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D0 YOU FEEL like you live in a nation of idiots?
I used to console myself about the state of stupidity in this country by repeating this to myself: Even if there are two hundred million stone‑cold idiots in this country, that leaves at least eighty million who'll get what I'm saying‑and that's still more than the populations of the United Kingdom and Iceland combined!
Then came the day I found myself sharing an office with the ESPN game show Two‑Minute Drill. This is the show that tests your knowledge of not only who plays what position for which team, but who hit what where in a 1925 game between Boston and New York, who was rookie of the year in 1965 in the old American Basketball Association, and what Jake Wood had for breakfast the morning of May 12, 1967.
I don't know the answer to any of those questions‑but for some reason I do remember Jake Wood's uniform number: 2. Why on earth am I retaining that useless fact?
I don't know, but after watching scores of guys waiting to audition for that ESPN show, I think I do know something about intelligence and the American mind. Hordes of these jocks and lunkheads hang out in our hallway awaiting their big moment, going over hundreds of facts and statistics in their heads and challenging each other with questions I can't see why anyone would be able to answer other than God Almighty Himself. To look a these testosterone‑loaded bruisers you would guess that they were a bunch of illiterates who would be lucky if they could read the label on a Bud.
In fact, they are geniuses. They can answer all thirty obscure trivia questions in less than 120 seconds. That's four seconds a question‑including the time used by the slow‑reading celebrity athletes who ask the questions.
I once heard the linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky say that if you want proof the American people aren't stupid, just turn on any sports talk radio show and listen to the incredible retention of facts. It is amazing‑and it's proof that the American mind is alive and well. It just isn't challenged with anything interesting or exciting. Our challenge, Chomsky said, was to find a way to make politics as gripping and engaging as sports. When we do that, watch how Americans will do nothing but talk about who did what to whom at the WTO.
But first, they have to be able to read the letters WTO.
There are forty‑four million Americans who cannot read and write above a fourth‑grade level‑in other words, who are functional illiterates.
How did I learn this statistic? Well, I read, it. And now you've read it. So we've already eaten into the mere 99 hours a year an average American adult spends reading a book‑‑compared with 1,460 hours watching television.
I've also read that only 11 percent of the American public bothers to read a daily newspaper, beyond the funny pages or the used car ads.
So if you live in a country where forty‑four million can't read and perhaps close to another two hundred million can read but usually don't‑well, friends, you and I are living in one very scary place. A nation that not only churns out illiterate students BUT GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMAIN IGNORANT AND STUPID is a nation that should not be running the world‑at least not until a majority of its citizens can locate Kosovo (or any other country it has bombed) on the map.
It comes as no surprise to foreigners that Americans, who love to revel in their stupidity, would "elect" a president who rarely reads anything‑‑including his own briefing papers‑and thinks Africa is a nation, not a continent. An idiot leader of an idiot nation. In our glorious land of plenty, less is always more when it comes to taxing any lobe of the brain with the intake of facts and numbers, critical thinking, or the comprehension of anything that isn't... well, sports.
Our Idiot‑in‑Chief does nothing to hide his ignorance‑he even brags about it. During his commencement address to the Yale Class of 2001, George W. Bush spoke proudly of having been a mediocre student at Yale. "And to the C students, I say you, too, can be President of the United States!" The part where you also need an ex‑President father, a brother as governor of a state with missing ballots, and a Supreme Court full of your dad's buddies must have been too complicated to bother with in a short speech.
As Americans, we have quite a proud tradition of being represented by ignorant high‑ranking officials. In 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower's nominee as ambassador to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was unable to identify either the country's prime minister or its capital during his Senate confirmation hearing. Not a problem‑‑Maxwell Gluck was confirmed anyway. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan's nominee for deputy secretary of state, William Clark, admitted to a wide‑ranging lack of knowledge about foreign affairs at his confirmation hearing. Clark had no
idea how our allies in Western Europe felt about having American nuclear missiles based there, and didn't know the names of the prime ministers of South Africa or Zimbabwe. Not to worry‑he was confirmed, too. All this just paved the way for Baby Bush, who hadn't quite absorbed the names of the leaders of India or Pakistan, two of the seven nations that possess the atomic bomb.
