Here’s a former substitute teacher:

I then made it my business, when finding an older teacher, to ask if education had been “dumbed down.”…Algebra teachers informed me that every year they were forced to eliminate problem sets that previous years had mastered. English teachers who once taught Shakespeare and Dante were now reduced to leading seniors through Orwell’s Animal Farm….

We could do much worse than Animal Farm. The trouble is, most teachers imply that the pigs on two legs are right-wingers. Not coincidentally, former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers (see “1968,” above) is now revered as a pedagogical guru even by the president.

Camille Paglia is aghast that her college freshmen don’t know who Adam and Eve and Moses are, and haven’t even the sense to pretend to be embarrassed about it.

So the conclusion is clear:

The easier we made school for kids, turning classrooms into laboratories of compulsory leftist social engineering, the more kids hated it”€”some to the point of homicide.

Abolishing the public-education system has no downside. A few million obese, incompetent, corrupt, vicious teachers and parasitical bureaucrats will finally be fired.

The conservative establishment’s dream of abolishing the Department of Education will come true.

Homeschooling is superior anyhow. Mothers will be able to do it because the taxes skimmed off the top of their salaries will no longer be needed to prop up said department.

Real and imaginary social problems such as chickenhawk teachers, anti-gay “bullying,” pro-gay sex education, the drugging of “hyperactive” boys, busing, high-school football concussions, and girls dressing like prostitutes for the prom will vanish.

Decades hence, our offspring will listen in disbelief when we tell them we used to pay billions of dollars to warehouse children in “gun-free zones” overseen by morons; that 21st-century kids were groomed for 19th-century jobs and came out functionally illiterate but experts nonetheless on the subjects of Kwanzaa, “safe” sex, and something called global warming.

Then every Gen-X grandparent will pat the shocked little rug rat on the head and say reassuringly, “Our love is God; let’s go get a slushie.”