Archive [January 2000]

As long as I’ve been behind the Golden EIB Microphone, I’ve been exposing the ineptitude, corruption, and destructive liberalism of the public education establishment in this country. Now comes a scandal that demonstrates how right I have been. (Not that there was ever any doubt.)

In December, a special commissioner of investigation for New York City schools, in an official inquiry, found that at 32 schools, 43 teachers and two principals in the city’s public school system engaged in carefully orchestrated cheating on standardized reading and math tests.

We’re talking about third graders, many from impoverished neighborhoods. Turns out authority figures guided eight-year-olds, step by step, through a systematic scheme to scam the tests. Some provided answers ahead of time; some pointed to the correct answers as they walked by the kids’ desks; others simply filled out the student test sheets for them.

Teachers-teaching kids how to cheat!

Here we have not only the injury of these kids’ consciences by those supposedly caring for them — an obvious evil. Equally indefensible, we have teachers giving third graders the message that they can’t achieve anything honestly, by working hard and pushing themselves. We can’t post the Ten Commandments on the classroom walls — oh, no. We can’t teach morality. So the only explicit lesson these public schools are teaching (in addition to sex education, of course) is how to commit fraud.

At P.S. 234 in the Bronx, Evelyn Hey, one of the principals accused in the investigator’s report, refused to comment on the cheating scandal — other than to claim that it was “all based on hearsay.” According to The New York Times, Ms. Hey then “ordered a reporter to leave the building, and minutes later drove off in her Jaguar.” Her Jaguar!

So what do you suppose the reaction of the elite media and the liberal establishment has been to this scandal? Have they blamed the teachers? Have they blamed the principals? Have they faulted the bureaucrats? Have they criticized the schools at all?

No.

What have they blamed? I hope you are sitting down, my friends. The leftist establishment, from The New York Times to the educational “experts” parading themselves on television, has blamed … the tests.

The tests! I kid you not. Here, from an editorial in The New York Times:

“This investigation, which involves a tiny percentage of city teachers, will not cure the problem. In fact, cheating by teachers and principals could increase as the entire school system becomes driven and judged by test scores. It is no surprise that many of the schools named in the report are among the lowest-performing schools in the city, where less than a quarter of students read at grade level. Neither the students nor their teachers are equipped to face the new and harsher consequences of educational failure, which for students means no social promotion or graduation from high school.”

So here’s the real message from America’s “newspaper of record”: “It’s no surprise that ‘people like this’ are dishonest. We know, don’t we, that they can’t make it any other way. Don’t bother attempting to actually teach these students. Don’t expect them to meet standards. There’s no solution for these kids — so just graduate them anyway, whether they learn or not.”

It’s outrageous! Every one of these teachers and principals should be fired, and banned forever from the education profession. How dare they cheat these kids this way? And how dare The New York Times compound the insult?

We get the same poisonous condescension in a New York Times op-ed piece by one Arne Kohn titled “Tests That Cheat Students”: “We would do well to look at how heavy-handed demands for ‘tougher standards’ and ‘accountability’ not only invite cheating but also cheat children out of opportunities for meaningful learning.”

Invite cheating! The only people inviting cheating here are the blasted teachers, and people like the esteemed Mr. Kohn, who blame the tests — because they are “an instructional approach that promotes rote recall ahead of understanding.” Oh, no! They require kids to memorize stuff! Pardon me, but that approach has been effective throughout the entire history of the human race.

This is the kind of thing that infuriates me, my friends. And thinking represented here by these glittering examples of colossal ignorance is widespread.

And so I was not surprised to learn that according to a new survey, only 26 percent of high school seniors (many old enough to vote next year), have a good understanding of how American government works.

This is the dumbing down of the children of America. They don’t know civics. They don’t know the building block foundations of this country. They don’t know why this country is as great as it is, how it became as great as it is — or even how it came to be. Thus they don’t know what their role is in maintaining it. They haven’t the slightest clue.

We are raising, in essence, a bunch of citizens incapable of citizenship. They will be incapable of making up their minds, because they don’t know anything.

Liberals benefit from an uninformed public, because an uninformed public is a dependent public. They need more people who don’t understand, say, how the budget process works. Who don’t understand how welfare reform works. Who don’t understand taxes. They create a bunch of people who end up thinking that the government exists for retirement, it exists for health care. And that’s exactly what has happened. In way too many people’s minds, the federal government is nothing more than a retirement home, or a hospital, or a doctor’s office, or the source of a welfare check.

