Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth (21 page)

The administration’s answer: Throw up new roadblocks that will continue to delay the building of the Keystone pipeline, even as Canada begins to ship oil to China.

As I’ve demonstrated in this chapter, not only is the green-energy initiative fraudulent—built as it is on unsupportable theories and nonexistent proof that releasing carbon into the atmosphere is dangerous to our climate—it is but one more way in which we are being divided into groups of private citizens and political and economic power mongers, the very groups who are likely to oppose each other in the coming civil war.

A
s many of you know, I grew up in the Bronx. My father was an immigrant and not an educated man. He was hardworking and intelligent, but he didn’t have the opportunity or the money for college, though education was very important in my family. I went to public schools and City College. I wasn’t naturally a good student, or rather I wasn’t a good memorizer, which was the modus operandi in school back then. I was much more of a dreamer and a free thinker. And when I discovered jazz in my teens, I thought I needed to know nothing else.
What could be more important in life than Stan Getz or Charlie Parker?

Though jazz would remain the soundtrack to my life, it became evident that I couldn’t live on music alone. I worked hard, became a good student, and would ultimately acquire several graduate degrees, including a doctorate from the University of California. My dissertation was published as a book, which is extremely rare. The child who had trouble memorizing the date of the Magna Carta and the multiplication tables is now a doctor and the author of twenty-eight books.

If you were lucky enough to have been born in the United States before about 1975—as I was, just barely—and if you were fortunate enough to have completed your public-school education by the mid-to late 1980s, you were the beneficiary of the best primary and secondary school system in the world.

But then Jimmy Carter became president and created the Department of Education in 1979. At the time, the United States was first in the world in the quality of education by every measure. Under Carter, instead of leaving education to people at the state and local levels, where it thrived, the federal government took over U.S. schools, and the quality of education began to sink, slowly at first, and gradually more rapidly. Now our international standing in education is trapped in the teens and low to midtwenties in virtually every ranking of every academic discipline.
¹
American high school students’ academic performances have sunk to fourteenth in reading, seventeenth in science, and twenty-sixth in math scores when measured against students in other countries around the world.
²

Student performances on the 2012 Program for International Assessment tests revealed that Asian countries in particular provide their students with a much better education
than the United States does. Chinese students, specifically those living in the city of Shanghai, posted the highest scores in the world in math and science. Students in Vietnam, which has been a third-world country since before we fought there in the rice paddies during the 1960s and ’70s, now score higher than those in the United States.

Even current U.S. Education secretary Arne Duncan, an Obama lieutenant and leftist ideologue, characterized the flat scores as a “picture of educational stagnation.”
³

Let me give you a few reasons why.

In 1979, the illiteracy rate among high school students in the United States was about 1 percent.
⁴
In other words, if you were in school before that time you were among the 99 percent of high school students who could read.

In the early 1980s, an approach to learning known as “outcome-based education” was introduced in the Chicago city schools. It was later expanded across much of the U.S. educational system.

This instructional methodology dictates that until all students have mastered the content in a given subject area, no student is allowed to advance to the next level. If you’re an above-average student and know the subject matter, you have to sit on your thumbs until everyone has caught up with you.
⁵
If you ask someone who is a proponent of this method, they will give you a lot of double-talk about the outcome of the whole class being more important than the success of the individual student.

Do you know what happened in Chicago after this subversive approach was introduced?

Within five years, nearly half of all the public school students in Chicago dropped out.
⁶

Literacy rates plummeted.

There is no question in my mind that Chicago’s current inner-city violence and unemployment is caused in no small measure by the intentional destruction of the city’s school system through the introduction of this leftist educational agenda.

And I have little doubt that, as Carter effectively nationalized education in this country through his creation of the federal Department of Education, this approach has been largely responsible for the dramatic drop in the national literacy rates of our elementary and high school students.

By 2010, although graduation rates were at an all-time-high 78 percent of high school students, 26 percent of twelfth graders could not read at their grade level. Put another way:
More than a quarter of today’s graduating high school students are functionally illiterate
.
⁷

According to the U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Literacy, in 2013,
19 percent of high school graduates could not read at all
.
⁸

Despite the decrease in our students’ academic ranking around the world since the late 1970s, there are nearly 5,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States with some 18 million students in attendance. That’s more than double the number of students attending colleges and universities in the ’70s.
⁹

At the same time, in order to accommodate an increasingly ill-prepared population of college-eligible students, standards
in higher education have dropped precipitously. Apart from the top-tier colleges and universities, most college curricula for incoming freshmen now consist of little more than remediation to bring students up to the standard of high school graduates of the 1970s.
¹⁰

So how do our Ivy League leaders handle such a problem? They look the other way while our educational system becomes rife with cons and criminals.

