Remove Meddlers From Our Schools

* The endless arguments over public education funding are getting on my nerves.

Some insist that we toss more and more money into the bottomless pit in order to remedy the substandard performance of our seemingly retarded kids.

Others point out that increased spending continues to reward the failures of an inept system. History seems to support the latter.

Education today seems to have many paradoxes. Can you believe that a chancellor of a local university recently bragged that the incoming freshman class had the highest SAT scores in history, but didn’t mention that maybe half of these little geniuses needed to begin their college training in remedial reading and math programs? Figure that one out.

In the quest to solve educational problems, you would think that it would occur to our brilliant doctors of education to look back several generations and wonder why pupils in the sixth grade often had better reading and writing skills than many of the high school graduates today.

Why were successful methods of yesteryear abandoned? A bunch of social scientists some time ago dismantled the system and installed their own agenda, which is designed to teach Dick and Jane what to think rather than how to think.

Concerned parents should insist on a major revamping of our pathetic education system and get the schools back into the reading, writing and arithmetic business.

Let the job of indoctrinating our children in social values be returned to Mom and Dad, where it belongs. Let’s get the bureaucratic meddlers out of our schools and lives and get back to teaching the fundamentals in the old-fashioned way.

ROBERT HARTMEYER

Anaheim