by Tom Woods, Lew Rockwell:
The New York Times has a headline today that reads, “What the New, Low Test Scores for 13-Year-Olds Say About U.S. Education Now.”
It’s one of those headlines that makes the article itself almost superfluous.
The test scores in question were released today by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
American 13-year-olds received the lowest score in reading (51.2% of questions answered correctly) since 1990, and the lowest math score (54.2% answered correctly) since 2004.
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Pause for a minute and suppose Apple computers were in charge of American education and the results were this bad. We would never hear the end of it. “Why, we can’t trust the private sector with something as important as education!”
But when the government runs the schools and the results look like this…silence.
And I’m sure you, dear reader, being brighter than the average American, realize that spending on education has not been cut, as most people inexplicably think, but instead has skyrocketed.
Note, too, that no matter how low the scores go, the American church — the public school — never suffers. The faithful’s confidence in it never wavers, and their intolerance for heretics never subsides.
Well, for all you heretics reading this:
I remember as a kid that Independence Day — which is creeping up on us — was always for me a warning sign that the resumption of school would be upon me before I knew it.
So now is an opportune moment to share something Ron Paul wrote ten years ago this fall:
During my presidential campaigns people used to ask how I could keep up such a punishing schedule. And believe me, it was quite a schedule. I’d be campaigning in Iowa in the morning and debating in New Hampshire at night. I’d do radio, television, public speeches – and that was just before lunch.
But you know what I used to tell people? You energize me, I would say.
To speak to such large, energetic crowds – and filled with so many young people! – who cared as deeply as I do about war, the Fed, Austrian economics, the Constitution, and so much else, was deeply moving for me.
The people in those audiences hadn’t learned those things in their classrooms. If anything, they learned the opposite of what they were cheering in my speeches. That means they figured these things out for themselves, despite overwhelming pressure to believe the opposite, and despite never being exposed to them in their official studies.
Although exhausting, I have no regrets about my decisions to run for president. It was a great privilege to share with so many fellow Americans a truly special moment in American history, when we all discovered how much larger our side is than any of us could have imagined.
I want to keep this momentum going. I want to keep these ideas fresh and vibrant. That’s why I decided to launch my own homeschool curriculum.
If millions of people managed to learn about the Fed on their own, when all respectable opinion was telling them the Fed was wonderful and benign, imagine what we could achieve if students actually learned real economics and history in their daily studies.
The typical classroom is not neutral. It does not give both sides on the Fed, or on limited government, or on pretty much anything we believe in. But what if students really could get both sides – and actually hear about the freedom philosophy instead of being deprived of it?
As many of you know, I teach Western civilization (two full years of it, so students learn more than superficialities) and government to the high school students in Dr. Paul’s K-12 homeschool curriculum.
