SAT score decline

In 1963 these scores commenced a decline which continued for almost 20 years:

             YEAR    VERBAL     MATH 
             1962:    478        502 
             1981:    424        466 
                      -11%       -7% 

From 1981 to 1991 the scores leveled off, holding within a few points of 425 Verbal and 470 Math. Some of this decline can be attributed to the fact that a wider range of students now take the test than took it in the l960s, but the Wirtz Commission concluded that about half of the decline represents an actual decline among students with qualifications similar to those taking the test earlier.

However, in early 1990 a nation-wide scandal came to light: it was revealed that school administrators and teachers, in their attempts to improve their standing in the community and to earn for themselves and their schools "improved student achievement" bonuses offered by the state governments, had been cheating on the achievement tests by providing their students with the answers prior to testing. This makes highly suspect the "leveling off" of the SAT score decline that was reported in the mid-1980s.

(In any case, the issue will be sidestepped in 1995, when the College Board will recalibrate the "average" combined verbal and math score (supposedly 500) to the median of the test group of that year. This will result in that year's group having a combined score 98 points above that of their predecessors.)

During this two-decade period there was also a precipitous drop in the number of students scoring at the top 1% level (700 or higher) in spite of the fact that the total student pool increased by more than one-fourth:

     YEAR    VERBAL       MATH 
     1966:   33,200      55,500 
     1979:   12,300      38,900 
              -63%        -30% 

To say less than words can say is to commit an intellectual crime. Today, the shriveled fruits of that crime are dropping off the vine of education, in the form of millions of students who have been prevented, by their years of schooling, from developing their capacity for thought.

The situation is further aggravated in the field of higher education. Observe the number of new Ph.D.s in science:

Physical Sciences     Physics        Mathematics 
    1971:  4500       1970: 1500       1978: 619 
    1984:  3400       1986:  900       1988: 341 
           -24%             -40%            -45% 

More than a fourth of the science Ph.D.s and 60% of the engineering Ph.D.s awarded in 1986 went to foreign students, and two-thirds of postdoctoral appointees in engineering were foreign citizens. In early 1989, only 7 in 1000 American university students were studying engineering. In Japan the ratio was 40 in 1000. The percentage of American students pursuing a degree in any science dropped from 11.5 in 1966 to 5.8 in 1988. This paucity of American science students extends down into the high schools: among the winners of the 1990 Science Talent Search, 57% were foreign students. And again, the arts are affected along with the sciences: in 1993, thirty-seven percent of the students at the Julliard School of Music were foreigners.

During the 1960s, American colleges and universities expanded as if the post-War baby boom that produced the massive youth cohorts of that period would last forever. (But what else could they have done - in view of the demands placed upon them?) It did not, and institutions of higher learning are now confronted by sharply declining enrollments in a period of economic hardship and insecurity. Faced with this potentially devastating situation, most undergraduate institutions, including some of the most selective, have lowered their admissions standards and many have abandoned them altogether.

A 1978-79 College Board survey of 2,600 colleges showed that only 40% required any minimum grade point average for admission and only 30% set minimum cut-off scores on the SAT. As a result, percentages of applicants accepted were very high:

         91% at public two-year colleges 
         86% at private two-year colleges 
         79% at public four-year colleges 
         77% at private four-year colleges 

The inevitable overall result is that virtually all literate and numerate students and many semi-literate or even illiterate ones can find some college which will accept them, if they can somehow arrange to pay the fees. This is illustrated by University of Wyoming president Terry Roark's comment in September, 1988: "My plan to stiffen UW admissions standards will not prevent any high school graduate from entering Wyoming's only university."

High School dropout rate

"So where are all the dropouts?" you may ask. More than half of the nation's prison population is comprised of these dropouts. The dollar cost of confining a prisoner can be up to $25K/year - a figure higher than the cost of a year of schooling at either Harvard or Yale.

And this dismal situation exists in spite of an enormous, and growing, financial investment: government spending on education consumes 7% of GNP ($240 billion in 1984). The cost per student of public elementary and secondary schooling was $2279 in 1980, $4810 during school year 1988-89, and $4929 the following year. Between 1950 and 1976, per pupil spending increased nearly 300% (inflation adjusted). In the five years from 1971 to 1976 total professional staff in US public schools went up 8%. The number of administrators increased 44%. The cost per pupil went up 58%. While the number of students went DOWN 4%. The number of school districts went down by 17%, continuing the trend to greater centralization. These massive changes produced not a nation of scholars but the least educated generation in our history.

