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The problems of state primary and secondary education in the United States are well known. These are manifested in such places as unfavourable test scores relative to the rest of the world and the extensive remedial work that colleges and universities have to do to enable students to pursue a university level degree.

These problems have three basic sources.

The first is the legal and regulatory environment public education operates in today. First among these are the unfunded mandates, primarly from the federal government, which add to the complexity and cost of getting the job done without necessarily adding to the quality of the result. Also, as with anything else in the U.S., public schools find themselves victims of judicial meddling, much of which is enabled by the unfunded mandates. One major result of this is the abrogation by many public schools of meaningful discipline, which is why we see resource officers cruising the halls these days.

The second is the trade union the teachers (and administrators for that matter) have opted to form. This is a lot more complicated subject than most people want to admit, but the main result is that it has made American public schools a "closed circle" in terms of staffing and operation, impervious to the forces of external change, good or bad. It is interesting to note that the first people to be forced "out of the loop" were the university academics, who had dominated the hierarchy of education until the first part of the last century.

The third is the long-running campaign to turn public schools into indoctrinators of state-enforced secularism. We spend time on this issue elsewhere. In some ways this is an unfunded mandate from the courts. Proponents of this have never explained how values can be taught in a purely materialistic system of thought where they have no objective reality, but some public school systems actually try to do this.

All of this has led to a giant political and bureaucratic gridlock. As Americans, we like to think that we can fix problems, and we have fixed others. So why does this one defy solution? The simple answer is that the desire to do so is lacking in the place where it counts.

Public schools were created to provide free education to the entire population. Until recent times the ideal was to create a system that was as uniform for all students as a system of many locally directed (sort of) school systems could offer. This idea was derived from nineteenth century Germany, whose "open curriculum" (not directing people to a specific trade or professional level at the primary or secondary level) led to one of the greatest mass lifts in social mobility in human history. (We deal with the effects of this in another context on another site.) Doing this will inevitably inspire people who can afford better to opt out of the system with private schools, especially people in regions where the tradition of non-public education carried over from colonial times (i.e., the Northeast and the South.) The present woes of the system only inspire people to do so on a broader scale.

This leads to the classical "view from the top" about public schools: these institutions are the "schools for 'them'," preparing "them" for trades that "they" will go into so they can serve "us." With the global move of people and capital, this enables those who invest to reap the benefits of schools in places like India and China, either here or there. We see the decoupling of public education from those who could really break the logjam and advance the cause of public schools. The end result will be a decrease in upward social mobility, and the hope of upward social mobility is the fuel of the modern American dream. If that hope dies, the country dies.

Americans are going to have to face the fact that their destiny is in their own hands and that they cannot rely on others to make it happen. In some ways, they already know this. It will not be easy. There are creative solutions out there. But the stakes are too high to let things go as they have in the "schools for them."