THE WHERE HAVE ALL THE STANDARDS GONE RANT?


Standards, especially high ones, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. They have plummeted so spectacularly far and so amazingly fast that at times it is virtually impossible to explain, comprehend, or accept. Only a cursory examination of our so-called educational system, for example, is more than sufficient to corroborate this blanket statement. As a society, we may have reached a point of no return. It may be too late to reverse this debilitating trend. I’m not precisely sure when falling and failing standards translate into a nation’s demise, but we’ve got to be getting damned close. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used his prophetic phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe worsening conditions in any number of key societal indicators, especially the American family and the state of American education. I don’t believe that even Senator Moynihan, however, could possibly have envisioned just how horribly deviant, how grotesquely deformed, and how distressingly weak our sense of standards have fallen.

The American system of education, at one time the finest in the world, has been quite literally decimated. Ronald Reagan maintained that had a foreign power done to our school systems what we ourselves have done it would be considered an act of aggression, a declaration of war, and a call to arms! In a Nation At Risk, Reagan warned of the dire and disastrous consequences of a failed system of education and what it would mean for this country on virtually all levels. These consequences quite literally augur in the death of the United States of America.

For the better part of the last thirty years, I have taught in a very large inner-city ghetto high school. Educational standards at this particular institution have gone from somewhat rigorous to just short of rigor mortis and that too is coming! My school is fairly representative of all large urban high schools nation-wide from New York to L.A., from Detroit down to Dallas and pretty much everything in between. It is safe to say that educational standards in urban secondary schools are at best horrific and at worst non-existent. I can’t speak for suburban or rural America, but education in our urban centers is completely facocta!!

The average graduation time is no longer four years but rather something over six and this is for a normal high school regimen. We now have students running around the building who are between twenty and twenty one years of age. Most of these “children” have just enough credits to qualify as sophomores and the vast majority will never graduate. Years ago, a credible rationale existed for these “young adults” to prolong their high school careers: they sold drugs. The school was their place of business, their office so to speak. Money was to be made and business flourished. That’s a thing of the past for very little in the way of controlled substances are now sold here.

Perhaps the entrepreneurial spirit is not as healthy and robust as it once was. Regardless of why they stay, we can’t show them the door until they are twenty-one years old. That sounds clear enough although no one has ever been able to explain the logic of this arbitrary age. There exists, however, an interpretational component. Can we discharge them when they become twenty-one or can they continue their educational endeavors until they are no longer twenty-one?

It wasn’t that long ago when a graduation age of eighteen was the national norm. It was rare indeed for a high school student to reach his nineteenth birthday without having graduated. That standard, of course, has gone completely by the boards and is an example of merely one shattered educational benchmark. I’ve been told that this extended time will serve to increase graduation rates so does it really matter whether they graduate at 18, 20, or 21 so long as they succeed? CRAP!! The New York City Board of Education touts a drop-out rate of about one-third and as disgusting as that sounds, would that it were so! The true drop-out rate hovers at something approaching 50%. About half of New York City’s high school students never make it out. I have no idea how the other major urban centers fare in this regard, but if it’s anything close to the Big Apple’s then this nation is fucking doomed!!

How about we try a different approach to the problem of “ageing out” of high school? How about reverting to that by-gone standard of four years and you’re gone – diploma or not. I know. That’s too harsh, too cruel, too punitive you say. Why, I reply? It used to work when standards were enforced. Why can’t it work again? Okay, how’s this for a minor concession then? A student is entitled to eight semesters of a free public education at taxpayer’s expense. Once a student hits that ninth term, however, it’s time to pony up. Every term after the eighth costs the family five grand! If the family can’t pay, they take their drop-out and try to find the fellow some form of gainful, albeit menial, employment.

Let’s move on to another moribund standard – proficiency. You’d think that while approximately 50% of our students drop out, the remaining half that successfully complete their high school careers would be educationally sound, so to speak. You’d think they should be able to demonstrate 12th grade mastery of at least a core curriculum as they prepare to exit high school and move on to whatever’s next. Yeah, you’d think that wouldn’t you? Well, think again Skippy, ‘cause it just ain’t so! I’d be willing to bet both my homes and the three cars that I can’t find twenty graduating seniors who can read or write on the 12th grade level. Note that I didn’t say copy. They’re great copiers and most have excellent penmanship. If they’d been born a few thousand or so years back they would have held important positions in places like ancient Egypt as scribes. Ask them to explain what they’ve just read and you’ll get a round of shoulder-shrugging accompanied by a chorus of really wet “teeth-sucking.” Both the shrugging and the sucking are defensive in nature and are employed to mask a sense of embarrassment. They are signs of surrender and defeat. These graduating seniors know that they should be able to explain what they have read or copied and they also know that they can’t. My real estate and vehicles are perfectly safe!