And Bush went to Yale and Harvard.
Recently a group of 556 seniors at fifty‑five prestigious American universities (e.g., Harvard, Yale, Stanford) were given a multiple‑choice test consisting of questions that were described as "high school level." Thirty‑four questions were asked. These top students could only answer 5 3 percent of them correctly. And only one student got them all right.
‑ A whopping 40 percent of these students did not know when the Civil War took place‑even when given a wide range of choices: A. 1750‑1800; B. 1800‑1850; C. 1850‑1900; D. 1900‑1950; or E. after 1950. (The answer is C, guys.) The two questions the college seniors scored highest on were (1) Who is Snoop Doggy Dog? (98 percent got that one right), and (2) Who are Beavis and Butt‑head? (99 percent knew). For my money, Beavis and Butt‑head represented some of the best American satire of the nineties, and Snoop and his fellow rappers have much to say about America's social ills, so I'm not going down the road of blaming MTV.
What I am concerned with is why politicians like Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin want to go after MTV when they are the ones responsible for the massive failure of American education. Walk into any public school, and the odds are good that you'll find overflowing classrooms, leaking ceilings, and demoralized teachers. In 1 out of 4 schools, you'll find students "learning" from textbooks published in the 1980s‑‑‑or earlier.
Why is this? Because the political leaders‑and the people who vote for them‑have decided it's a bigger priority to build
anotherbomber than to educate our children. They would rather hold hearings about the depravity of a television show called Jack ass than about their own depravity in neglecting our schools and children and maintaining our title as Dumbest Country on Earth.
I hate writing these words. I love this big lug of a country and the crazy people in it. But when I can travel to some backwater village in Central America, as I did back in the eighties, and listen to a bunch of twelve‑year‑olds tell me their concerns about the World Bank, I get the feeling that something is lacking in the United States of America.
Our problem isn't just that our kids don't know nothin' but that the adults who pay their tuition are no better. I wonder what would happen if we tested the U.S. Congress to see just how much our representatives know. What if we were to give a pop quiz to the commentators who cram our TVs and radios with all their nonstop nonsense? How many would they get right?
A while back, I decided to find out. It was one of those Sunday mornings when the choice on TV was the Parade of Homes real estate show or The McLaughlin Group. If you like the sound of hyenas on Dexedrine, of course, you go with McLaughlin. On this particular Sunday morning, perhaps as my punishment for not being at Mass, I was forced to listen to magazine columnist Fred Barnes (now an editor at the right‑wing Weekly Standard and cohost of the Fox News show The Beltway Boys) whine on and on about the sorry state of American education, blaming the teachers and their evil union for why students are doing so poorly.
"These kids don't even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!" he bellowed, as the other panelists nodded in admiration at Fred's noble lament.
The next morning I called Fred Barnes at his Washington office. "Fred," I said, "tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are."
He started hemming and hawing. "Well, they're... uh... you know... uh... okay, fine, you got me‑‑I don't know what they're about. Happy now?"
No, not really. You're one of the top TV pundits in America, seen every week on your own show and plenty of others. You gladly hawk your "wisdom" to hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting citizens, gleefully scorning others for their ignorance. Yet you and your guests know little or nothing yourselves. Grow up, get some books, and go to your room.
Yale and Harvard. Princeton and Dartmouth. Stanford and Berkeley. Get a degree from one of those universities, and you're set for life. So what if, on that test of the college seniors I previously mentioned, 70 percent of the students at those fine schools had never heard of the Voting Rights Act or President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiatives? Who needs to know stuff like that as you sit in your Tuscan villa watching the sunset and checking how well your portfolio did today?
