1,212 words
Life is hard in the column racket, I tell you. The work load is crushing. Every week I get many hundreds of e-mails (well, okay, I would if I did, but this is close enough for journalism) asking, “Fred, Fred, what beneficial and meritorious measures will you enact when you become dictator? What will you do to set the course of American society for centuries to come?”
My first step as dictator will be to reform schooling: To this end I will put a bounty on education theorists, no bag limit. Moreover, I will establish rental stalls where the civic-minded can rent duck guns for the purpose. Next, I will have teachers’ colleges pumped full of linoleum cement. These places are the dark night of the mind. They turn perfectly good children into goobering, phone-pecking, mental blank slates who can barely read.
You may think that things are not as bad as they are. Ha. They are, and have been. Many years back, before the invention of fire, I wrote a piece for Harper’s on the black schools of Washington. In it I wrote this:
The bald, statistically verifiable truth is that the teachers’ colleges, probably on ideological grounds, have produced an incredible proportion of incompetent black teachers. Evidence of this appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County, Florida (which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater), cited in Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.’s, 25 percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar statistics exist for other places.
(The book The Myths That Divide Us, in my view the best overview of the racial problem in America, details them on pages 227-228. Not a pleasant read, but worth the effort. Amazon has it.)
See? People barely at the tenth-grade level were teaching twelfth-graders. How bass-ackward is this? The twelfth-graders should have been teaching the teachers.
Nothing has changed. Today such stories abound like lunatics in a Democratic administration. Our children are taught by people with the brains of doorknobs. How can we allow this?
Okay, more scholarly reforms that I will impose. Teachers in grade school will be required to have IQs of 100, middle-school 110, high school 115 and a degree in their subjects. See, this will rid the schools of people too dim to understand what education is or what it is for, and who probably have trouble finding their way home at night. Yes, I know it’s rude to point out that a whole class of people aren’t very smart. Okay, I apologize. Doorknobs are people, too. But they need to find something else to do.
On a happier note (as a committed curmudgeon, I don’t like happy notes, but occasionally they add variety), I will raise salaries of teachers until I get people meeting these standards. The cleansing effect will be immediate and the cost, whatever it might be, worth it. Teachers are more important than anyone in society but dentists and bartenders. Under my beneficent regime, they will get the respect they deserve, but we will get the teachers we deserve. You know, balance, or something.
You can buy Anthony M. Ludovici’s Confessions of an Anti-Feminist here.
Next, I will behead anybody who says that dodgeball is violence or thinks that recess should involve a cooperative and affirming game led by caring adults. Kids hate caring adults, or healthy kids, anyway. Me, too.
I will bring back tracking in high school. And Advanced Placement courses in all academic subjects, especially nerdy ones, admission by rigorous entrance exam. You know, things like Python programming. (This doesn’t mean programming an actual python. It’s something about computers.)
Current didactic practice is child abuse, especially of smart kids. You have a girl of IQ 145 and she faces a teacher who reads at the tenth-grade level (see above,) and she and others like her are bored to the point that the school ought to have a resident suicide counselor. But she can’t have courses at her level because that would be, like everything else in America, racist. In my enlightened regime, anyone who says “racist,” or even looks as if he might be thinking it, will be sent to Leavenworth for life.
There will be no affirmative action. If you are good enough, you don’t need it. If you need it, you aren’t good enough. We all have limitations. Deal with them. I want to be a star point guard on a National Basketball Association team, but I am ancient, half-blind, and my jump shot isn’t what it was when I was 15. I would like to get a doctorate in mathematics from CalTech. I like Pasadena, and there would be interesting people to talk to. I’m just not smart enough. This is disappointing, but it isn’t discrimination. Though I do think the Lakers should let me try out as a walk-on.