The cost of education is more than just taxpayer and parental dollars; it is also the students' time, much of which is wasted. For example, does it really take 12 years to produce high school graduates who cannot read, who cannot find the USA on a world map and who do not know when WWII was? Couldn't the same results be achieved in a lot less time? Is it likely that better results will be achieved with longer school years and extra years in school, as many educators advocate?

The conjecture that schools are primarily custodial institutions is corroborated by the observation that in most school districts children are forbidden to take the high school equivalency exam sooner than the age at which they would complete high school. If a child can demonstrate at age 13 that she knows what is required of a high school graduate, why shouldn't she be able to take the exam and be done with school?

Quality of Education

Critics of schooling rarely attempt to define the term "functional illiterate" but I believe a distinction can be made between two groups of people: those who are not able to read/write (correctly described as "illiterate") and those whose educational experience has traumatized them into a state where they are not WILLING to read/write, even though they are able to do so. This is the group being described as "functional illiterates" but I believe either "aliterate" or "scriptophobic" would be a more accurate term. These are the people who eschew independently initiated literary behavior. They have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to passive obedience that their intellectual initiative is almost extinct.

An NSF survey in 1997 showed that one in 7 American adults - about 25 million people - can not locate the USA on an unlabeled world map. This finding was also made by the National Council for Geographic Education and by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Says James Vining, executive director of the NCGE: "We have a situation where Johnny not only doesn't know how to read or add, he doesn't even know where he is." And, I would add, he can't figure out what's going on: the NCEE also found that 40% of 17-year-olds are not able to draw a simple inference from written material. And as time passes they have less and less access to even the simplest written material: In 1950, virtually all American households received at least one daily newspaper. In 1970, 98% did so. But by 1993, that had fallen to 63%.

In 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state to force children to go to school, the literacy rate in that state was 98%. Today, after nearly 150 years of compulsory government schooling, the literacy rate is 91%

An NSF poll in 1988 revealed that 55% of adult Americans do not know that a year is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. Perhaps even more frightening is the fact that 25% of Americans do not even know that the Earth goes around the sun.

The Third International (among 21 countries) Mathematics and Science Study, held in February 1998, showed US high school seniors performing third to last in general science literacy, second to last in advanced mathematics, and last in advanced physics.

In an examination of 17 countries, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement found that US 14-year-olds ranked 14th in their knowledge of basic science. (Hungary was first and Japan second.) US students were also among the worst at age 18. A 1989 international math test included the statement "I am good at mathematics." The Americans led in their agreement with this statement: 68% answered "Yes." (In another survey, 30% considered themselves to be not just good, but "among the best.") But when the test was scored, the Americans ranked LAST in their actual math performance. American students do not know their math, but they have evidently absorbed the lessons of the newly-fashionable curriculum wherein kids are taught to feel good about themselves, thus American kids feel good about doing badly. The US high-school grad used to be highly educated relative to the rest of the world. This is no longer the case, and the economy is now much more globally-extensive. Thus the US grad is relatively dumber.

Only nine of the states require a geography course for graduation. Thirty percent of US high schools do not offer a physics course, twenty percent offer no chemistry, and ten percent offer no biology. Almost 75% offer no earth or space science courses. In 1990, fewer than 50% of the graduates had taken chemistry, and only about 20% had taken physics.

A 1988 survey found that half of those who had never taken a course in biology did as well in tests as 40% of those who had; apparently, biology courses taught most of those taking them almost nothing.

In 1997, only 20 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives had a science or engineering background. There were 9 among the State governors, only 2 in the Senate, and none in the Cabinet. Keep in mind that these are the people who make the decisions regarding automobile pollution standards, approval of space programs, funding of the superconducting supercollider, the human genome project, and developments in bioengineering such as the possibility of human cloning. NASA administrator Dan Goldin cites a question he received while defending funding for the space agency: "Why are we building meteorological satellites when we have the Weather Channel?"

Can Americans choose the proper leaders and support the proper programs if both they themselves and those leaders are scientifically illiterate? In the long term, uninformed control over scientific endeavors is the equivalent of denying ourselves and our children the future.

