If you support a school system that won't teach children to read, do math, learn the simplest events in history, or understand the most ordinary facts about the world we live in, you're guilty of child abuse.

Maybe not sexual child abuse, but certainly academic child abuse, education child abuse, cultural and intellectual child abuse, cognitive and psychological child abuse.  You're guilty.

Look at the evidence.  It's the size of Texas.  To flee from your guilt, you might try to deny the undeniable and believe the unbelievable — for example, that the Education Establishment cares about improving education.   That's funny because it doesn't care even a little. For the people in that group, education is the enemy.  Evidently, they want dumbing down and mediocrity.  They have figured out that educated people are harder to control.  Why take a chance?  Surely, for them, less is more.

Is that difficult to accept?  Certainly no more difficult than news such as this: in 23 high schools in West Baltimore in 2019, no graduating senior could pass the basic proficiency test in math or English.  That's crazy.  QED: Public school education is collapsing faster than a snowman on Malibu Beach.  Some 7,000 Baltimore students will not be able to advance in our economy.  They will stay reliant on welfare and will have low self-esteem.  That's bad for the country.

The teachers' unions and professors of education are guilty of undermining our public schools...and thereby undermining the country.  Don't help these irresponsible people. 

If you side with corrupt unions and Marxist professors, you're guilty of bad faith, of aiding and abetting.  You deserve more blame than you've gotten so far.

Don't you think the time has come to clean up this mess?  Face the facts, wallow in guilt, plan now for a better future.  Otherwise, you're complicit.

The main thing to confront, to grapple with, is that public schools have been mediocre for many decades.  You watched it happen but did nothing.  You can look at the government's official numbers, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and see that progress has flatlined.  Why aren't you demanding better?

Do you know that our country 100 years ago was almost universally literate?  An eighth-grade education was probably more education than today's college students receive.  Goals have been set artificially low.  You have to use such terms as "sabotage" and "malevolence."  Some powerful people want bad schools.

To explain this to yourself, realize that crippling America was always the logical goal of the far left, the obvious goal.  All these people are quasi-communists of some stripe.  What is their first commandment?  Destroy capitalist society.

How do you suppress intelligence in children?  Simple.  You don't teach much.  Or if you do teach something, you muddle it.  You disorient people by talking, for example, about morals and murals without ever defining the terms.  Kids don't know which is what.

There's too much soft chatter and mushy jargon.  We need some hard urgency.  Save the schools by any means necessary.  Let's start by shouting the truth: the people in control of the public school are deliberately dumbing them down.  Their choices make that clear.

Stop dreaming of a day where our Education Establishment will suddenly become benevolent and efficient.  They say your kids are learning to read; it's a lie.  They claim there's no longer any need for children to know basic information like continents and cities, no longer any need to multiply numbers or anything else you want to mention.  Completely wrong.  Children should learn these things.  That's what school is there for.

The sun also rises, according to the Bible and Hemingway.  But the sun never rises if you live in fog-shrouded America with children who can't figure out what 20% of 100 is.  The Education Establishment ought to wear a shoulder patch with a skull and crossbones on it, like the Waffen SS, and the motto Fighting to Kill Dreams.

Don't turn away from what has happened.  There is a war against children and knowledge.  Maybe we can still win this war.

Instead of conceding everything the commissars demand, start asking a question: why should we agree with that?  Aren't you cheating the kids in school when you take education away from them?

Bruce Deitrick Price's new novel is Art and Beauty.  Crime fiction.  Manhattan.  Art galleries and model agencies are the most glamorous businesses in the world.  Read Chapter 1 here.

Image: jarmoluk via Pixabay, Pixabay License.