Why Johnny Can’t Read: State Legislators’ Skewed Priorities
By Mary Theroux • Friday April 22, 2011 7:22 PM PDT • 5 Comments
In the 2009 “Nation’s Report Card” of students’ achievement, by state, produced by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, Californian students ranked 49th in reading—ahead only of Hawaii and the District of Columbia—and above only Mississippi in science.
One would think that those kind of statistics would focus all attention on reversing the tragedy of processing students through schools that leave them incapable of dealing with the world they will inherit.
One would be wrong.
Instead, last week, the California State Senate passed a bill specifying:
Gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people would be added to the lengthy list of social and ethnic groups that public schools must include in social studies lessons....
This new legislation clearly helps fill the gaping holes in earlier mandates:
California law already requires schools to cover the contributions to the state and nation of women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor.
Sorry, guys, but a child who cannot read, and knows little math and science, is not going to get a lot out of such “social studies,” and is certainly never going to make history.
Does anyone really still believe that politicians will ever produce an education system that serves our children?
Let’s just eliminate the taxes and debt that go to government education altogether, and release those resources to be available for producing education far more effectively and creatively. Teachers and/or parents could privatize their schools (see our Can Teachers Own their Own Schools?), and the market and private associations could and would otherwise create myriad alternatives (such as these examples of how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves)—just as phone companies freed from the Ma Bell monopoly have put a cell phone with functionality unimaginable 20 years ago into the hands of every 13 year old in the country.
As Adam Smith knew, freed from a public school monopoly, people “would soon find better teachers for themselves than any the state could find for them.”
Tags: American History, California, Education, Racism, Science 
But private schools won’t indoctrinate children with government propaganda, which is the real reason for governmental control of education.
steven | Apr 23, 2011 | Reply
The “education” system was never intended to serve our children. Its purpose is to make them obedient drones while simultaneously sucking the productive sector dry paying for the wages and pensions of the bureaucratic class. Mission accomplished.
Steve Hogan | Apr 23, 2011 | Reply
If so many parents weren’t OK with this type of schooling, we wouldn’t have so much of it. I find that among the parents of the kids in my community, I am alone in thinking the way I do about education. Most parents are stuck in the trap of thinking “if it worked for me, it will work for them.” I am 53 years old and I certainly remember being fed propaganda in elementary school in the Midwest. Back then it was overpopulation rather than climate change, with the dreaded “megalopolis” presented in social studies textbooks and the Weekly Reader. I remember being surprised the first time I took a bus from New York to Boston that there were mostly trees in between. p
Academically there was a lot of hand-wringing about keeping up with the Soviet Union. At the same time I was not made to study science past the seventh grade, which I don’t consider a problem. No high school chemistry, no biology, nothing. I studied it in college when I had the inclination (B.S. in physics, summa cum laude). Now you have these poor kids who can’t graduate unless they pass Chemistry—what the heck for? Medical school? If a kid wants to go to medical school, they darn well know they need to take chemistry. If they don’t, they will be disabused of that notion soon enough. What a waste of their precious youth. My kids learn the things they deem necessary according to their best judgment, and they are in a school that fosters judgment above all. If they ever decide they need to learn chemistry, they can pick up a book and master the basics in a matter of weeks. Same as you or I would.
ccrawford | Apr 26, 2011 | Reply
“If so many parents weren’t OK with this type of schooling, we wouldn’t have so much of it.”
We have “so much of it” only because we are forced to pay for it first, and only afterwards given a “choice” as to whether to use it or pay twice to use an alternative.
Henry Bowman | Apr 28, 2011 | Reply
Children should be worked to death in factories.
Corey Mondello | Apr 29, 2011 | Reply