What can you expect from an educational process in which reading, writing, arithmetic and science are delivered to students in much the same way as tires, windows and doors are attached to the frame of an automobile on an assembly line? A student moves along this assembly line, at each stage having an additional "education module" slapped onto his mental framework. It is supposed that the end result of this agglomeration process will be a comprehensively educated person. But nowhere during the process does the student acquire the ability to integrate the modules into a coherent whole. In the public schools the students are, at best, merely memorizing facts - they are not integrating ideas, and are certainly not learning to do so.

Good teachers are as much victims of this situation as are the students. They are forced to comply with government and school administration "guidelines" instead of determining them. The result is that students are "exposed" to subject material instead of being taught it.

But the kids ARE learning something: the fraction of schoolchildren believing in astrology rose from 40% to 59% between 1978 and 1984.

The institutionalized ignorance described here has another really tragic consequence for American teen-agers: partly as a result of grossly inadequate - or nonexistent - sex education programs, the rate of abortions rose 70% between 1973 and 1988 among American girls under the age of 20.

A culture is a collection of values and the behaviors required to achieve those values. Schools do not transmit the culture because they do not teach children how to set long term life goals in the context of a political and economic environment. In fact, what the schools are actually doing is culturally retrogressive, as they are instilling a philosophy of value- deprivation/depravation. A 1989 survey by the National Endowment for the Humanities showed that nearly one quarter of college seniors believe the words "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" are found in the US Constitution.

At the time you graduate from high school, everything you know about government you learned in schools which are owned by government, operated by government, staffed by government employees, financed with government money, teaching courses of study which are selected by government committees, and which you have been compelled to attend by government law. Can you really trust what you supposedly "know" about government? Or about any of the ethical ideas which government considers to be important?

Sooner or later America will have to face the fact that angry denunciations of public education and innumerable studies by committees with prestigious appellations have left us blue in the face but have produced not one whit of change. In no field is there more rhetoric about change, and in no field is there less actual change reflecting real improvement.

Many parents turn a blind eye to these phenomena because they don't want to face (for example) the prospect of having minority students who should be in the seventh grade attending fifth or sixth grade classes with their children. People who support this view point to the overwhelming percentage of minorities in remedial classes as evidence that it is a genuine concern. But when the "right to an education" becomes the "right to a diploma" many students are graduated who haven't received an education.

Quality of the Teachers

And what of the soldiers who are waging this war? Observe:

The state of Texas recently heaved a sigh of relief that only 3.3% of its teachers flunked a basic "see-Spot-run" competency test. Still, that was 6579 teachers unable to read, write, or cipher - all early grade-school material. And you wonder how they managed to finish college and get hired?! Medals given to the winners of a Los Angeles scholastic competition in 1992 misspelled the word "academic" (acadumbic?)

Using data provided by ETS, Ron Hoeflin compiled this list of median GRE advanced achievement test scores for graduate school applicants in various fields. It shows clearly the intellectual position of teachers relative to other professional groups:

  
         Mathematics   630 
         Physics       628 
         Philosophy    627 
         Biology       609 
         Chemistry     606 
         Economics     590 
         Engineering   583 
         Geology       569 
         English Lit.  549 
         Spanish       549 
         French        544 
         German        535 
         Psychology    533 
         History       529 
         GRE (total)   509 
         Political Sci.498 
         Geography     486 
         Music         485 
         Education     464 

The decline in the SAT scores of educators has been just as acute. In 1973, future education majors scored 59 points lower than the national average on the combined SAT; by 1982, they scored 82 points lower. The negative selection of those going into teaching has been aggravated by negative selection among those already in the field: the 1972 National Longitudinal Survey of high school seniors shows that the mean SAT score for those who enter the field of teaching and then leave it is 42 points higher than the score of those who enter and stay. Those who remain permanently in the profession have a combined SAT score 118 points lower than the score of those who have never taught.

In the words of teachers-union president Albert Shanker, "For the most part, you are getting illiterate, incompetent people who cannot go into any other field."

And if you should ask "Well, why can't they clean up their act?" - consider this: The American Association for the Advancement of Science is attempting a radical redefinition of science curricula. The first phase, intended to establish what high school graduates should know, was intended to last six months, but took five years! Many teachers who are honestly looking for ways to improve their techniques walk away without any answers.

In view of the widespread concern for "classrooms without education" the simple alternative of "education without classrooms" ought to be readily apparent, but no one seems to be aware of it. The belief that classrooms are a prerequisite to education leads to the belief that education comes only from classrooms - that education is a prerogative of the schools. How many times have you heard the remark "When will you finish your education?" when what is meant is "When will you get your diploma?" It is unfortunate that many people, strutting off the stage while clutching in their hot little hands that decorative piece of wallpaper, think "at last my schooling is finished" and then commence to stagnate intellectually for the rest of their lives.

