'Very'? I couldn't be so generous: it is a conspiracy theory, self-admittedly:

> "Anyone interested in the truth will be shocked by the way American social engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of millions of American children for the purpose of leading the American people into a socialist world government controlled by behavioral and social scientists."

I agree that that blurb is a piece of poorly-written rhetoric, but the book is full of damning primary-source material that effectively support the author's points. If you want something less controversial perhaps, look at John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. It is also available in its entirety online, but to spare you the huge download, I will link to reviews from hacker-friendly sites: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/7/27/215225/986 http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/06/1722203...

I don't see what's wrong with a conspiracy theory. History is full of conspiracies and any deep study on human nature will point out to you the tendency of humans to conspire.

Sorry, should have mentioned it is a ~7MB book. As far as conspiracy goes, can anyone offer up a mainstream explanation as to why public education is such a massive failure? If there is such an explanation, surely it would have led to reform by now. On the contrary, as public education spending continues to increase, literacy continues to decrease.

I want to echo the other reply -- I've discovered in my life that whenever there is something wrong with a system, it's never a cabal deliberately undermining it. It's always some perverse incentive for a group to act badly. Look for the underlying perverse incentives.

No such explanation is needed; in the lack of powerful motivating forces for education (or anything else) to be good, it will be mediocre. PG makes the point that school is bad, not because it was deliberately designed to be, but because the design spec was to warehouse otherwise potentially disruptive young people, not particularly to educate them: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

"""And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose."""

Hmm… I can think of one reason. Public school is designed for the bottom 60%. Therefore the top 40% will always be dragged down towards that level.

I also found (this may not be true in general) that the majority of public school teachers come from the bottom 60% and they have a serious lack of ambition.