Recently, Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt published an impressive work entitled, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America".  Her premise is that for many decades now, the American education system has focused on training our youth to be an efficient and compliant workforce for major corporations.  Critical thinking has been discouraged, because such free thought would question the obvious and wouldn't blindly reverence authority.

The impact of this strategy is greatly apparent in our society.  Our nation's colleges and universities struggle to remediate high school graduates in Basic English, Math and Writing.  And now, in the aftermath of this utilitarian assault on the minds of our children, the achievement gap has only grown wider, especially for our nation's urban minority students.

Left unchallenged, our educational enterprise could leave countless thousands of children stranded in an obsolescent wasteland, unprepared, unable to compete, and hopelessly detoured from the pathway to excellence.

No, until we can fundamentally change our nation's education system, we must teach our children to rise above.  We must inoculate them from viral mediocrity that has infected our schools.  We must liberate them from the tyranny of consensus theory that prohibits and extinguishes individual initiative.  Churches, Boys & Girls clubs, and other community organizations must stand with parents to assure that our children can read, write and compute at or above grade level.  We all need to take Board of Education elections very seriously.   We must demand what some have labeled unreasonable: that our schools actually provide an education to our children.

The longer we remain dumb, the sooner we cease to exist!