How did we get this way? To begin with, America embraces resentment-fueled fiat equality, which is like fiat currency: based on nothing. If Stephen Hawking and Mike Tyson do not perform equally well at theoretical physics, then there must be a conspiracy against Mike. When I was growing up, or at least getting older, in Alabama ages ago, when pterodactyls flapped over the Earth, I was seen carrying a book. This wasn’t much done. Jimmy-Jack ‘Callister told me, “You ain’t no gooder’n me.” This, more smoothly expressed, underlies American politics. Ain’t nobody allowed to be no gooder’n anybody else.
That’s the first cause of our degeneracy. The second is women. Yes. See, before femlib, women had to be secretaries, nurses, or teachers. This was hard on smart women, but it was good for schools. I remember teachers who didn’t just know things, but who bought into the Euro-American view of education and why it was important. Today, smart women are all biochemists.
This was good for biochemistry, but it left the schools in the hands of the doorknobs. A teacher who can’t quite tie her shoes on a good day after three cups of coffee is unlikely to grasp the European intellectual tradition and very likely to be resentful of it. This left niceness and feeling good and self-esteem as what schools were for. And it shows.
I’m not kidding about the gals in biochemistry. For example, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Nobel Prize for discovering clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats. They probably read above the tenth-grade level.
Many years ago, in the mostly white and allegedly good schools of Fairfax County, Virginia, I saw a student’s project on the wall in the hall, intended to celebrate the contributions of Italians to physics. In big letters, it said “Enrico Fermi and Nucler Physicts.”
This probably would have driven Fermi to take poison in despair. Fortunately he was already dead, which probably saved him. But what kind of school would honor a kid for not being able to spell? What kind of country would tolerate it? And what if the kid wants to get a job some day?
Okay, that’s education. In my next civic-minded column, I will expound on reforming Congress. I will now retire to my basement, where I am designing a high-throughput guillotine.
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11 comments
Right on Fred. It’s even worse than you think. I have a close friend who teaches high school U.S. History. He said he was once discussing LBJ. At the end of a long lecture all of his kids were scratching their heads wondering what the hell he was talking about. He then realized that his students thought he was talking about Lebron James.
I would assert that “equality” measures, such as no Dodgeball and egalitarian grading standards are merely a ruse. The truth is that competition to attend higher institutes of education or achieve athletic scholarships are more viciously competitive than ever. High school students have had their academic or athletic paths picked out as young as kindergarten. Asians will utilize inhumane methods to encourage their children to achieve academic scholarships while whites seem intensely interested in athletics, even if their offspring aren’t great athletes. But the clownworld mask that education is egalitarian is merely that, a mask.
Always love Fred. Sir, thank you.
In your next column could you please explain bilabial friction and why I should care? Please? I just never got it, Sir.
Thank you, regards
T
Ps…you don’t have much to work with so please be gentle.
Ha, ha, very Swiftian column. I got quite a few chuckles out of it, though many of the points raised are enormously valid, nonetheless.
On a more serious note, about 15 years ago I was preparing to take the GRE and so I procured a study guide for the test. The guide in question was produced by the same company that administers the GRE, and in the latter pages it helpfully included a breakdown of prior GRE test results, grouped by academic discipline.
Of all the academic disciplines listed (about a dozen or so), education majors had the lowest average GRE quantitative scores. Of course, someone might argue that this shouldn’t be surprising, given that many of these folks are going to teach, say, English or the humanities. Naturally those individuals will pull down the quantitative average score for prospective teachers as a group, but this shouldn’t necessarily be reflective of the ed major who actually wants to teach math (or the hard sciences).
This sounded like a reasonable enough argument… right up until I noticed that fine arts majors(!) had a higher average quantitative GRE score than the education majors did. Think about that for a moment. We’re talking about students who were majoring in dance, theater, visual arts, or music performance. Those students were better at math than the average, hapless education major.
Ever since then, in my professional career, I’ve yet to see much compelling evidence that the median ed school grad is anything more than a complete airhead. Mostly, they seem to be a collection of (1) silly suburban women who tend to “uptalk” more than usual, (2) people who are really touchy about being addressed as “Doctor,” and (3) the usual motley collection of POCs who wanted a Ph.D. but couldn’t hack it in a more rigorous discipline.