Merely sitting in a school room for a period of years is not equivalent to receiving an education.

(See the BOOKLIST file for a large selection of references on home schooling.) See reference

And for those ambitious students who manage to cope with this state of affairs and graduate from high school, what awaits them when they do get to college? (52% of the graduates of American high schools go on to college.) Just what is the educational philosophy of the modern university? Here are some representative examples:

In metaphysics, the University of Delaware offers a course titled: NOTHING. "A study of Nil, Void, Vacuum, Null, Zero, and Other Kinds of Nothingness. A lecture course exploring the varieties of nothingness from the vacuum and void of physics and astronomy to political nihilism, to the emptiness of the arts and the soul."

In epistemology, New York University offers THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. "Various theories of knowledge are discussed, including the view that they are all inadequate and that, in fact, nobody knows anything."

For ethics, we go to Indiana and attend course SOCIAL REACTIONS TO HANDICAPS, in which the students will "explore some of the different ways in which the handicapped individual...has been regarded in Western Civilization. Figures from the past such as the fool, the madman, the blind beggar...will be discussed."

There was once a time when college students studied facts, knowledge, and human greatness. Now they study nothingness, ignorance, and blind beggars. The resulting technical incompetence and moral relativism is producing a generation of young people who are intellectually impoverished, lacking the knowledge, moral standards and the commitment to reason necessary to sustain the technologically sophisticated civilization they have inherited. They have become innocent people stumbling through a Rube Goldberg world and trying in vain to make sense of it.

This may seem like an exaggeration, but some philosophers do not shrink from spelling out the final consequences of the modern skepticism: "There is no truth," holds Richard Rorty, "there is no such subject as philosophy, there are no objective standards by which to evaluate or criticize social and political practices. No matter what is done to the citizens of a country, therefore, they can have no objective grounds on which to protest."

Having been taught that there is no knowledge, no values, no standards of judgment to appeal to or rely on, men must now accept the fact "that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize it if we do see it. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them."

Nowadays we hear much about the value of our colleges and universities, their importance to the nation, and our need to contribute financially to their survival and growth. In regard to many professional and scientific schools, this is indeed true. But in regard to the arts, the humanities and the social sciences, the opposite is true. In those areas, with a few rare exceptions, colleges and universities are now a national menace; and the more distinguished (and therefore popular) the university, such as Harvard and Berkeley and Columbia, the worse its effect is. Today's college faculties are hostile to every idea on which this country was founded, they are corrupting an entire generation of students, and they are leading the United States thereby into slavery and destruction.

Most of the colleges of this country have simply classified ignorance and are peddling it as knowledge. There are very good reasons to believe that the money you pay to a college could be much better spent in other investments for your future. (See Chapter 14 - An Alternative Lifestyle for an Individualist.) See reference

I have asked several students, "What does it cost you to spend a year in that school?" And in every case the answer is an amount of money that would suffice to support me comfortably for at least two years, with plenty left over for the purchase of all the books, journals and educational materials that I normally consume during that time. College is a financial rip-off.

Consider also that if you take a degree, you will then probably enter that particular field of professional endeavor and spend your life pursuing it. This tends to make you educationally restricted. I have a vastly broader education today than I would have acquired if I had spent my life pursuing only the scholastic specialty I began with.

Self-education IS a viable alternative! The personal experience of many people who have successfully educated themselves proves this conclusively.

Futility of Reform
Principles underlying government schooling

The effects of NEA policies, and of five generations of John Dewey in the public school system, show clearly that that system has failed. Public schools have failed and will continue to fail for a very simple reason: there is no impetus for success.

Because children HAVE to be in school and HAVE to do what they're told, teachers almost never get any quick and reliable feedback about their teaching. By contrast, people teaching their own children, even if they make many mistakes, are soon likely to become effective teachers, because they get from their children the kind of unmistakable feedback that tells them when their teaching is helpful and when it is not. But public education is accountable to no one. Taxpayers must support it and the majority of parents must accept its product, like it or not.

Much of the legislation concerning educational reform, particularly that directed toward "minority" accomodation, is no more than ideology masquerading as reform, as conflicting pressure-groups fight for control over the school system.

