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In point of fact, uh, the uh, money spent on education was rising by leaps and bounds throughout the entire period during which the test scores were going down. After 45 years, the United States spends more money on education by far than any other country and spends likewise, by far, more money per pupil than any country, and it's not even close. But yet we rank near the bottom of the list in terms of success. Uh, it's an amazing stat; that's uh, those are two stats you don't want—the most money spent per pupil and you're at the bottom of the list. And that's where we are, like it or not, and we've been there for a long time.
In a few moments, I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all. And it sounds strange, doesn't it? Department of Education. We're going to eliminate it, and everybody knows it's right. And the Democrats know it's right, and I hope they're going to be voting for it because ultimately it may come before them. But uh, everybody knows it's right, and we have to get our children educated. We're we're not doing well with the with the world of education; the American education system, I think from top to bottom, including colleges, as being in terrible shape. They they are. And why is that, other than the standards being relaxed? That's not true at all. Colleges, for instance, I don't think—oh, you you can graduate, you can graduate probably from any college in the Ivy League or Stanford, for that matter. I I haven't checked the requirements, but I suspect you can graduate without uh having taken a single course in math, in economics, in history, or in any hard science. I think Brooke Shields created a sensation with things that she hadn't studied at when she got a degree from Princeton. That wasn't special treatment for for Brooke Shields. Anybody can graduate from Princeton as an ignoramus now. If they really want to learn something, they can also learn an awful lot at Princeton, but it's entirely up to them.
Well, what about elementary and secondary education? They're disastrous as well. Uh, one of the biggest problems is one that that doesn't get talked about but which is really at the heart of it all: the people who go into teaching are really the low, the lowest level of college students. If you look at the test scores of people who major in education compared to people who major in history, uh, science, anything else, virtually uh, they're at near the bottom and have been for something like half a century. What would you do if you were uh, if you had taken the post of of education secretary and President Reagan came to you and said, "Tom, whatever you want, I'm going to be for—" Uh, I would say, "All right, you you you've uh you've broken the airline uh air controllers union, break the NEA uh and uh and make teaching non-union." That that would probably do more than anything, any other single step that you could do. Well, what would be step number two? Step number two would be to hire people—oh, then step number two would be to abolish all education schools. I I have argued that if if we were to spend them a million dollars getting every professor of education to retire uh and not hire anymore, it would be the most productive money we have ever spent trying to improve educational standards. What's the matter with education professors? Oh, you obviously don't know any of the obvious. I don't. Yeah. Oh, this the stuff is is unbelievably childish. I get emails uh from time to time from people who are in education school saying, "I can't believe the drivel they're teaching us here, and and should I complain to the dean?" And so I said, "No, don't complain to the dean. What you're getting is the norm in schools of education." It's one of the reasons the schools are so bad. But see, the people in schools of education pay no price for for for mis-educating students.
Back in 1966, uh, there were about twice as many C's as A's given out in the uh high in the public schools in the United States. By the late '70s, there were twice as many A's as C's. So you have this long period during which all sorts of test scores are going down at the very same time grades are going up. Is that going on at both the elementary, secondary level, and college level? At the college level, uh, during the entire decade of the 1980s, uh, the percentage of A's at Yale University never fell below 40%. So you're saying there's there's a great inflation going on and there are declining test scores? Yes, and this is this is part of the deception because if people knew exactly what was happening, I don't think the test scores could have kept going down as long as they did. But everyone was told—they they saw the wonderful grades their kids were bringing home; they were told glowing things. When I was teaching back in the 1960s, I kept hearing that this was the brightest and best generation that we've had, and I kept saying, "They don't seem to be enrolling in my courses." Uh, and it was only into in the and well into the '70s before the word came out that the data showed just the opposite of what the educators were saying. And now it would seem that a good many educators are in agreement with you when they talk about the serious straits that are American schools are in. They agree in in the sense only that this this kind of talk gets them more money, uh, and in fact, that's used as the biggest reason why we need more money. But in point of fact, uh, the uh money spent on education was rising by leaps and bounds throughout the entire period during which the test scores were going down. Uh, somewhere in the early '80s, there was a there was a level off and a few little uh uh rises, but we have never come close to where we were in 1963.
