Sure, you'll call me cynical. But the evidence is very clear-cut. Our Education Establishment is not good at very much except excuses.

A good excuse is an example of sophistry. I'm a big admirer of sophistry. Remember the brothers who killed their parents, and then petitioned the court for clemency. On what grounds? Because they were orphans! It doesn't get much better than that. And that's the world our Education Establishment lives in.

No matter how bad things get, it's always the fault of somebody or something else: the parents, the kids, popular culture, Hollywood, teenage sex, drugs, comic books, Kim Kardashian, school hours are too long, school hours are too short, schools themselves are too big, schools themselves are too small… See how it works? Just say anything. That's better than taking responsibility for doing a lousy job. And nobody wants to admit what the real agenda is. (I suspect myself it's more or less summarized in Iserbyt's famous phrase "the deliberate dumbing down of America.")

http://brucedprice.hubpages.com/hub/Memo-to-education-establishment...

This article explores excuses and how to make them. I'm sure there's a graduate-level course at Harvard's ed school called The Art of the Excuse. It takes brains and creativity to create clever excuses. So even as I might wish our elite educators would stop this stuff, we can all admire their skills.