(Postscript: years later I discovered that subsequent editions of that GRE study guide conveniently expunged the prior years’ test results. The FBI’s similarly-reasoned refusal to publish racially-categorized crime stats immediately came to mind.)
I don’t really know how things are in the States, but over here visual arts students are significantly higher in IQ than average. I’d reckon about 115. Very ignorant in all that matters — meaning the humanities — but reasonably smart.
It’s entirely conceivable, what you suggested. As another example, it’s possible that some musicians are fairly good at math, due to similarities in the types of thought processes involved. (This is especially true of musicians who become particularly engrossed in music theory, such as aspiring composers.)
That being said, I still think it’s pretty sad that ed majors are so cognitively inept on the whole. They purportedly want to become educators, after all. You’d think they’d do better than that. But if more people knew just how infantilized the classes that ed majors take actually are, it would give them good reason to give homeschooling a try.
You missed the pooch on this one. The reason why the education stinks, is that the normal kids were never born because we are so poor in this generation. Only the mystery meats, the single moms, the handicap were birthed.
You mention the low testing scores of teachers in the Bible Belt. You ever consider the kids are way below that level?
The figure from 1980, in FL isn’t that bad. Florida is a state where teaching is a busy body job, no pay, tenure or union–no credentials. I can assure you, 25% failure rates of the White applicants would be much higher now.
When students get to 7th grade (about 12 years old) I think the school day should also end at noon. A 12 year old is enough to watch themselves for a few hours at home until a parent, or both, comes back from work. Foundational skills are already built up by 6th grade, so there’s no need to continue a 7+ hour school day past the elementary years. It also reduces the risk of having enough time to indoctrinate whites and push woke BS.
High school should also end at noon, and only take place Monday-Thursday. On Fridays, let high schoolers put in an 8-hour day at whatever hamburger joint is in their town. Let schools park the buses, and turn off the lights and HVAC systems one extra day a week to cut costs. Football games at most, anyway.
I’m also ok with higher pay for male teachers, as they’ll be teaching harder subjects anyway and will need more to raise a family if they don’t have a working wife. Married women with a breadwinner spouse can afford to be paid less.
Only in clown world are these recommendations–except for the killing–over-the-top.
I enjoyed this essay very much.
As Churchill observed, “The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”. There are plenty of mediocre to lousy teachers but among the ranks here there may be excellent nascent teachers. The job can pay 55-80 K per year, with summers off. Add in a summer job in bartending or construction and some are making 100 K a year. Yes that’s better pay than that person with the PhD in sociology or gender studies stuck as a Lecturer at a college. After a few years teaching the same class, there is less preparation needed to teach the same literature, history, math classes.
There is competition to teach at ‘good’ schools. I once dated a woman who didn’t seem all that hot as a teacher and she got stuck teaching inner city kids. Nonetheless, the stories she told were horrifying and exactly like The Wire…. Kids throwing tantrums, disrupting the class, getting in her face and calling her bitch, cunt, nearly every week.. The consequences of such behavior? Practically nothing. An occasional and brief trip to an administrator office. Never removal to a class for those with behavior problems… suspension or expulsion would require weapons and near lethal bloodshed. The troublemakers would be back causing disruptions in no time ruining the experience for the other students and the teachers. It’s part of the equity problem where the troublesome students are not seen as rocks that sink an enterprise, they just need some polishing of their transcripts to appear as gemstones.
How money is spent in schools determines what is available to actually pay the teachers who do the actual teaching. Non-teaching administrators have ballooned in public/private schools and colleges. There are all sorts of new deans and staffers of DEI, campus wellness, compliance officers, etc. Their salaries are sucking the life force from teacher pay and raising tuition. Does it seem like history is being ‘rewritten’ in modern times to comply with the DEI agenda? It’s really no surprise as many schools have twice as many DEI staff as they do History professors.
an old favorite https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/02/10
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