So what if not one of these top universities that the ignorant students attend requires that they take even one course in American history to graduate? Who needs history when you are going to be tomorrow's master of the universe?
Who cares if 70 percent of those who graduate from America's colleges are not required to learn a foreign language? Isn't the rest of the world speaking English now? And if they aren't, hadn't all those damn foreigners better GET WITH THE PROGRAM?
And who gives a rat's ass if, out of the seventy English Literature programs at seventy major American universities, only twenty‑three now require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare? Can somebody please explain to me what Shakespeare and English have to do with each other? What good are some moldy old plays going to be in the business world, anyway?
Maybe I'm just jealous because I don't have a college degree. Yes, I, Michael Moore, am a college dropout.
Well, I never officially dropped out. One day in my sophomore year, I drove around and around the various parking lots of our commuter campus in Flint, searching desperately for a parking
space. There simply was no place to park‑‑every spot was full, and no one was leaving. After a frustrating hour spent circling around in my '69 Chevy Impala, I shouted out the window, "That's it, I'm dropping out!" I drove home and told my parents I was no longer in college.
"Why?" they asked.
"Couldn't find a parking spot," I replied, grabbing a Redpop and moving on with the rest of my life. I haven't sat at a school desk since.
My dislike of school started somewhere around the second month of first grade. My parents‑‑and God Bless Them Forever for doing this‑‑had taught me to read and write by the time I was four. So when I entered St. John's Elementary School, I had to sit and feign interest while the other kids, like robots, sang, "A‑B‑C‑D‑E‑F‑G... Now I know my ABCs, tell me what you think of me!" Every time I heard that line, I wanted to scream out, "Here's what I think of you‑‑quit singing that damn song! Somebody get me a Twinkie!"
I was bored beyond belief. The nuns, to their credit, recognized this, and one day Sister John Catherine took me aside and said that they had decided to skip me up to second grade, effective immediately. I was thrilled. When I got home I excitedly announced to my parents that I had already advanced a grade in my first month of school. They seemed underwhelmed by this new evidence of my genius. Instead they let out a "WHAT THE‑," then went into the kitchen and closed the door. I could hear my mother on the phone explaining to the Mother Superior that there was no way her little Michael was going to be attending class with kids bigger and older than him, so please, Sister, put him back in first grade.
I was crushed. My mother explained to me that if I skipped first grade I'd always be the youngest and littlest kid in class all through my school years (well, inertia and fast food eventually proved her wrong on that count). There would be no appeals to my father, who left most education decisions to my mother, the
valedictorian of her high school class. I tried to explain that if I was sent back to first grade it would appear that I'd flunked second grade on my first day‑putting myself at risk of having the crap beaten out of me by the first graders I'd left behind with a rousing "See ya, suckers!" But Mom wasn't falling for it; it was then I learned that the only person with higher authority than Mother Superior was Mother Moore.
The next day I decided to ignore all instructions from my parents to go back to first grade. In the morning, before the opening bell, all the students had to line up outside the school with their classmates and then march into the building in single file. Quietly, but defiantly, I went and stood in the second graders' line, praying that God would strike the nuns blind so they wouldn't see which line I was in. The bell rang‑and no one had spotted me! The second grade line started to move, and I went with it. Yes! I thought. If I can pull this off, if I can just get into that second grade classroom and take my seat, then nobody will be able to get me out of there. Just as I was about to enter the door of the school, I felt a hand grab me by the collar of my coat. It was Sister John Catherine.
"I think you're in the wrong line, Michael," she said firmly. "You are now in first grade again." I began to protest: my parents had it "all wrong," or "those weren't really my parents," or...