Perhaps these graduating seniors’ strength lies in mathematics as opposed to reading and comprehension. Randomly pick any twenty and have them solve a simple arithmetic problem: two-thirds of thirty, let’s say, or how about a real brain- teaser – the square root of nine? Get ready for the shrugging and the sucking because the overwhelming majority simply cannot do it. OK, we’ll try science. Wander the halls and ask what information is contained in the periodic table of elements or perhaps they can tell you the symbol for, oh let’s see, Hydrogen. Nope. The vast majority will have absolutely no clue. Their answers will range from the ever- popular “Huh” to the ubiquitous, “Wha he said?” There will be much shrugging and sucking. They simply cannot do it and yet they are soon-to-be high school graduates. Most of them have plans to attend college or university, for while their skills are sorely lacking their self-esteem is literally bursting at the seams. Most will be accepted somewhere and fully expect to graduate with some sort of post-high school degree.

A trend has surfaced among our higher institutions of learning that is by no means new. Have you noticed that incoming freshman spend the greater part of that first year immersed in remedial classes to make up for their deficiencies in core high school subjects? This was absolutely unheard of a generation ago! If a student did not possess the requisite knowledge and/or skills, college was not an option. It was that simple. You did not receive that coveted acceptance letter. Somebody please try and convince me that our educational standards are anything but a total cluster fuck! Someone show me where there exists the least little glimmer of hope that the American system of education is just not completely shot to shit!! By the way, after being accepted to college and taking their remedial courses, most of these New York City graduates don’t make it. They drop out. After the better part of a decade, most leave school with nothing to show for it: Nada, Zip, Zero!! Their over-inflated self-esteem bubbles have been completely punctured by the harsh needle of reality. Hard work and success build a healthy sense of self-esteem and self-worth. There are no substitutes!

How have our plummeting educational standards helped to cripple this nation? Hey, let me fill you in. Internationally, American students from grade school on up can no longer successfully compete with their counterparts from other industrialized, developed nations especially in the areas of math, science, and technology. The results of international comparisons are at best dismal and at worst catastrophic. Math, science, and technology are the three most essential areas for any nation’s continued prosperity in the 21st century and we are so far behind the fucking eight ball in this regard that a resurgence seems to be no more than a cruel fantasy.

We have reached the point where we cannot produce enough qualified “home-grown” scientists, mathematicians, and computer specialists to satisfy the demand for them. We now have to import them from abroad under the auspices of special visas. While it is true that America has always welcomed immigrants and that people world-wide have clamored to take advantage of the opportunities found here, we now find ourselves dependent on foreign expertise to maintain our premier position in these crucial fields. This does not bode well for our nation’s future. Dependency is never a positive. Self-reliance should be the desired standard.

Will these “imports” learn to love America and become loyal, patriotic citizens? Will they become citizens at all or will they remain attached to their homelands while taking advantage of America merely for material gain? Ever since that fucking debacle called the Immigration Act of 1965, this seems to have been the trend. Mexico’s second leading industry after oil production, for example, is Mexican citizens residing in the United States, legally or not, who send American dollars back to the home country. They are not loyal to this country and have no desire to become citizens. The latest figures I’ve seen put that amount at over twenty billion dollars annually! It seems that for far too many years fewer and fewer foreigners desire citizenship but instead want to accumulate as much wealth as possible with an eye toward one day returning to their country and living like royalty!

When did the shit start hitting the fan? When did it start to go so drastically wrong? I believe it can be linked directly to the decade of the 1960’s, undoubtedly the most destructive ten-year span ever witnessed in this country. Moral relativism really took hold at that time and the concepts of right and wrong took an absolute hit while the truth became whatever one wanted it to be. “Doing your own thing” was in and fuck the consequences! The individual reigned supreme and societal norms were scoffed and ridiculed. Flower Power replaced morality, all authority was to be shunned, police became “pigs,” and soldiers defending our nation were dubbed “baby killers.”

Given this atmosphere and mind-set, high standards had no chance of surviving, for everyone had their own versions of acceptable or unacceptable behavior. To criticize was to be called a fascist and worse. To speak out against the then current ideologies was to invite scorn, ridicule, and ostracism. The educational establishment at the time did nothing to stem the rising tide of abandoning standards all across the board but rather happily swam along with it. It was during this period that we first heard terms like “Ebonics” or “Black English” or “Blinglish.” Teaching proper English – you know – verbs, pronouns, diagramming sentences and the like – were deemed to be too structured and rigid, not to mention too white. Self expression was crowned king and correct spelling, pronunciation, or sentence structure were all sacrificed to the gods of self-esteem and inflated egos. “We be goin’ to school where we be getin’ our edjumacation at,” was perfectly acceptable. Colleges and universities offered courses in “Ebonics” and I believe one could major in the same. Yeah, standards my ass!!