Competing educational systems would offer the consumer a wide choice in his purchase of education for himself and/or his children. This would end forever the squabbles over curriculum (sex education? more athletics? more academics? Black Studies programs?), student body (segregated or integrated?), control of education (should it be in the hands of parents, teachers, voters, the school board, or the colleges?), and all the other questions which are unsolvable within the context of government's coercive control of education. If each consumer were free to choose, among competing schools, the type of education he valued most, all these problems would be solved automatically. But the government school system preempts the options of the citizens who are obliged to finance it, so that alternatives are dependent on the arbitrary decrees of government committees.

The government has not solved the education problem because government IS the problem.

If the government got out of education, would all parents make the best choices for their children? Of course not. We don't live in a perfect world. But we SHOULD live in a free country - one in which each of us is free to make his own choices, good or bad. And those parents who are capable of making good choices shouldn't have their children held prisoner in government schools because other parents are less competent.

As American public schools slowly sink under waves of violence, drugs, and illiteracy, supporters search frantically for salvation - but there is none. The internal chaos and increasing politicalization of public education are inherent in its government ownership wherein, without the necessity to compete for customers, and lacking the profit motive, there is little incentive for improvement. As long as local school systems are assured of state and federal financing, it would be sentimental, wishful thinking to expect any significant increase in their efficiency.

The application of individual rights and cognitive competence to the educational system is necessary before sanity can return to the classrooms.

The Japanese educational system demonstrates some interesting contrasts with that of the USA. In the mid-1960s math tests were given to 18-year-olds in 12 countries. The AVERAGE Japanese scored at the same standard as the top 1% elsewhere. A second run of these tests in the early 1980s had similar results. Another comparison (in 1981) of 17-year-olds in Japan and in Illinois showed the average Japanese scoring better than 98% of the Americans.

In attempting to understand this disparity, it should be noted that the financing of state-owned senior high schools in Japan is about average for economically advanced nations. But 30% of Japanese high schools are privately owned, and although compulsory schooling extends only to age 15 in Japan, 94% of Japanese adolescents voluntarily continue their education, even though they are all required to pay fees for this continuance - whether they choose to attend a state-financed high school or a wholly private school.

Thus, while the American government-controlled schools are barely able to attract half the nation's adolescents, the Japanese experience suggests strongly that schools sensitive to consumer requirements by virtue of their market orientation provide a service which virtually all adolescents (and/or their parents) are not only willing to avail themselves of but even to pay for. AND which has fabulously successful educational results!

We should make the public aware of how much better educated their children would be from reading things produced by private institutions rather than from studying the social sciences at a university. What happens in the American Sociological Association is trivial, but what's coming out of think tanks like the Cato Institute is much more central to the real problems of American society. The Laissez Faire Bookstore undoubtedly provides a better selection of useful educational material than can be found in any university's social science department.

The erosion of confidence in government resulting from continual policy reversals, irresolution in the face of electoral whims, and stifling bureaucracy may eventually lead to a trend toward private funding of education.

To ensure the supply of trained talent, business will have to invest in the private educational system. And to some extent, it already is doing so: the NSF estimated in 1992 that employers in the US spend about $100 billion a year retraining high school graduates in basic skills. Of 200 major American corporations, 22% teach employees reading, 41% teach writing, and 31% teach arithmetic. The Savannah symphony orchestra players sign two contracts, one to play in the orchestra, and the other to teach music to high school students for 20 hours per week.

Educational policies in America - from pre-schoool to graduate school - are turning out students who are not only intellectually incompetent but also morally confused, emotionally alienated and socially maladjusted. The destruction begins in the primary and secondary schools, with content-less classes designed to inculcate relativism by encouraging students to express whatever it is that they happen to FEEL about a subject, rather than teach them the facts about the subject. Students taught under this curriculum are given no techniques for dealing with facts. They are not taught logical principles, nor even any concept of right or wrong answers. It is not merely that Johnny can't read, or that Johnny can't think. Johnny doesn't know what thinking is, because in the classroom thinking is so ofen confused with feeling.

While schoolchildren in Japan are learning science, mathematics and languages, American children are sitting around in circles, unburdening their little souls and expressing themselves on scientific, economic and military issues about which they lack even the rudiments of knowledge. Worse than what they are NOT learning is what they ARE learning - presumptuous superficiality, taught by practitioners of it.

