The New Yorker ran a big piece about Tom Steyer, billionaire environmental activist. He’s built a whole crusade around the Keystone Pipeline, explaining himself this way, “In every generation, there is an overwhelming issue that people may not recognize at the time…If you blew it on the big issue, then that’s the measure.”

My first thought was, maybe the Keystone Pipeline is NOT the big issue. Maybe the fact that we have an intellectually corrupt public school system is the Big Issue. 

I put a piece on Examiner.com called “Did billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer miss “the big issue”?? I suggested he did. I suggested that they all did.  By “they” I mean the big-shot movers and shakers who should be getting their hands dirty fighting the pretenders who run our schools.

There is this remarkable silence and passively in American culture. Children are deliberately kept from reading or mastering math. They are not taught fundamental facts. But the big shots stand back and yawn.

We all know that Bill Gates is involved in education but who else? Meanwhile, has Bill Gates contributed even one thing to education? He makes lots of speeches, for more than five years. But what policy or innovation has he caused? I have nothing against Bill Gates. I want him to help education but he doesn’t seem to know how.

You know why? Because nobody wants to deal with the simplest aspect of education which is that there are a thousand things that an educated adult needs to know. How do you teach those thousand things?  You start in kindergarten, that’s how. In some respects, it’s a long slow tedious process, like building a high brick wall. You do it one brick at a time. 

 Everybody wants to pretend that education is some la-de-da process that can only be explained with pretentious jargon. Liberal progressives pretend this so they can get away with academic murder. Other people want to put a sheet of respectability on their laziness. Education is work, for the earnest teachers who to do it, and for the students to whom it is done.

This is a cry in the wilderness for the movers and shakers in this country to start moving and shaking. Force your local public schools to do a much better job. That won't be hard.

Bruce Deitrick Price

Improve-Education.org

Word-Wise Education

757-455-5020