An Unusual Usual Tactic: Blame The Victim

In these pages there has been a great deal of discussion about the abysmal level of the American education "system" in that it has systematically failed its clients. In today's Wall Street Journal Mr. Charles Murray opined that it is not the system's fault but rather that the clients are too stupid to learn in the first place. Is this a surprise?

In the United States the liberal, or so-called progressive mentality is to blame the victim and champion the offender. Beyond the failure of the public education system is the most recent example. Why didn't the kidnapped eleven year old boy, Sean Hornbeck, attempt to escape as he grew older? In Vermont last week a child molester was given the minimum sentence, this is the same state that gave a child raper 60 days in jail because the system didn't know how to rehabilitate the criminal.

In today's article Mr. Murray puts forth the idea that most of the children are too stupid to learn therefore it cannot be the faulty teaching and money grubbing administrators to blame. He goes further and says that the supposed success of the stern discipline and academic achievement of the years prior to 1970 were a myth. This is a sop to the idea that standards had to be lowered to admit minority students. Therein lies the true myth.

Today's children are lucky if they can read at the fourth grade level by the time they leave high school. Many college "graduates" are functionally illiterate. Is is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of American children are retarded? Tempting, yes, reasonable no; Mr Murray goes on to destroy his own argument. During the Great Leap Forward in American education universities began to drop the ABCDF grading system in favor of pass/fail. Some schools had no failures. The idea that IQ could even be a measurement was considered laughable because it was racially biased in favor of white students.

How then do we account for the large numbers of pre-boomer students still living who are more literate, more articulate, more educated than today's education system victims? Even with segregated school systems the demands of families and teachers for excellence produced citizens that could think critically and are still doing so. The NEA has failed the children and the nation. No longer are good teachers and leaders promoted to supervisory or administrative positions. Most come to these jobs from college doctoral of education programs which place emphasis on the business of education and not on education itself.

A nation that does not educate its children is suicidal. A nation that does not demand excellence from both sides of the blackboard is irresponsible. For a union apologist to blame the lack of native intelligence as the basis for academic failure on such a monumental scale is absurd. Absurd but typical of liberal thinking that promotes the idea that the system can never be at fault.