During the ten year period of the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China Chinese youth were recruited by hard liners in the Communist Party and used as weapons to root out, abuse, and sometimes kill, “bourgeois” elements in Chinese society and Party. Education came to a halt, young people learned skills in street fighting, pillage and extortion, and a generation of “lost youth” was created. Uneducated, unskilled and cruelly manipulated for immoral purposes by a communist regime in throes of internal revolution, the Red Guards came to symbolize what to fear from totalitarians in the PRC—and America.
Though the 60s revolution did a good job in contributing to the decline of academic standards, morals and discipline in American higher education, the generation of Woodstock, Weather Underground, Hippies and Yippies was largely contained to Berkeley, Haight-Ashbury, Columbia University and the streets of Chicago in summer 1968, and sporadic acts of violence by Environmental extremists.
Unseen and largely unnoticed was the formation a lost generation by a system of public education that cruelly warehouses students until one half drop from the system into lives of desperate subsistence living. Even today school boards “fix” the books, lie about test scores and cover up a systemic failure to educate.
A Charter School reform movement arose to challenge this benign neglect and now thirteen states have instituted some form of school reform and some Democrats have joined Republicans in calling for serious reforms. The District of Columbia’s Charter School legislation has allowed several Charter Schools to come into existence and DC Mayor Adrian Fenty and School Superintendent Michelle Rhee promise that more reform is to come.
America is a wealthy country, but like all wealthy countries it is wasteful of resources. America’s school children for generations have been amongst the many resources wasted by powerful education interests, school superintendents, teachers unions and parents showing lack of concern for the education of their children. Over the long term this has led to a lowering of workforce skills, lowering of college admission standards, grade inflation, and, of course, a decline in the number of Americans choosing the mathematical and physical sciences.
Marcus Winters writes in the Manhattan Institute’s “The City” about recently released results of an international study of 4th and 8th grade student achievement in math and sciences. The results are not good, but there is hope if certain measures are taken now. You can read about it at http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0116mw.html