For the next twelve years I sat in class, did my work, and remained constantly preoccupied, looking for ways to bust out. I started an underground school paper in fourth grade. It was shut down. I started it again in sixth. It was shut down. In eighth grade I not only started the paper again, I convinced the good sisters to let me write a play for our class to perform at the, Christmas pageant. The play had something to do with how many rats occupied the parish hall and how all the rats in the country had descended on St. John's Parish Hall to have their annual "rat convention." The priest put a stop to that one‑‑and shut down the paper again. Instead, my friends and I were told to go up on stage and sing
three Christmas carols and then leave the stage without uttering a word. I organized half the class to go up there and utter nothing. So we stood there and refused to sing the carols, our silent protest against censorship. By the second song, intimidated by the stern looks from their parents in the audience, most of the protesters joined in on the singing‑and by the third song, I, too, had capitulated, joining in on "0 Holy Night," and promising myself to live to fight another day.
High school, as we all know, is some sort of sick, sadistic punishment of kids by adults seeking vengeance because they can no longer lead the responsibility‑free, screwing‑around‑‑24/7 lives young people enjoy. What other explanation could there be for those four brutal years of degrading comments, physical abuse, and the belief that you're the only one not having sex?
As soon as I entered high school‑and the public school system‑all the grousing I'd done about the repression of the Sisters of St. Joseph was forgotten; suddenly they all looked like scholars and saints. I was now walking the halls of a two‑thousand‑plus inmate holding pen. Where the nuns had devoted their lives to teaching for no earthly reward, those running the public high school had one simple mission: "Hunt these little pricks down like dogs, then cage them until we can either break their will or ship them off to the glue factory!" Do this, don't do that, tuck your shirt in, wipe that smile off your face, where's your hall pass, THAT'S THE WRONG PASS! YOU‑DETENTION!!
One day I came home from school and picked up the paper. The headline read: "26th Amendment Passes‑‑Voting Age Lowered to 18." Below that was another headline: "School Board President to Retire, Seat Up for Election."
Hmm. I called the county clerk.
"Uh, I'm gonna be eighteen in a few weeks. If I can vote, does that I mean I can also run for office?"
"Let me see," the lady replied. "That's a new question!"
She ruffled through some papers and came back on the phone. "Yes," she said, "you can run. All you need to do is gather twenty signatures to place your name on the ballot."
Twenty signatures? That's it? I had no idea running for elective office required so little work. I got the twenty signatures, submitted my petition, and started campaigning. My platform? "Fire the high school principal and the assistant principal!"
Alarmed at the idea that a high school student might actually find a legal means to remove the very administrators he was being paddled by, five local "adults" took out petitions and got themselves added to the ballot, too.
Of course, they ended up splitting the older adult vote five ways‑and I won, getting the vote of every single stoner between the ages of eighteen and twenty‑five (who, though many would probably never vote again, relished the thought of sending their high school wardens to the gallows).
The day after I won, I was walking down the hall at school (I had one more week to serve out as a student), and I passed the assistant principal, my shirt tail proudly untucked.
"Good morning, Mr. Moore," he said tersely. The day before, my name had been "Hey‑You!" Now I was his boss.
Within nine months after I took my seat on the school board, the principal and assistant principal had submitted their "letters of resignation," a face‑saving device employed when one is "asked" to step down. A couple of years later the principal suffered a heart attack and died.
I had known this man, the principal, for many years. When I was eight years old, he used to let me and my friends skate and play hockey on this little pond beside his house. He was kind and generous, and always left the door to his house open in case any of us needed to change into our skates or if we got cold and just wanted to get warm. Years later, I was asked to play bass in a band that was forming, but I didn't own a bass. He let me borrow his son's.
I offer this to remind myself that all people are actually good
at their core, and to remember that someone with whom I grew to have serious disputes was also someone with a free cup of hot chocolate for us shivering little brats from the neighborhood.
Teachers are now the politicians' favorite punching bag. To listen to the likes of Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education in Bush the Elder's administration, you'd think all that has crumbled in our society can be traced back to lax, lazy, and incompetent teachers. "If you put out a Ten‑Most‑Wanted list of who's killing American education, I'm not sure who you would have higher on the list: the teachers' union or the education school faculties," Finn said.
