Did you ever wonder why the US has so many gloomy education stats? Here's just one example: our schools have created 50,000,000 functional illiterates! History books say that at the time of the American Revolution, most people could read. What happened?
I've been arguing for many years that the Biggest Mystery in American History is why the public schools can no longer do their basic job of educating the young.
Lots of people say it's bad luck, incompetence, foolish fads, and other similar excuses that let the Education Establishment off the hook.
I've become more comfortable with the notion that the people at the very top are not clumsy or incompetent. Rather they are carefully conspiring to dumb down the schools (in order to make people less informed and more manageable). The Education Establishment is obsessed with social engineering. Educational engineering is secondary.
At this point the conversation gets interesting. The word "conspiracy" makes a lot of people nervous.
A college professor wrote me just last week: "Conspiracy is a flag word. When I hear someone say conspiracy I tune them out as kooks." Similarly, a famous executive sent me a note saying that he agreed with much of my work but he couldn't accept the word conspiracy.
So I've had to think a lot about my research and wonder whether I can ever persuade this professor or this executive.
For me, this is not just an academic dispute. It has vast everyday consequences. Namely, if we can't honestly confront what was done to us in the past, how are we going to fix the future?
And what exactly was done to us? The Education Establishment lurked in the shadows and mugged us. That's what.
I can make a good case that virtually every program and method used in the public schools (for almost a century) was not seriously intended to increase education but to muddle it. Only conspiracy can explain this kind of consistency.
The paradigm for all educational quackery is Look-say or Whole Word, which was introduced across the country in 1932. I'm convinced that virtually no child can learn to read using this method. By imposing this gimmick in the schools, our Education Establishment created the already-mentioned 50 million functional illiterates, and made the country much weaker.
Introducing a bad idea and then admitting a mistake is one thing. Introducing a bad idea and keeping it in play for 80 years can only be the result of a conspiracy. At least that's my common-sense conclusion.
Actually, there are many people who savor conspiracy theories. But I'll bet that even they don't realize that the most brazenly successful conspiracy of all has happened in plain sight throughout their lives and is the reason why millions of their fellow citizens, and maybe some relatives and acquaintances, can't read.
I've always hoped that one of our old conspirators would confess about what their plans really were in the 1940s, 1960s and so on. If you know anecdotes or names, please discuss them. In the meantime, I urge everyone to find out for yourself what the Reading Wars are all about. The shooting continues; the damage goes on. The loons who created 50,000,000 functional illiterates are not the sort to slack off now.
(For more info on bogus reading methods, see "42: Reading Resources" on
Improve-Education.org .)
.