Free Inside American Education by Thomas Sowell Page A

educational system need to be assessed, to see what can be salvaged from the debacle and reorganized into a viable enterprise.
    ASSETS AND LIABILITIES
    The greatest assets of American education are its postgraduate institutions, especially in the sciences, mathematics, and medicine—all justly renowned around the world—and the enormous generosity of the American people which makes this renown possible. The abundance of resources made available for research, not only in these fields but also in economics, history, and other fields, provides American scholars with decisive advantages over their counterparts in other countries. However, to turn from scholarship to teaching, and from postgraduate education to that in most colleges, and still more so in the elementary and secondary schools, is to turn from the assets to the liabilities.
    One symptom of the deficiencies of American colleges is the declining ability of their graduates to compete with foreign students for places in the postgraduate institutions of the United States. This inability to compete is most glaring in such intellectually demanding areas as doctoral programs in mathematics and engineering, where American students have in recent years become a minority in their own country. Only 40 percent of the Ph.D.s in engineering awarded in the United States in 1990 went to Americans. 1
    In elementary and secondary education, the lag of American school children behind their counterparts in other countries has become a widely known disgrace. What is not so widely understood is that this lag is greatest in thinking skills, rather than in mere information or even in the application of mathematical recipes, as distinguished from multi-step analysis. 2 Johnny can’t think . That is the bottom line that makes American education bankrupt.
    That bankruptcy is both in institutions and in attitudes. The two go together. Attitudes wholly antithetical to the intellectual development of students flourish in elementary and secondary schools across the country, and are gaining more and more of a foothold in even our elite colleges. The institutional protection of tenure insulates such attitudes from accountability for their consequences. It is not merely that sweeping fads come and go in the schools and colleges, leaving all sorts of educational wreckage in their wake. What is more fundamentally harmful is the enduring attitude of self-indulgenceamong educators behind such reckless experiments. It is not enough to discover, seriatim and ex post , the deficiencies and disasters of particular educational fads, unless it leads to institutional changes restricting the self-indulgence of educators.
    In education, as elsewhere, perpetual self-indulgence and divorce from reality are often results of being over-indulged by others. These others include legislators, both in the states and in Washington, who pour ever more billions of tax dollars down a bottomless pit to demonstrate their “commitment” to “education,” without requiring even the most rudimentary accountability for results . College trustees who rubber-stamp the expediency-minded policies of smooth-talking college presidents, and alumni who contribute money in utter disregard of what is being done with it, are also among those who overindulge academics. Media coverage of academia is indulgent to the point of gullibility, as reporters hang on every word of professors and college presidents, in a way they would never listen uncritically to businessmen, generals, or politicians. Even law-enforcement agencies are skittish about prosecuting academic institutions, though it would be hard to think of a more unconscionable “conspiracy in restraint of trade” than the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
    The assets and liabilities of American education are attitudinal, as well as institutional. One of its chief assets—the public’s generosity to a fault—can also become a liability when it becomes a blank-check subsidy