Sure, there are a lot of teachers who suck, and they'd be better suited to making telemarketing calls for Amway. But the vast majority are dedicated educators who have chosen a profession that pays them less than what some of their students earn selling Ecstasy, and for that sacrifice we seek to punish them. I don't know about you, but I want the people who have the direct attention of my child more hours a day than I do treated with tender loving care. Those are my kids they're "preparing" for this world, so why on earth would I want to piss them off?
You would think society's attitude would be something like this:
Teachers, thank you so much for devoting your life to my child. Is there ANYTHING I can do to help you? Is there ANYTHING you need? I am here for you. Why? Because you are helping my child‑MY BABY‑learn and grow. Not only will you be largely responsible for her ability to make a living, but your influence will greatly affect how she views the world, what she knows about other people in this world, and how she will feel about herself. I want her to believe she can attempt anything‑‑that no doors are closed and that no dreams are too distant. I am entrusting the most valuable person in my life to you for seven hours each day. You, are thus, one of the most important people in my life! Thank you.
No, instead, this is what teachers hear:
*"You've got to wonder about teachers who claim to put the interests of children first‑and then look to milk the System dry through wage hikes." (New York Post, 12/26/00)
*"Estimates of the number of bad teachers range from 5 percent to 18 percent of the 2.6 million total." (Michael Chapman, Investor's Business Daily, 9/21/98)
*"Most education professionals belong to a closed community of devotees... who follow popular philosophies rather than research on what works." (Douglas Carminen, quoted in the Montreal Gazette, 1/6/01)
*"Teachers unions have gone to bat for felons and teachers who have had sex with students, as well as those who simply couldn't teach." (Peter Schweizen, National Review, 8/17/98)
What kind of priority do we place on education in America? Oh, it's on the funding list‑‑somewhere down between OSHA and meat inspectors. The person who cares for our child every day receives an average of $41,351 annually. A Congressman who cares only about which tobacco lobbyist is taking him to dinner tonight receives $145,100.
Considering the face‑slapping society gives our teachers on a daily basis, is it any wonder so few choose the profession? The national teacher shortage is so big that some school systems are recruiting teachers outside the United States. Chicago recently recruited and hired teachers from twenty‑eight foreign countries, including China, France, and Hungary. By the time the new term begins in New York City, seven thousand veteran teachers will have retired-‑and 60 percent of the new teachers hired to replace them are uncertified.
But here's the kicker for me: 163 New York City schools opened the 2000‑2001 school year without a principal! You heard right‑school, with no one in charge. Apparently the mayor and the school board are experimenting with chaos theory‑throw five hundred poor kids into a crumbling building, and watch nature take its course! In the city from which most of the wealth in the world is controlled, where there are more millionaires per square foot than there is gum on the sidewalk, we somehow can't find the money to pay a starting teacher more than $31,900 a year. And we act surprised when we can't get results.
And it's not just teachers who have been neglected‑American schools are literally falling apart. In 1999 one‑quarter of U.S. public schools reported that the condition of at least one of their buildings was inadequate. In 1997 the entire Washington, D.C., school system had to delay the start of school for three weeks because nearly one‑third of the schools were found to be unsafe.
Almost 10 percent of U.S. public schools have enrollments that are more than 25 percent greater than the capacity of their permanent buildings. Classes have to be held in the hallways, outdoors, in the gym, in the cafeteria; one school I visited even held classes in a janitor's closet. It's not as if the janitor's closets are being used for anything related to cleaning, anyway‑in New York City almost 15 percent of the eleven hundred public schools are without full‑time custodians, forcing teachers to mop their own floors and students to do without toilet paper. We already send our kids out into the street to hawk candy bars so their schools can buy band instruments‑what's next? Car washes to raise money for toilet paper?
Further proof of just how special our little offspring are is the number of public and even school libraries that have been shut down or had their hours cut back. The last thing we need is a bunch of kids hanging out around a bunch of books!