Talk about the social phenomenon you call affective education and how it plays into this whole uh question of just how good schools are. A great deal of time and energy uh are spent on things which are non-academic subjects, which are essentially psychological kinds of subjects, exercises. And this is known as affective education. If you can somehow educate people's feelings rather than to educate their intellect, and the problem is that uh most public school teachers have no such qualifications. If anyone has such qualifications, but certainly they are not psychiatrists or psychologists, uh, they have no idea of the emotional turmoil they may be stirring up in the students. And there's some evidence that that's that's happening in terms of medical reactions—of vomiting, uh, signs of nerves in various uh ways. Uh, but more than that, what they tend to do is to try to alienate the child from the parent, and I think that's the most dangerous thing they do. How did they do that? Well, if you read the literature, it's just astonishing how parents are depicted in the literature as people who are hung up, who have old-fashioned ideas. Um, one of the areas which they do this is sex education, but it's not sex education as such because there are a whole series of kinds of education of the uh emotions, as they would put it, uh, which do the same thing. And the idea is that the child is supposed to make his own decisions, and he's supposed to pick his own values on which to make those decisions. So the whole history of the human race is sort of thrown out the window, and Johnny is supposed to start and draw upon his entire eight or nine years of experience in the world to decide uh what his values ought to be.
It was interesting in the uh book—you used an example of an exchange that you had with a student, uh, and I guess your question to the student was something like, um, "Well, what did you learn?" And the response was something like, "I learned that my thoughts and my feelings are valued," yes, uh, whereas there was no effort to speak to a fact or something learned, but rather the emphasis on feeling, no interpretation. That was actually Ben Stein, a reporter in Los Angeles, and he asked this graduating senior who was considered the smartest kid in the class, "What did you what do you know about the Vietnam War?" And he said, "The Vietnam War was when North and South South Korea were fighting, and they drew a line along the 38th parallel," and so on. And Ben Stein said, "Would it bother you to know that that's completely wrong?" He said, "No." And he said, then what you just said that uh it was that his feelings were valued, his what his thoughts were valued, and that was it. But now isn't that of some worth if you do have a child who, for example, has done nothing but learn by rote? Aren't you attempting to bring out the fullness of that young person and get that person to reflect and think and meditate? I if you think the confusion—the Vietnam War with the Korean War—is thinking and meditating, why then, of course, that that's very nice. The tragedy is that these kids have no conception of thinking. And if we we were talking about adding something as an extra along the fringes, fine. But when you see how far behind we are—behind almost every large industrial nation or even behind Korea, for heaven's sake—uh, you wonder what makes them think that we have the luxury of spending our time on these kinds of uh little experiments in the classroom.
Just recently, I received a letter from a high school student who wanted my opinion on a wide variety of subjects, and this was a classroom assignment—that this questionnaire was to be sent out to people. And I wrote him back that the opinions of old men like me don't matter. What matters is whether young people like you learn to think, get some knowledge, because you're going to be making these decisions long after I'm gone. And to think that people are wasting your time having you send out these questionnaires to people you don't know is a sign of just why we're so far behind. Virtually everyone has heard how poorly American students perform, whether compared to foreign students or to American students of a generation ago. What everyone may not know are the specifics of how bad the situation has become, how and why the public has been deceived, or the dogmas and hidden agendas behind it all. The general decline in educational performance that began in the 1960s encompassed elementary and secondary education as well as education at the college level. The evidences of this decline include not only results on a variety of objective tests but also firsthand observations by teachers and professors and dismaying experiences by employers who have found the end product seriously lacking. The most widely known decline was in the scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. However, scores also declined on the rival American College Testing program examination as well as on the Iowa Test of Educational Development and on a variety of local tests. As of 1991, only 11% of the 8th-grade students in California's public schools could solve seventh-grade math problems. Significantly, this era of declining academic performance has also been a period of rising grades. American high schools gave out approximately twice as many C's as A's in 1966, but by 1978 the A's actually exceeded the C's. By 1990, more than 1/5th of all entering freshmen in college averaged an A-minus or above for their entire high school careers. At private universities, entering freshmen with averages of A-minus or above were an absolute majority—54%. Similar grade inflation has become common at the college level. Between 1958 and 1988, the average grade at Dartmouth rose from C to B. More specifically, the Dartmouth student body's grade point average rose from 2.2 in 1958 to 3.2 in 1988. At the University of Chicago, the once common grade of C constituted only 15% of all grades by 1988. Yet Chicago's grades are considered comparatively low relative to grades at comparable institutions around the country. At Yale, for example, the proportion of grades that were A's never fell below 40% during the entire decade of the 1980s. At Smith College likewise, A's were 40% of all grades by the end of the 1980s—a tripling of the proportion of A's over a period of 25 years. And A's and B's combined constituted more than 90% of all grades. Rare is the college like Franklin and Marshall where the student body's grade point average has remained consistently below B over the years. Among the factors behind nationwide rises in college grades, in addition to more lenient grading by professors, have been such widespread practices as not recording failing grades on the students' records, allowing students to withdraw from class when a failing grade is impending, and ordinary cheating. Between 1966 and 1988, the proportion of students cheating increased by 78%, according to a national survey. These two trends—grade inflation and declining test scores—are by no means unconnected. Without the systematic deception of parents and the public by rising grades, it is highly unlikely that the decline in performance could have continued so long. The deeper question is whose purposes are being served and whose agendas are being advanced as American education declines.