by Warren Longwell

Created on: September 24, 2010

With the release of the film, “Waiting for Superman,” and with Facebook’s CEO donating $100 million to improve the schools in Newark NJ, America suddenly has its underpants tied up in  knots over the pathetic state of the nation’s public schools. Predictably, all three major television news networks will piggyback on this hubbub by serving up their own version of concern about education— promising major news coverage of public school shortcomings to be broadcast over the course of all five weeknights next week. Gee, I can hardly wait. In the meantime, I have two cents to throw into the pot.

One of the smartest guys I know is my own brother-in-law who retired from a career in public education, most of it spent as the principal of an Iowa elementary school. Thirty years ago he told me something quite profound. He said, “The primary role of public education is to perpetuate the culture and values of the nation, so the state of public education simply mirrors the state of the country.” WOW, he nailed it, and I never forgot what he said. In the thirty years since then I’ve added my own caveat. American culture is portrayed, and to some degree even shaped, by network non-cable television, so if you want to understand what’s going on in schools, just watch network television. And not just the programs, but the commercials too, because television commercials keenly reflect societal tastes and behaviors.

It’s just a given that in any representation of the American family on television, the father will always be portrayed as the family nitwit— usually being upstaged by his own kids, sometimes as young as three or four. The little child actors spout wisecracks and put-downs like tiny miniature Jon Stewarts or Will Ferrells, and the clear message is that kids start out incredibly smart and grow progressively more stupid as they grow older. Being cool or hip (are those words still in use?) is always shown as more desirable and fashionable than being intelligent, and any teenager would rather be able to come up with a perfectly-timed punch line than to be able to solve a quadratic equation.

It’s not just the present school age generation that’s being dumbed down. American ignorance and stupidity didn’t just happen overnight. It took 20 or 30 or 40 years to take root. A recent study found that a majority of American adults of voting age thought that a billion was twice as much as a million,

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