I like the title on this from the New York Post — The education cabal vs. America’s kids — it is a cabal. The following is “An excerpt from US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ remarks Wednesday at the Manhattan Institute’s 19th annual Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner”:
When I think of this award’s namesake, I can’t help but think of Broadway’s take on . . . Alexander Hamilton.
With or without music, Hamilton’s commitment to our country and our prosperity was unmatched. He noted that our young republic is about more than independence. America is an idea. It’s the revolutionary notion that our rights are not bestowed by man — not a king, not a bureaucrat, nor anyone else.
Our rights are God-given, and they are innately ours.
“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records,” Hamilton wrote. “They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself; and can never be erased.”
That line may not have made it into a Broadway tune, but it’s music to my ears.
Hamilton’s playwrights probably didn’t expect it when the musical opened, but they turned that theater on 46th Street into a classroom. Unfortunately, too many students know of Hamilton because of the show, not because of their education.
Only about 15 percent of America’s students have a reasonable understanding of American history. And the numbers look just as bleak in other core subjects.
The Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, ranks the United States 24th in reading, 25th in science and 40th in math in the world. And it isn’t for lack of funding. Americans spend more on education per pupil than almost every other nation on earth does.
And there are many who propose we spend even more on doing the same thing over and over again. Albert Einstein called this “insanity.”
Read more: New York Post
Image credit: www.newyorkpost.com.
