Our nation's public education system should be dissolved and should no longer be supported by the taxpayer. I base my statement on the following.
Fact: One out of eight adults in the United States is functionally illiterate - over 25 million - virtually all of whom have had at least eight years of compulsory public schooling. It has been shown that while 99 percent of the nation's 17-year-olds can demonstrate basic reading skills, fewer than 40 percent are able to comprehend, summarize and explain what they have read.Fact: A survey conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 20 percent to 30 percent of the students in fourth, eighth and 11th grades, depending on the type of writing called for, could write adequately. This means that the rest of the 55,000 students tested could do minimal quality writing or worse.
Fact: American business can expect to spend $25 billion a year in remedial training programs for new employees because our work force does not have the skills an information-based economy needs. Comic books must be published to help our armed service personnel learn how to open the hood of a jeep.
Fact: In the latest international study of mathematics and science, U.S. students scored last among 17 industrialized nations.
Fact: It has been shown that one out of three of our nation's high school students fail to know elementary history facts and that a majority fail to know elementary world and national geography facts.
Fact: More than a million of our nation's high school students will fail to graduate, and the number is growing. If the trend continues, 40 percent of America's students will drop out of high school in the year 2000.
Fact: Since 1978, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of high school seniors planning to major in education have been at least 70 points below the national average. They remain about 200 points below the average of aspiring English and science majors.
Fact: Our national system of education has become the socialists' primary instrument for promoting socialism, humanism and illiteracy. In fact, socialism was its goal from its conception.
The principal founders of our nation's public education system, almost without exception (and those who took exception were overruled), were influenced and subscribed to philosophies such as Hegelianism, which states that man should be elevated to the position of God and God reduced to a mere mass of harmless energy; and Darwinism, which professes that man evolved from the lower animals and shared his ancestry with apes; and Marxism, from whom the dogma of the "transformation of society through a new, socially minded individualism" was inspired and governs today's public pedagogic practices.
And their socialistic teachings have been well-received, albeit blindly, as the tax burden for the average American family, which amounted to just over 1 percent of its earnings in 1948 and 19 percent in 1971, has today increased to over 30 percent.
Fact: Not all but the majority of our nation's parents are apathetic toward their children's educational achievement and personal development. Parents have dumped on the schools a hopeless hodgepodge of purposes and goals, demanding that the school serve as both teacher and surrogate parent. Consequently, a plethora of fake educations must be taught by the teacher, and the milk of education - literacy - is greatly watered down.
Fact: Our nation's teachers are overworked, underpaid, poorly supplied with educational materials and terrible textbooks, and receive most of the blame for our nation's educational woes when, in fact, they are the very least to blame, as they have the least power to regulate the educational conditions of the home, the least power to regulate the quality of training they get during their university experience, the least power to determine curriculums and have the least power to set school policies.
In the face of these facts I, personally, would like to see one of two things happen. I would like to see our nation's teachers finally wise up and unitedly give this nation a fair warning.
They should say to parents and the facilitators of public education policies and curriculums, "Shape up, or we'll just walk off the job. Every one of us! If you parents fail to teach your children what matters, if we can't trust you to participate actively in your children's education, in a year from now we will quit.
"If school administrators cannot mandate to us that our only purpose is to ensure that each and every student, upon graduation, is literate - that they have a command of the fundamental processes of word and number, a sense of citizenship and self-government - we'll just say good-bye.
"If the public can't give us respect and look upon us as professionals - `worthy of their hire' - then we will let the public do the job."
Yes, I would like to see America's teachers produce an all-or-nothing mandate of their own to our nation's citizenry. But if these college-educated professionals can't see that they are just supporting and prolonging the suffering of a mortally wounded beast, then I'm for abolishing the whole system of public education and would be in favor of turning over my tax dollar and the responsiblity of educating children to the private sector.