Inside American Education:  The Decline, The Deception, The Dogma, by Thomas Sowell

As someone who worked in the education system himself for a good part of his career, Thomas Sowell is well equipped to discuss the decline of American Education and, perhaps more importantly, the reasons for that.  The author points out, in a way that is likely to seem rather harsh to those in the education field, the incompetence of students who study education and often fail to be more intelligent and knowledgeable than their students, as well as the politicized aspects of education that seem designed to corrupt the education of young people and discourage the development of sound reasoning in exchange for appeals to emotion that make those who grow up in the education system susceptible to emotional manipulation towards destructive ends pushed by leftist progressives.  The result is not a particularly pretty picture, but it is certainly an honest if pointed one.  This book is more about pointing out what is wrong with education, and presents no easy answers because there are no particularly easy examples, as good education is a rather expensive and labor-intensive matter that requires a fair amount of work by people who are both committed to educating rather than corrupting children and who have the knowledge and insight to provide children with that education.

This book is about 300 pages long and consists of three parts and eleven chapters.  The author begins with a preface and then introduces the decline, deception, and dogmas that are involved in the contemporary American education system (1).  Part one then looks at schools, which chapters that discuss the impaired faculties for education (2), the way that classroom brianwashing has taken the place of sound education (3), and the assorted dogmas that are related to contemporary education that simply do not pass muster (4).  The author then turns his satirical eye towards colleges and universities, with chapters on the danger of admissions standards that are skewed for favored minorities (5), the connection between new racism and old dogmatism among the left (6), the ideological double standards that serve the interests of leftists while disregarding equity and justice and fair dealing in judgments (7), the way that teaching has become ideologically loaded and harmful preaching (8), and matters of athletic support that further lower the standards of educational systems (9).  Finally, the author discusses his assessment of the education system, with chapters on the way the education system has resisted reforms (10), and the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American educational system (11), after which there are notes and an index.

Why is American education so dreadful compared to other countries?  Money is not the issue–at least not in the aggregate–we spend a lot of money on education but little of it gets filtered down to the students.  Politics seems to be at the root of so many educational problems, as having an educational system that would equip children with genuine reasoning skills would allow those children to critique the sort of leftist pablum that passes for education and would demand too much of teachers who are not always very well qualified to pass on substantive knowledge about the fields that they are purportedly instructing.  When one adds to this the fact that education majors are the least skilled students in universities, and the massive political sensitivities related to the entrenched interests in the education system, and it is obvious that any change of the education system for the better will have to involve a great deal of massive change that is painful for those who are currently profiting from it.  Sowell does not sugarcoat the difficulty of the task, but merely clinically and unsparingly points out the manifest failures of America’s education system and how it came to be such a mess.