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WHY AMERICA'S SCHOOLS ARE FAILING
Our education schools, which tell teachers not to convey knowledge to their students, must be shut down
By C. Bradley Thompson
President Clinton is urging the American people to help him launch a 21st-century revolution in education. Echoing those sentiments, the Republican Party is declaring that education is now at the top of its own legislative agenda.

While our schools certainly need revolutionizing, the two parties believe that the way to do it is to spend more money--a lot more money. Clinton asked Congress to double the $15 billion currently being spent on our schools. Not to be outdone, the Republicans bragged that they wanted to spend $500 million more than the president. The two parties differ only over which government should control the expenditures--federal or state.

But that is not an educational revolution; it is educational treason. There is virtually no connection between a proper education and money. Pouring more money into a failed system will serve only to perpetuate the status quo. More teachers, school uniforms, more computers or designer buildings will have no effect on the single most important factor in our schools: the content of the child's education.

At its core, America's education crisis is a teaching crisis. Our children are woefully ignorant because--inconceivable as it seems--it is the policy of the education establishment not to impart substantive knowledge.

In most states, prospective teachers are required to graduate from a so-called education school. They are typically required to take a plethora of courses in classroom management, assessment, audio-visual technologies and multicultural indoctrination--in everything but the subjects they are to teach. America's ed schools are the intellectual slums of our universities and are breeding grounds for mediocrity. Not surprisingly, 59 percent of ed-school graduates seeking teachers' licenses in Massachusetts recently flunked an elementary screening test in reading comprehension.

Worse yet, the ed schools are the source of America's tragic 80-year experiment with Progressive education. The underlying assumption of Progressive education is that children should discover or construct their own knowledge. Teachers, therefore, should not seek to convey knowledge and to train minds in objective principles of thinking. Instead, they should be facilitators and enablers. In the infantile jargon of the ed schools, teachers are told to be a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage. Thus, there is no particular reason why teachers should actually have to know their subjects. In short, our schools are filled with teachers who have not been taught to teach anything.

To paraphrase a hackneyed saying: It's the ed schools, stupid!

Teachers certainly need motivation, common sense, discipline and creativity. But what they need most is wide-ranging knowledge in a real academic field, such as math, physics or history. They must be masters of their subject matter, not masters in bulletin-board design.

If there is to be an American revolution in education, we must first have an education Declaration of Independence. We must declare ourselves independent of the anti-knowledge tyranny that grips American education. To that end, I offer the following proposal to the American people: close down the education schools!

The effect on our school system would be immediate and genuinely revolutionary. We would have teachers who had actually majored in the subjects they were teaching. Moreover, higher-quality individuals would be attracted to the teaching profession. Over the years, many of my best students have told me that they refuse to consider a career in teaching, not because of low pay, but because of their unwillingness to waste their minds and their money on the anti-intellectual Pablum served in the ed schools.

In addition, here are two other concrete proposals for improving education in America. First, prospective teachers should be required to take a super major of 40ñ50 credit hours in the subject they plan to teach. Second, they should be required to maintain a minimum 3.00 Grade Point Average overall and should have to pass with distinction a written exam in their majors.

As a result of these reforms, we would have teachers who are able to convey real knowledge to their students, and who understand the crucial importance of doing so.

The members of the ed-school establishment will fight such reforms to the death because they reject the value of a knowledge-based curriculum and because they want to preserve their positions of entrenched power over America's classrooms. But like the Berlin Wall, the power of the ed-school establishment is beginning to show the strains of its hollow weight. Public dissatisfaction is growing, as the deficiencies of our schools become more obvious. The time has come for parents to demand that the ed schools be shut down and that teachers convey real knowledge in the classrooms. Only then will we have a genuine revolution in education.

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