A survey was conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) titled “Our Fading Heritage: Americans Fail a Basic Test on Their History and Institutions.” Highlights of the survey include the following:

• Only 21% of respondents recognized the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” came from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
• Only 53% know that the power to declare war belongs to Congress. Almost 40% incorrectly believe it belongs to the president.
• Less than 20% know that the phrase “a wall of separation” between church and state comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Almost 50% incorrectly believe it can be found in the Constitution.
• Only 27% knew that the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.
• Amazingly, close to 25% of Americans believe that Congress shares its foreign policy powers with the United Nations.

The article “Academic Fraud,” by Walter Williams, partly explains the above findings.

At Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are A’s. At Harvard, 50 percent of all grades were either A or A- (up from 22 percent in 1966); 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. The Boston Globe called Harvard’s grading practices “the laughing stock of the Ivy League.” Eighty percent of the grades given at the University of Illinois are A’s and B’s. Fifty percent of students at Columbia University are on the Dean’s list. At Stanford University, where F grades used to be banned, only 6 percent of student grades were as low as a C.

He continues: “A recent survey of more than 30,000 first-year [college] students revealed that nearly half spent more hours drinking than studying. Another survey found that a third of students expected B’s just for attending class, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the assigned reading.” The growing academic entitlement mentality is another interesting phenomenon.

The average GPA in the 1930s was 2.35, while today it is 3.11 in public schools and 3.30 in private schools according to Professor Thomas C. Reeves in his article “The Happy Classroom: Grade Inflation Works.”

Williams writes how “employers report that many college graduates lack the basic skills of critical thinking, writing and problem-solving.” But students can recite the dogma of environmentalists; why America is a racist, imperialist country; that capitalism is evil and socialism is needed to create ‘equality’ and ’social justice’, etc.

We are told by the establishment media and intelligentsia that lack of adequate funding for government education (or virtually anything they control) is to blame. But Americans are starting to come to the realization that no matter how much of our hard-earned money is handed over to politicians in Washington, the promised ’solutions’ never materialize. Never mind that other countries, and even places within the U.S., can spend less per pupil and still produce superior results. One has to wonder - how is it in the past, schools spent less per pupil, classes were more crowded, there was less technology, but children received a better education than today? Statists have no answer and just clamor for more funding without accountability.

As the observant Bruce Thornton points out about this country’s education philosophy and President Obama:

Once again, Obama only has to let continue the same process of politicization that has been developing since the Sixties and that informs his own political ideology. The orthodox dogma that underlay Obama’s campaign rhetoric - all the world’s ills can be traced to American misdeeds, Western crimes like racism, imperialism and colonialism, or the greed of lupine capitalists exploiting the Third World “other” and ravaging the environment - this dogma can be heard every day in thousands of classrooms across the land. Whole departments such as Women’s Studies, Culture Studies, and Ethnic Studies exist to preach this doctrine of Western criminality. In the traditional disciplines such as History or English, the same melodrama of Western wickedness informs the courses taught, the books chosen for class, and the perspective shaping the presentation of the material. As a result, most students will graduate with scant knowledge of the great tradition of English literature or even the basic facts of American history. Anybody who doubts this should go down to his local college bookstore and scan the titles ordered for classes.

Monopolies - especially ideologically slanted classrooms - do not help either:

After all, the monopoly on teacher training and certification enjoyed by Schools of Education is what accounts for the deterioration and dysfunction of American education. Lacking any real content, given that the only useful preparation for a teacher is in the subject matter to be taught, Ed Schools have been prey to every lunatic fad that pops up in the pseudo-sciences like psychology or sociology. Whole language reading instruction, the “New Math,” will-o’-the-wisps like “self esteem” or “values clarification,” and hundreds of other pedagogical equivalents of phrenology or mesmerism have compensated for the simple fact that teaching is an art, not a science, and as such will be learned by actually teaching under the supervision of an experienced and successful teacher, not by sitting in classrooms listening to the latest pop-psychological bunkum about “learning styles” and such.

Without any real competition and so long as teachers and administrators are beholden to the radical ideas of the left, we will continue to see declining academic performance in this country. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the kind of change necessary to turn around our failing schools, especially with this administration. Thornton correctly states that Obama was extremely popular with younger voters - probably the most poorly educated and misinformed generation in history. He sums it up best when he asks the question, “Given that the youth vote helped to elect him, why would he change the system that helped create them?”

Read the followup of how blacks are harmed by the education system HERE.