American schools are failing in every subject and on a fundamental level; they are doing it methodically, as a matter of philosophical principle. Their courses are a hodge-podge of random and contradictory information that can't possibly be integrated into a consistent whole, and one of the first things they teach students is not to bother to try. The anti-conceptual epistemology that grips them comes from John Dewey, who stands on the shoulders of Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who dedicated his life and his system to the destruction of reason.

About 1900, psychologist William James developed what came to be called the "pragmatic method." It maintained that the value of anything is to be found only in terms of its "usefulness" or actual consequences. It denied the existence of "absolutes" of any kind. Shortly thereafter, philosopher John Dewey seized upon this concept and developed the theory of Instrumentalism. It holds that thought is simply a method of meeting difficulties - that its goals are wider experiences and the solving of problems. To Dewey, knowledge equals experience, and there are no universal truths of any kind. To Dewey, anything in life which satisfies a want is a "good." If one concedes that good and evil have no other connotation than satisfying or failing to satisfy an individual want or need, then it follows that there can be no positive standards of child behavior, no moral code except a relative one. Knowledge, in this gibberish doctrine, is never worth pursuing for its own sake, only for the sake of problems it might solve for the individual.

Dewey's pragmatism held the main goals of education to be these: To aid the child to live the life of the peer group, and to enable him to adjust to unknown and constantly changing environmental conditions.

There is nothing here, you will note, about the basic essentials of knowledge. Nothing about culture. Or teaching children to use the intellectual tools which the human race has found to be indispensable in the pursuit of truth. Or even simple literacy, for that matter. The American education establishment has continued to embrace this balderdash long after its failure has become blatantly apparent (except to that establishment), and no matter how many kids emerge from its clutches illiterate and ignorant.

The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though rarely said, that uttering nonsense and half-truths without cease ends by destroying intellect.

Tragic consequences

If improvements are not made in the educational system, the divisions among people in this country will only become more extreme.

A few horror stories:

City government departments such as Fire, Police, Ambulance, Hospitals, Parks, Electricity, Water, and Streets need to employ people who are at least moderately literate and who possess sufficient education and self- confidence to make reasonable judgments in everyday situations. It was disheartening to call 911 to report a crime at the playground in Riverside Park at 91st Street, only to have the responding city employee ask plaintively: "But what is the house number? We have to have a house number..." I had managed to get hold of a person who wasn't familiar with the geography of her own city, probably didn't know how to read a map, and didn't realize that private homes with numbers are not part of the layout of the public parks and playgrounds. This is not so unusual. Incompetent public service does not contribute to a high standard of community living.

A Missouri couple took their local public school to court for failing to teach their child to read and write. The judge ruled for the school on the grounds that the law specifies compulsory attendance in Missouri, not compulsory education.

The social sciences are "disciplines" whose connections with reality seem to get more and more tenuous every year. This can be frustrating for graduates who depart college full of a social science know-how that leaves them knowing only how to teach the same stuff to others. A political science professor tried to convince me to go to graduate school and get a Ph.D. in political science:

"What could I do with a political science Ph.D.?" I asked.

"Well," came the answer, "you could lecture to other students getting political science degrees."

"And what would they do with their political science degrees?"

"Well, they could teach others..."

It sounded like a giant Ponzi scheme, so I left college immediately.

As Martin Gardner remarked: "If you're a professional philosopher, there's no way to make any money except to teach. It has no use anywhere."

One woman, looking back on her scholastic experience, remarked that school "was too stifling for me and," she maintained wistfully, "the wrong place for people who need freedom and who want to use the energy of their youth to ask naive questions. You may be using up a time in life that will just never come again."

During the 1994-95 school year, the administrators of a high school near Boulder Colorado decided to rent its wall space for commercial advertising. In an attempt to quell the inevitable opposition to such a decision, they held meetings with the students in which they explained their reasons. When the students were told that the local voters had not passed an increase in the school tax base for over 20 years, the response of one student was rather surprising:

"Why do you hate us so? You force us to spend 12 years in these schools, but then you refuse to pay for their operation. When we go into the community we see signs on doors saying 'You are not welcome here if you are under 18 years old.' You have recently passed a curfew that forbids us to move about in our own community at night. The tone of moral outrage and vilification used by the conservatives when they talk about teenage pregnancy makes it perfectly clear to us that they hate these young parents. Why do you hate us so? In a few years WE will be the adults who run the world, and YOU will be old folks whose economic well-being will depend at least in part on us. We will remember then what you are doing to us today."

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, It expects what never was and never will be.
.... Thomas Jefferson