So when you read that just 26 percent of high school seniors scored well enough to demonstrate a good understanding of how the government works, you are correct if you conclude that this must be by design.

They’re born willing and eager to learn; they’re sponges. But the problem is, they’re soaking up a bunch of cockeyed psychobabble about global warming and animal rights and all this social experimentation gunk that is irrelevant to preparing them for the roles they must play in maintaining this nation as the greatest on Earth. How can they, if they don’t even realize this nation is the only hope the world has, when it comes to keeping alive the “sacred fire of liberty,” to quote George Washington.

This nation already feeds the world. It has the ability to maintain safety around the world. But there are not enough people who are being educated to understand what people went through to found and preserve this country.

John Silber, Chancellor of Boston University, did a study on high school textbooks, and found that of the five most-used history texts, the longest reference to Abraham Lincoln was two paragraphs. This is profoundly troubling, my friends: a nation is only as strong as the young people who are being educated on how to preserve it. This is a tremendous challenge to overcome.

This question wasn’t on the survey, but I’d bet that you’d get just as dismal a response if you asked, simply: “What are the Bill of Rights?” Not name them, just what are they? “Uh, they’re about our rights, man.” Okay, but where are they? “Gee —an old, yellow paper in some museum in Washington, right?”

The Bill of Rights are the first ten amendments to the Constitution, ratified December 15, 1791. They are vitally important, according to the Founding Fathers, because they explicitly protect individual rights of the people. All ten amendments were designed to limit the power of the federal government in our lives.

And yet, we are raising generations of kids who think that it is the purpose of government to run our lives. That cannot happen, unless the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not being adequately taught.

I think the home schoolers know it. The people sending their kids to private school know it. More and more people are becoming aware of the inadequacies, and I have the sense that more and more Americans realize that something must be done to change this.

When the Administration deals with education all they talk about is more funding, spending more money. How much money did it cost to educate Abraham Lincoln or Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson? Money doesn’t equal IQ, intelligence, or knowledge. But everybody’s stock answer is “more funding.” Well, the answer is less funding, more competent teachers, more homework, and a more demanding educational system.

“Oh, come on, Rush,” you say. “We’re hard enough on our kids as it is now.” No, we’re not nearly hard enough on them. When they’re young is when they’re designed to be pushed, prodded. That’s when human beings can absorb the most, have more energy. That’s when you teach them what they’re capable of. That’s when they learn that they’re better than they think they are. That’s when they learn that there’s more inside them than they think they have.

It takes special people to get that out of them. Most people are not self-starters. But no, we’re into this new approach: We’ve got to go easy on them. We don’t want to hurt their self-esteem. We don’t want them to have to memorize anything, it’s too hard! And so, this is the result. Only 26 percent of the nation’s seniors have a clue about the nature of this government, or this country.

The left wants it this way. It is absolutely purposeful. The most dangerous thing modern liberalism could ever face in the United States of America today would be a student population schooled in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Liberals want more power over your lives (which is, of course, also the reason they don’t want tax cuts). This is not just a conservative cliché, my friends; it’s fact. This is why the torch of liberty must be passed from generation to generation with civics education — a proper understanding of how the country was formed, and what it cost. So few people in this country have really sacrificed for the freedom we enjoy. We just wake up every day and go about our lives. But if we do not take the time to learn for ourselves the way this country was supposed to work, we are in grave danger.

When President Clinton was in Florence, Italy, recently, he made a statement — one he’s made countless times since he took office in 1993: “Government must give people the tools and the help that they need so that they can be prosperous.” That sounds good to too many Americans. But that’s not the way it works! The government does not “give” people “tools.” Power doesn’t go from government to people. It goes from people to government. It’s not the government that tells us what to do. We tell the government what it can and can’t do. That’s the foundation on which the country was built.

But that isn’t taught, if fewer and fewer people know that the purpose of the Bill of Rights is to limit the government’s ability to infringe on our freedom and not the other way around, if that torch is not passed from generation to generation, then who will stop the liberal drive to make as many people dependent on government for as many aspects of their lives every day as possible?

That campaign will never end. Because making people dependent on them is the source of their power. These are socialists with a utopian dream. It fails every time it’s tried, but yet they’re still after it in this country.

