I have always said the song Kodachrome by Paul Simon said it all about the American educational system.
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all!”
I spent most of my high school academic career coasting, staring out windows, watching the clock’s minute hand drag itself around the face like it owed somebody money. The teachers I remember most vividly were the ones who had clearly made peace with a certain kind of defeat—men in short-sleeved dress shirts who gripped their chalk like a scepter, women who kept their desk arranged with the precision of someone who controlled very little else. They taught us the periodic table, the causes of the War of 1812, how to diagram a sentence—knowledge assembled by other teachers before them, passed down like a family recipe nobody had tasted in years.
Other countries figured this out generations ago—that there is a canyon of difference between filling a child’s head with dates and formulas and actually teaching that child how to think. How to look at a broken thing and reason your way toward fixing it. How to sit with a problem that has no answer in the back of the book. Meanwhile, the American classroom keeps running the same play it ran in 1955: memorize this, recite it back, receive your grade, forget it by summer. The teachers pass the recipe to the next set of teachers, the children grow up and send their own children back into the same rooms, and the machine rolls on—self-sealing, self-satisfied, and proud of its own mediocrity.
My own experience fit the mold well enough. I scraped through with C’s, turned in work I have no memory of doing, and collected a high school diploma that has never once been asked for or thought about since. What I remember most is the particular quality of boredom—the smell of mimeograph paper, the sound of a projector cart being wheeled down a hallway, the way certain teachers seemed personally offended by a question they hadn’t anticipated. Men who had read the same chapter aloud since 1962, women who graded with a red pen like they were correcting a personal affront. It took me years outside those walls to understand that what I’d been handed wasn’t an education so much as a long exercise in compliance.
And then there were the teachers who took things personally. A gym teacher and coach—I can still see the clipboard, the brown pressed-wood kind with the metal clip—who had a habit of bringing it down on the heads of boys he’d decided weren’t worth the effort. I was one of those boys, and one of his basketball players. Slow, he called me. A lazy jock. A dipshit in a jersey who was wasting a chair. This was the Chicago area, late-sixties, and a grown man cracking a clipboard off a teenager’s skull wasn’t abuse—it was pedagogy. Nobody had a word for it yet, so nobody used one.
A moment of reckoning came for me eventually, when I went out to find real work. Because my grades had advertised me as a young man of modest intellectual promise, the company put me through an IQ test before they would consider me for an underwriter trainee position—a stroke of luck I didn’t recognize as such at the time. After the interview and testing, my soon-to-be boss came into the small room where I’d been left to wait, a square-shouldered man in a good suit who had the unhurried manner of someone who had already made up his mind. He asked how I’d liked school. I told him honestly that I had found it boring and couldn’t wait to be done with it. He nodded slowly, the way a man nods when something confirms what he already suspected, and said, “That’s what I thought.” Then he laid out my test scores—spatial recognition, problem solving, social insight—each one, apparently, a small shock to the system.
He offered me the job on the spot. I drove home that afternoon with the windows down, trying to make sense of it. What followed was an education that no classroom had prepared me for—learning to solve problems by standing inside them, studying Deming’s quality principles not from a textbook but from true geniuses and the factory floor up, teaching myself how to use spreadsheets (Anyone remember VisiCalc?) by breaking them and starting over until they did what I needed. One thing led to the next, and then the next, until I found myself retiring in my early fifties, stepping out of a Chief Operating Officer role at a Fortune 50 company and into something I actually wanted: a farm, some horses, and the particular satisfaction of owning and breeding good racehorses.
I’ll say this once and never again, because I have always believed that a man who leads with his IQ score is advertising something other than intelligence. But the number is relevant here, so: when I finally sat down for proper testing, my scores came back consistently between 135 and 145—not the rarefied air of the genuine prodigies, the Einsteins and Hawkings who seem to operate on a different voltage entirely, but well clear of the statistical middle, and in the same general range as most of the men who have held the American presidency. I share it not as a trophy but as a question. If the system is designed to find what a child is capable of, how did it spend twelve years looking directly at me and see nothing worth the trouble?
So what does the data say about the American educational system today? The United States ranks behind thirty other countries in global education standings—behind Poland, behind Estonia, behind nations that were still rebuilding from rubble when we were already putting men on the moon. We spend as much as Denmark, Germany, Finland, the UK, and Sweden, and we get back a fraction of what they do. And then there is the matter of what we spend on whom. New York, Vermont, New Jersey, and Connecticut pour between twenty-eight and thirty-three thousand dollars into each student per year. Oklahoma, Utah, Idaho, and Arizona spend somewhere near twelve. A child’s ZIP code determines more about the quality of their education in America than any federal policy ever has—because federal oversight, in practice, amounts to a strongly worded letter and a shrug.
The curriculum itself is a major problem. The same units that were taught in 1965 are still being taught today—the same wars, the same formulas, the same canonical novels—assembled into a course of study that was designed for a workforce that no longer exists, handed down through generations of teachers who inherited it the way you inherit furniture, without ever asking whether it still fits the room.
The emphasis remains on rote memorization—dates, definitions, the names of rivers—knowledge stripped of any connective tissue, handed to a child with no instruction on what to do with it. A student can recite the causes of World War One in the order they appear in the textbook and still have no idea how to look at a broken thing and work out what broke it. The facts go in, the test gets taken, and by August the whole transaction has been quietly voided.
A student can spend thirteen years inside a school building and emerge without ever having been asked to balance a checkbook, read a lease, negotiate a disagreement, or diagnose why something stopped working. The classroom and the world outside it are kept in separate rooms, and nobody hands you the key between them.
A student can graduate without having written a letter meant to persuade a real person of a real thing, without having worked out a disagreement with someone who had equal standing and a different opinion, without having been asked to find information, weigh it, and decide whether to trust it. Adaptability is never taught because the curriculum itself refuses to adapt—same units, same pacing, same assumptions about what a child will need when they walk out the door into a world the textbook has never heard of.
The curriculum needs to be torn out by the roots and replanted. Not revised, not updated with a new chapter on the internet—rebuilt from the question of what a person actually needs to navigate a life: how to read a contract, how to think about risk, how to find information and decide whether it’s worth trusting, how to fail at something and work out why. The world the current curriculum was designed for has been gone for decades. The textbook just hasn’t noticed yet.
The math ranking alone should stop you cold: 34th in the world, behind Vietnam, behind Slovenia, behind countries that spend a fraction of what we do. Meanwhile, public school enrollment quietly bleeds out year by year as parents pull their children and find other arrangements—homeschool co-ops meeting in church basements, small private academies in strip malls—and discover, with some mixture of relief and fury, that the alternatives work better. A system that cannot retain the students it was built to serve, and cannot stop handing out tenure and commendations to the teachers who have simply outlasted everyone’s patience, is not a system that is struggling. It is a system that has already made its peace with failure.
Such is life, and it’s time for a change!
Old Man Pondering 
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