Education: The Conspiracy Question Persists
Summary: The case for conspiracy is simple: the public schools couldn’t have become so dysfunctional by accident. When bad things keep happening, maybe somebody likes it that way.
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Education statistics in the United States tell a grim story. The news always seems to be bad. Why is that?
I’ve argued for many years that The Biggest Mystery In American History is that the public schools can’t seem to do the fairly straightforward job of educating the young. How, by the way, do you explain this inability to yourself?
Lots of people say it’s bad luck, incompetence, unfortunate fads, unhelpful parents, video games, drugs, and many other answers that have this common denominator: they let the Education Establishment avoid suspicion of deliberate malpractice. (Even the charge of incompetence, although insulting, is exculpatory, because there is no intent.)
But deliberate malpractice is precisely the concern of this article. So let’s