This is the first in a series about systems in this country (or the world) which just don’t work. And instead of fixing the system, the government just throws band-aids at it (or worse, exploits it to fill the public coffers). First up - Driving.

Drive anywhere in this country and it quickly becomes apparent how many really poor drivers are out there on the roads. The problem is not cell phone use or speeding or distractions or poor manners. Those are all symptoms. The problem is education. We don’t teach people how to drive. We teach them (maybe) to control a vehicle at slow speeds, and then we give them a license and turn them loose on the roads. And then, to make things worse, we don’t really hold people accountable for their poor driving. We just fine them, raise their insurance rates, and turn them loose again. This is one of those situations where the state would rather maintain the status quo rather than rectify the problem and risk losing their cash cow. One needs only to travel to Germany to see how a government can require people to demonstrate an ability to drive safely and responsibly and then require that they continue to do so or risk serious repercussions, including a loss of their license and/or a humongous increase in insurance rates. That is why the Germans can safely drive on roads with no speed limits. (It also is because they know how to build and maintain roads, but that is another issue for another time.)

The Germans must also maintain their vehicles to a very high standard. People in the US who complain about inspections and emissions testing have no idea how easy they have it. Try getting your car through TÜV, the German inspection system. In some places in the country, including central Illinois, there is no inspection at all. You can drive around any old piece of junk even if it doesn’t have an exhaust system or decent brakes. But in typical back-ass-ward Illinois, it’s required that all children under the age of 8 must be in a car seat or booster seat. It matters not that your car has poor brakes and bald tires and is belching carbon monoxide into the passenger area while Mom is smoking up a storm and yacking on the cell phone while driving. As long as junior is strapped into his car seat on the way to soccer practice, he can inhale all the second hand smoke and exhaust fumes he can handle. Not that anyone actually obeys this law once a kid hits 5 or 6. After all, how do you prove your kid is under the age of 8? Just another idiotic band-aid law that fails to address the real safety issues.

Back in the 60’s and 70’s you could answer an ad on the back of a matchbook and for a few bucks and some half-assed schoolwork, you could get a diploma from some phantom school with a prestigious sounding name. These “schools” were known as diploma mills. The diploma, of course, wasn’t worth the paper it was mimeo’d on, but an inattentive employer may not bother to check to see if it came from an accredited school. In the real academic world you still had to pass tests and write papers and meet certain standards to graduate high school, let alone college. If you weren’t meeting the minimum requirements to pass from one grade in school to the next, you either went to summer school or you repeated the whole year in the same grade. It was just the accepted way of doing things, and it worked. Students actually learned to read and write and do simple math without a calculator.

Then it all changed. Suddenly it was taboo to have a child repeat a grade. It was “traumatic” for the child. It seemed to happen about the same time it became child abuse to smack your kids on the butt when they stepped out of line. Discipline now meant sticking the kid in a corner for a “time out.” Ego boosting was all the rage. Every kid was a winner. Each week brought a new Student of the Week so that every Soccer Mom could proudly display her kid’s sticker on the back of her minivan. God forbid, you couldn’t traumatize the poor child by holding them back. They had to move on with their peers even though they couldn’t read or write. All the teachers’ fault anyway.

Eventually Little Miss Student of the Week was shoved from one grade to the next without ever learning a thing. Young Mister Student of the Month had an ego the size of the Goodyear blimp, but the IQ of a fern. Discipline in schools came to a screeching halt and school administrators weren’t allowed to do a thing, lest they get sued. Passing grades became a matter of semi-regular attendance. Whole classes of students were paraded across the stage to receive a diploma most of them couldn’t even read. The diploma mills of the previous decade had become the high schools of the day.

Fast forward a decade or so and now you have students with meaningless high school diplomas entering college in droves. What’s a college to do when 80% of the freshman class does not possess the minimum skills required for acceptance? Higher education is, after all, a business. Tuition pays the bills. No students means no tuition which means no college. Simple answer, lower your standards. Allow anyone with a high school diploma and a pulse to attend classes, as long as they pay their bills. But wait, if you grade them as you’ve graded classes from the past, you’d have to fail too many students. Too many failing students means too many dropouts which means no tuition and you’re back to the original dilemma. So again, lower your standards. So what if Johnny Jockstrap can’t spell. You can get the gist of his paper. And he really is a good running back. And Becky Bubblehead? Well, her English skills aren’t the best, but you can’t hold that against her.  

I’ll be the first to agree that a college education should be available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Higher education should not just be a perk for the wealthy. But the idea that everyone “deserves” a college education is wrong. A college education should be earned. A college edcuation should mean something. It should be an indicator of a person’s ability to read and comprehend and learn. If a person graduates from college or a university and cannot spell simple words or do simple math or string together original thoughts to form sentences and paragraphs, then the college or university has failed to benefit the student or society as a whole. If everyone truly does “deserve” a college education, then a college education will become something everyone has, regardless of their abilities. And when everyone has a diploma which in reality means nothing, then the diploma becomes worthless.

Where will we be in 20 years when the vast majority of workers entering the workforce have higher education diplomas, many of which are worthless? Will a Masters degree be the new entry level requirement? Even those are up for grabs these days. You don’t even have to set foot in a campus building. You can take a few Mickey Mouse courses online and earn a PhD. Name your topic, pay the price, and Saint Thomas Federal University will send you a link where you can download your new sheepskin.