Apparently "President" Bush agrees: in his first budget he
proposed cutting federal spending on libraries by $39 million, down to $168million‑‑a nearly 19 percent reduction. Just the week before, his wife, former school librarian Laura Bush, kicked off a national campaign for America's libraries, calling them "community treasure chests, loaded with a wealth of information available to everyone, equally." The President's mother, Barbara Bush, heads the Foundation for Family Literacy. Well, there's nothing like having firsthand experience with illiteracy in the family to motivate one into acts of charity.
For kids who are exposed to books at home, the loss of a library is sad. But for kids who come from environments where people don't read, the loss of a library is a tragedy that might keep them from ever discovering the joys of reading‑‑or from gathering the kind of information that will decide their lot in life. Jonathan Kozol, for decades an advocate for disadvantaged children, has observed that school libraries "remain the clearest window to a world of noncommercial satisfactions and enticements that most children in poor neighborhoods will ever know."
Kids deprived of access to good libraries are also being kept from developing the information skills they need to keep up in workplaces that are increasingly dependent on rapidly changing information. The ability to conduct research is "probably the most essential skill [today's students] can have," says Julie Walker, executive director of the American Association of School Librarians. "The knowledge [students] acquire in school is not going to serve them throughout their lifetimes. Many of them will have four to five careers in a lifetime. It will be their ability to navigate information that will matter."
Who's to blame for the decline in libraries? Well, when it comes to school libraries, you can start by pointing the finger (Yes, that finger) at Richard Nixon. From the 1960suntil 1974, school libraries received specific funding from the government. But in 1974the Nixon administration changed the rules, stipulat
ing that federal education money be doled out in "block grants" to be spent by states however they chose. Few states chose to spend the money on libraries, and the downslide began. This is one reason that materials in many school libraries today date from the 1960s and early 1970s, before funding was diverted. ("No, Sally, the Soviet Union isn't our enemy. The Soviet Union has been kaput for ten years....")
This 1999 account by an Education Week reporter about the "library" at a Philadelphia elementary school could apply to any number of similarly neglected schools:
Even the best books in the library at T. M. Pierce Elementary School are dated, tattered, and discolored. The worst-‑many in a latter stage of disintegration-‑are dirty and fetid and leave a moldy residue on hands and clothing. Chairs and tables are old, mismatched, or broken. There isn't a computer in sight.... Outdated facts and theories and offensive stereotypes leap from the authoritative pages of encyclopedias and biographies, fiction and nonfiction tomes. Among the volumes on these shelves a student would find it all but impossible to locate accurate information on AIDS or other contemporary diseases, explorations of the moon and Mars, or the past five U.S. presidents.
The ultimate irony in all of this is that the very politicians who refuse to fund education in America adequately are the same ones who go ballistic over how our kids have fallen behind the Germans, the Japanese, and just about every other country with running water and an economy not based on the sale of Chiclets. Suddenly they want "accountability." They want the teachers held responsible and to be tested. And they want the kids to be tested‑‑over and over and over.
There's nothing terribly wrong with the concept of using standardized testing to determine whether kids are learning to read and write and do math. But too many politicians and education bureaucrats have created a national obsession with testing, as if everything that's wrong with the educational system in this country would be magically fixed if we could just raise those scores.
The people who really should be tested (besides the yammering pundits) are the so‑called political leaders. Next time you see your state representative or congressman, give him this pop quiz‑and remind him that any future pay raises will be based on how well he scores:
1. What is the annual pay of your average constituent?
2. What percent of welfare recipients are children?
3. How many known species of plants and animals are on the brink of extinction?
4. How big is the hole in the ozone layer?
5. Which African countries have a lower infant mortality rate than Detroit?
6. How many American cities still have two competing newspapers?
7. How many ounces in a gallon?
8. Which do I stand a greater chance of being killed by: a gun shot in school or a bolt of lightning?
9. What's the only state capital without a McDonald's?
10. Describe the story of either The Iliad or The Odyssey.
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