Around the same period, we note the rise of something called the New Math which once again centered on the self and feel-goodism. Obtaining the correct answer mattered not a whit and the process of problem-solving gave way to building self-esteem. If you wanted two plus two to equal seven, that’s great as long as you felt good about yourself. Being told that you had arrived at a wrong answer or conclusion was anathema and all forms of criticism attained pariah status. This period also saw the rise of a new phenomenon in this country: the self-loathing American who blames America first for any and all problems in the world. Hunger – blame America; War – America’s fault; Pestilence and Disease – America sucks; Natural Disasters, Global Cooling or Warming – blame the United States of America! Once again, this attitude was accompanied by a further lowering of standards. To reinforce these overwhelming negative sentiments about this nation both high school and university curriculum were revised to reflect this new paradigm. The standard of teaching history how it actually unfolded was completely abandoned in favor of an anti-American bias. None of the overwhelming, positive aspects of American history received the least bit of attention which it deserved. Only the negatives were dissected, bisected, and examined.

OK, OK, I know. The 1960’s is over, gone, and finished for nearly half a century. What’s the point of rehashing it all now? Best to let sleeping dogs lie, right? Well, that damned dog just don’t hunt! Unfortunately, that’s what we call a false premise. All those young folks back then are now ageing baby-boomers and far too many have attained positions of power and influence. They are now and have been for decades implementing their 1960’s ideologies while the rest of us sit back and fulminate about the total lack of standards in virtually all aspects of American life. Think of how far these former “hippies” have come. They literally control almost all avenues of the media, print and otherwise. These folks have a lock on our entertainment industry, and our institutions of higher- education are overwhelmed by them! They have infiltrated and now control our primary and secondary schools as well as the unions that represent them. Liberal politicians, normally of the Democratic ilk, have had a stranglehold on this nation’s policies for the better part of the last fifty years. No, the sixties are far from over but continue to hold a near death-grip on America’s future!

The ‘60’s were not the only aberrant time frame to further erode standards in our nation’s educational morass. In 1979, for example, that fucking peanut farmer created, with the approval of Congress, the Department of Education – a cabinet level post! What in the Hell was he thinking? Not until 1979 did the federal government get involved in what theretofore had always been a local or at best a state responsibility. How did the rest of us old farts manage to get a quality education before 1979? Quite nicely, thank you very much. What in the Hell does the government know about the educational needs of students in Podunk, Iowa or Newark, New Jersey? Didn’t President Goober understand that the federal government must only do what the private sector can’t do, won’t do, or shouldn’t do? Oh, I forgot. Carter was a Liberal fucking Democrat who by definition wants more and more government intrusion and control over all aspects of the lives of its citizens including education. The national government only does a few things well and education sure ain’t one of ‘em!

So, we have the late ‘60’s, the late ‘70’s, and finally in the 21st century we get the No Child Left Behind crock of shit sponsored by “W”. No liberal democrat, he nevertheless caved in to Fat Drunk Teddy and the Boys and let them write what has probably become the final nail in our educational coffin! NCLB sounds great. It sounds so caring, so inclusive, and so, so fucking liberal in tone and tenor that it makes one want to retch!! George, what in the Hell were you thinking by getting the federal government further involved in the education of our children and then allowing these Liberal Do-Badders to take the helm? No Child Left Behind is not working nor can it ever work. It dictates from the top down and that is a sure recipe for failure – just look around you!! Former President Bush, here’s some free advice and you can take it for what it’s worth. When in doubt, follow the lead of an admitted mentor-hero of yours: Ronald Reagan. Ronaldus Maximus famously quipped that the eleven most dangerous words in the English language are as follows: “Hi, I’m from the government and I’m here to help you!” In education, as in all else, please follow his lead.

The loss of standards equates to a loss of competency, not to mention excellence in all aspects of American life. It seems that in far too many instances, we no longer strive for excellence but are willing to accept mediocrity. What happens to this nation when even mediocre standards are abandoned for something less? When that happens, America is truly over. I fear that this time is rapidly approaching as we watch the greatest country that God has ever given this planet literally hurtle toward third-world status!!

Much Luv Y’all and Have a Great Day!

The Fifth Horseman