The fact is, we’re in danger of losing the moral foundation on which the nation is built. You wonder why all this attempt at democracy in Russia isn’t working. “Well,” liberals say, “freedom’s not for everyone.” That is a bunch of malarkey. Freedom is the natural yearning of the human spirit as created by God. But freedom requires many things: responsibility, rule of law, and most importantly, a moral foundation on which freedom is built.

We are allowing ours to erode because gutless wonders in America haven’t the courage to stand up for what’s right and wrong and to proclaim what is moral and what is immoral. Instead we get into arguments over who’s got the right to impose their view of morality on somebody else.

You can’t “impose” decency. You instruct it; you teach it. It’s the single most important responsibility parents have. It’s not earning a living; it’s not even providing the best for them that you can materially. It is instructing young human beings on the differences between right and wrong. They will not learn it on their own.

I’ve told this story — and I’m going to tell it again. It was in Croton-on-Hudson, NY, the suburban estate of Roger Ailes, where every Saturday during the summer, friends and associates gathered for water volleyball and a barbecue. After one such fun afternoon, we all gathered in the living room, and a 26-year-old teacher went on a tirade about how we’re pushing our children much, much too hard. We’re working them too hard, she said, demanding too much of them.

I flipped out. I said, “Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the reason why our kids are getting dumber. We think that they are weak and incapable of being pushed —when in fact, when they’re in their teens is when they should be pushed to and beyond their limit so that they will know what they’re capable of.” It’s just so simple. “We don’t want them to suffer — they get so stressed out.”

They don’t know what stress is! I mentioned to you recently that more and more, I contemplate my place in life at the time I happened to be born. And I think of how literally easy our lives are. Just how many Americans today would be capable — physically, emotionally, psychologically — of handling the rigors of life 75, 100, 200 years ago!

When I hear about how parents cannot deal with the pressure of seeing their kids fail, that teachers cannot deal with the pressure of seeing their kids work hard, I think it would be worthwhile for everybody to try to imagine what it would be like without a car, without central heat and air conditioning, without indoor plumbing, without penicillin. We don’t have it hard.

We’ve got way too many people who don’t know what hard is, who don’t know what tough is, who do not know what stress is. And now we hear that kids who are made to cheat on a test means there’s something wrong with the test; we’re pushing the kids too hard and stressing them out, and we’ve got to back off. All for their “self-esteem.” Heaven help us!

We are becoming a nation of softies. We all think that we’re giving our children self-esteem, when in fact we don’t have the guts to see our kids struggle. We don’t have the guts to see our kids go through those things in life that teach you character. We don’t have the guts to see our kids go through life experiences that teach them right and wrong. We somehow have come to believe that we need to shield our children from virtually everything that may be the slightest bit unpleasant or uncomfortable or difficult.

At the same time, the education system has fallen so far that we cannot discuss right and wrong because of its divine source — God. God is taboo in America, thanks to the ACLU and the incorrect interpretation of the so-called separation of church and state. This eroded over time, and it is not going to be fixed overnight, either. But the bottom line is, we are in dire straits; in addition to students’ ignorance of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, there’s a huge absence of God in their lives. God is an essential part of civic education — which has a fundamental moral foundation.

You have to understand, of course, that there are people purposely trying to tear down the foundation that this country rests on. And those people need to be engaged. They don’t need to be gotten along with, they don’t need to be understood, they don’t need to be reasoned with, they need to be defeated. Politically.

It is our responsibility. There are millions of Americans alive today who do know what this nation is made of, and why. Those of you in my audience who do understand the meaning of the Bill of Rights — it is our task to pass the torch. Our elders did it for us. We cannot wait for someone else to ensure that the light of freedom will not flicker out. It is up to you. It is up to me.

And the first place we start is with a grateful heart. That may sound strange, but it is only in gratitude that we truly grasp the value of this nation’s great gift of freedom. It is only with a spirit of thankfulness that we can understand the price paid by those who went before, and the heroic struggles of millions of ordinary men and women who bequeathed to us America’s bounty.

If young people today have no knowledge of the past, then it is we who must make sure they know. We must remind them that this country did not spring into existence with a poof of magic. It was built. We must remind them that they stand on the shoulders of generations of Americans who expected much of them — and expected them to understand what it cost.

There is no excuse, and there is no time to spare: Pass the torch.