Rain and schools

We in West Texas have gone through several years of drought lately, though many of us have seen a good deal of rain in the last six weeks. Before the rains started there were cases around the area of politicians organizing citizens to pray for rain.  It seems that a large number of our adult citizens believe that changes in the weather – particularly rain storms -  are caused by supernatural forces.  Some may find this fact and others like it (including the gullibility of followers of the green religion in accepting their myths about climates) a cause for concern about the quality of the American electorate and what that might mean for the future, and they would be right to worry.

However, I thought instead about what it says about the quality of America’s government schools. Most adult Americans have done a twelve or thirteen year stretch in a government school. Surely at some point during their time in school, many or most sat through courses in science where some  general notions of the actual causes of atmospheric phenomena would have been mentioned. Yet the instruction seems not to have worked. (There was even a poll a while back reporting a large fraction of American adults did not know the earth orbited the sun.) Similar ignorance of history, English usage and composition, and basic arithmetic appears to be common. It would be unfair to blame the schools for  the ignorance of the  mentally deficient or completely unwilling, but these exceptions cover only so much. These schools are failing far too many people, and especially failing the people who need them most, and thus failing this country. Reform and competition are well over due.