KINDER'S COMMENTARY: A CATALOG OF DUMBING DOWN

One of this year's most important books is Charles Sykes' "Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America's Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write or Add." (St. Martin's Press, $23.95). In August the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine published a lengthy excerpt, which I commended to readers. The book came out in October, and I have just gotten around to reading it. I commend it again, and most especially to state and local school board members and to colleagues of mine in the General Assembly. Downer though it is, it is must reading for anyone who cares about the future of our children and their education in our public schools.

On every one of his 297 pages, Sykes describes in disturbing detail the dumbing down of most of America's public schools. A snapshot of Sykes' depressing litany includes: the worship of fads, especially "self-esteem;" the attack on gifted programs and ability tracking (both condemned as "elitist"); the flight from literacy; the whole-language approach to reading now proving such a disaster; "invented spelling" (drills and spelling bees are out); the banishment of grades and all vestiges of competition; the dumbing down of tests and textbooks; the tendency of educationists to demonize any critics as "enemies of the public schools;" and the corruption of teachers colleges and their descent into the dismal swamps of political correctness, quotas and multiculturalism. A chapter entitled "Moral Dumbing Down" details the pervasive relativism and "values clarification" to which most modern educationists are committed.

As to literacy, this process is already affecting newspapers in the steady decline of readers, especially young ones. Where mathematics is concerned, the parallel concept to literacy is what is called "numeracy": the capacity to perform basic math and arithmetic functions. If Sykes is correct, the catastrophic effects of what he calls "innumeracy" will soon engulf us. Sykes forecasts a generation of youngsters entering higher education and the workforce completely lacking in basic math and even arithmetic skills (what Sykes calls the new New Math abandons drill altogether and demands the use of calculators from the earliest primary grades.) This at a time when, in order to operate computerized machinery, even factory jobs filled by high school graduates demand knowledge of advanced algebra, if not also trigonometry.

To read Sykes' masterpiece is to get angry. I am haunted by another writer's warning of a "great night of unknowingness" that could be upon us. Some of Sykes' excerpts will give you the flavor:

-- "Administrators from Minnesota's Apple Valley School District assured parents that gifted students would be given `enrichment exercises' while slower students worked to catch up on their outcome-based classes. A gifted student describes his `enrichment' exercise: `We had to do a diorama on dinosaurs. We also did that in kindergarten. That was enrichment.'

-- "A student in Oklahoma writes to a state legislator, explaining his `enrichment' project: `Eight high-achieving students were sent to measure a room. While one child took the measurements, the rest of the exiles from the outcome-based classes sat around talking and goofing off.'

-- "Charles Willie, an influential professor of education at Harvard, declares the goal of education should not be `excellence,' because that is a measure of personal choice and requires sacrifice. Instead, schools should be concerned with `adequacy,' and should weigh non-traditional types of intelligence, such as `singing' and `dancing' at least as much as `communications and calculations.'

-- "Peggy McIntosh, an influential educationist from Wellesley College, believes that `excellence' is a dangerous concept for schools and argues that schools need to stop giving out `gold stars' and other honors, because they reflect `an outmoded white male culture of vertical thinking.' McIntosh heads up a program known as Seeking Educational Diversity (SEED), which already has enrolled several thousand educators from 30 states for seminars on making schools equitable and cooperative and freeing them from the ideal of `excellence.'"

If you care about our schools and about our country's future -- whether you have children in school now or not -- get this book, read it and get in this fight.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.