For instance, a Dallas-based company that bills itself as a “custom writing service” creates papers for barely literate students to turn in as their own work. There’s so much demand for the firm’s services that it now employs more than one hundred writers. As the company’s news release explains, students “no longer have to face the burden of academic coursework.”

Students—and it breaks my heart to call them that—rave about the service. Here are some of the things they have to say:

We were once a country that produced the likes of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Now we have this.

Compounding the diminished quality of the education they
received in our elementary and high schools, 18 million college students are living in an education bubble. Simply put, an education bubble is the same as a bubble in real estate or finance. As tuition goes up, the financial benefits of a college degree decrease. The student who takes a student loan is immediately underwater, just like the person who buys a house at the height of the market and the next week the bubble breaks. College graduates are underperforming so badly today that new legislation is in the works that would mandate colleges demonstrate the success or failure of the education their students receive by publishing data on the salaries their graduates earn.
¹²

The number of high school students enrolling in colleges has increased by 47 percent since 1970, with 25 percent of the increase occurring between 2000 and 2008. During roughly the same time, tuition costs at four-year public colleges and universities rose by nearly 250 percent, while the median U.S. family income has dropped by more than 14 percent.
¹³

Colleges have padded their faculties and staffs enormously as the education bubble has developed. Layer upon layer of management has been added.
¹⁴
It won’t be long until some university will create a position called Dean of Deans.

A few years back, the University of Minnesota created a department called the Office of Equity and Diversity. According to a
Wall Street Journal
investigation, that department has ten people with the word
director
in their title. The school employs 353 people who make over $200,000 a year.
¹⁵

This ugly and inefficient trend is made much worse by the introduction of hundreds of new pseudo-academic disciplines in response to the growing division of the U.S. population into groups—based on such characteristics as gender, race, and income—that political leftists have brought about.
¹⁶
University coursework is overloaded with classes weighted heavily toward such soft disciplines as Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies, which can be molded to comply with their professors’ political biases. Here are some of the more enlightened subjects that are being offered at our major universities today:

• GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender and Identity (University of Virginia)

• Philosophy and
Star Trek
(Georgetown University)

• God, Sex, Chocolate: Desire and the Spiritual Path (UC San Diego)

• The Feminist Critique of Christianity (University of Pennsylvania)

• What if Harry Potter Is Real? (Appalachian State University)
¹⁷

If you’re an English major, you very likely no longer study the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. Those requirements are gone. Now, if you choose to major in English, in many universities you’ll have to take at least three “literature” courses in one or more of the following disciplines: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; Interdisciplinary Studies; or Critical Theory. The substance of courses in these disciplines is left up the professor’s interpretation.
¹⁸

There was a time when free speech was a fight that the left viewed as strictly theirs. But now on college campuses across the country, it is the conservative voice that struggles to be heard. Look no further than commencement addresses and whom the elite schools pick to deliver them. In 2012, out of
the top fifty liberal arts colleges, only one asked a conservative, Governor Bob McDonnell from Virginia, to give a commencement speech. McDonnell spoke at the University of Richmond. Not a single conservative was asked to speak outside of his home state.
¹⁹

As I see it, college textbook publishing has degenerated into something akin to a racket that is trying desperately to maintain its stranglehold on the extended-adolescence market that brick-and-mortar institutions of higher education have helped create.
²⁰
According to a survey conducted by a public interest research group, textbooks cost college students over $1,200 a year on average, with the cost of many individual books soaring to $200 and higher. What’s more, new editions, usually with little additional material, are published every two or three years. This effectively limits the market for used textbooks. The cost of textbooks is so prohibitive that students regularly decide their course schedule not on their hopes and dreams but on how much the books for the course will cost.
²¹

Beyond that, American colleges foster the physical separation of people into racial, ethnic, and cultural groups, a purposeful result, I believe, of the president’s agenda. As I see it, his plan is to drive wedges between us based on characteristics that include race, and college campuses are a perfect staging ground for this.

Let me give you some examples.

At many universities, blacks are offered the option of living in all-black dormitories or on all-black floors within dormitories. Even where colleges don’t offer segregated housing, students often self-segregate. It’s gotten so serious at the University of Massachusetts that the school claims it is trying to end the practice: