Well, that’s likely a bit of a shocker for the panjandrums of the public school system in New York; that 80 percent of graduates have to have remedial education before considering college-level courses. It could have been worse; the first time the story floated past my awareness, I understood it as 80 percent of the public high school graduates were functional illiterates. Ten or fifteen years ago the concept that public high schools were releasing functional illiterates into the wilds of adult life would have been shocking, incredible … but these days? Meh – not so shocking, and not that much surprising, after hearing some of the stories of friends with school-aged children, the occasional stories of malpractice in education which bubble up in the media … and most of all, interaction with some of the products of the public education mill. Some of these were very junior airmen whom I encountered in the military, some were friends of my daughters’ … and many had been appallingly educated.

Honestly, it seemed like they had only gone to school because it was the law that they do and it was no longer legally to send them to work in a factory. What they got out of the modern educational experience seemed mostly to be a big steaming pile of nothing, with a lot of political correctness sprinkled across the top. The cleverest and most focused children manage to educate themselves, in a spotty fashion and in spite of their teachers. The ordinary get passed along until they are dumped out of the end of the educational alimentary canal, while the criminally-inclined gravitate toward that interest – at least until they run afoul of the law. This is all terribly frustrating to read about, especially for people like myself who remember better educational times, before educational heresies such as ‘whole word’ reading, the New Math, ‘relevance’, and sundry other horrors took over the classroom. A group of commenters are lamenting this at According to Hoyt. Truly, truly I say unto you, there is no way that when and if my daughter has children that they are going to public school. I’ll homeschool the little darlings myself, read to them aloud every afternoon or evening, and take them to every museum and educational outreach establishment that there is. And as many books as they want to read; I mean, my brother and I had the complete set of the Golden Book Encyclopedia, and read every volume from cover to cover for the fun of it.

Another aspect of this ongoing educational malpractice is that our taxes are paying through the nose for it. In some cases and in some localities, parents are paying Maserati prices for Yugo results – a situation for which the teachers’ unions don’t even have the grace to be ashamed. And finally, learning of so many incidents of bullying of vulnerable students during the school day, and through social media after it; well, who would want their child exposed a real-life and institutionalized Lord of the Flies, every day and all day? What parent, being moderately well-educated themselves and having access to some resources couldn’t do a better job of educating their children at that? I’m just surprised that there aren’t more stay-at-home parents home educating. Discuss.