Such an unsatisfactory state of affairs prompts the obvious question: to what bizarre set of circumstances is all this attributable? Professional educators, when forced to admit that there is room for improvement, inevitably point to an insufficiency of resources. What is needed, they maintain, is more teachers, more equipment and more money. Never mind the fact that per capita spending in America's public schools has steadily increased even as performance has dwindled, nor the fact that parochial schools spend far less per pupil while achieving better results. "But give us the tools," proclaim the educats, "and we will do the job." To which the tax-paying citizen would be well-advised to reply, "Maybe. But before we throw what may, in fact, be good money after bad, perhaps we should consider alternative explanations." Indeed, as Gross convincingly demonstrates, alternative explanations there are, and compelling ones at that.

Gross' first point is that teachers, being generally drawn from the bottom half of their high school classes are, by virtue of their own educational failure, unlikely guides to the world of the mind. To expect such individuals to undergo some miraculous metamorphosis which allows them to commend to their charges an understanding and appreciation of the fruits of human intellectual endeavor is naive. Baldly put, one cannot teach that which one neither values nor comprehends. Not surprisingly, the deficiencies of today's high school graduates mirror those of their mentors. Indeed, as evidenced by the misspelled missives sent home by the schools, a distressingly large per centage of primary and secondary school teachers are, by the standards of year's gone by, effectively illiterate.

Gross' second point is that teacher training compounds the felony. Teacher education programs emphasize pedagogy at the expense of content, losing sight, in the process, of the fact that it is content which ultimately must be transmitted from one generation to the next. From this dubious perspective follows no end of mischief and an unending stream of buzzwords: "student-centered learning", "discovery-based education", "creating knowledge", etc. Perhaps the most perfidious is the last. If nothing else, history teaches that the climb out of ignorance is slow and arduous. Yet today's educators blithely maintain that poorly trained teachers can "facilitate" the creation of knowledge by students with neither facts nor cognitive skills at their disposal. It is a conceit, which would be laughable, were it not tragic. A more recent cant, "life-long learning," is relevant to today's high school graduates only in the sense that it will take a lifetime of self-study to undue the damage wrought by their formal education.

Marching shoulder to shoulder with this content-free approach are the twin disasters of "whole language" and "whole math." Common to both is the setting aside of traditional step by step approaches in which students build on what they have already mastered in favor of guessing and approximation. In the case of reading, the emphasis is on "strategies" (another term redolent with educrat prejudice) entailing a reliance on pictures, context and (oh so grudgingly!) the sound of a word's first letter. In the case of mathematics, methods that always work are dismissed in favor of truly byzantine sequences of successive approximation¹.

Of these two thoroughly unwholesome innovations, whole language is probably the more pernicious. This is because the ability to read rapidly and with comprehension is a sine qua non for quite a number of things - among them, virtually everything else in the curriculum and the existence of an informed, i.e., literate, electorate. Crucial to the efficient and widespread mastery of the written word is the alphabet, the invention of which, as Gross rightly observes, was one of the major advances in human history. The importance of the alphabet which functions, in effect, as a code, would seem so obvious, that one can hardly imagine an approach to reading in which primacy is not given to the fact that we use letters to represent sounds. Alas! Whole language enthusiasts have little use for Phoenician inventiveness which made possible the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome"². Instead whole language teaches students to recognize individual words. This approach, Gross suggests, takes us back to hieroglyphs, in which case, "children must memorize thousands of picture characters and combinations in order to read." In fact, the situation is even worse. Chinese and Japanese "words" are often formed by combining simpler characters in ways that eventually, i.e., when enough have been mastered, become intuitive. Combinations of Roman letters, having been devised to represent sounds, bear no such relation to each other.

Of course, a strictly phonetic approach has its own pitfalls. In English, the same letter or combination of letters is used to represent multiple sounds, and, conversely, the same sounds often have different representations - for example, "shun" and "tion." But here too, pedagogical theorists miss both the point and a marvelous opportunity. Much of the beauty and power of English derives from the fact that it is an amalgam: principally of the original Anglo-Saxon and Old French which was introduced into Britain by the Normans. Because the different uses to which letters are put often reflects etymological origins, the various exceptions and complications which distinguish English from more nearly phonetic languages can be used as an opportunity to acquaint students with their linguistic history and to introduce them, in a meaningful way, to the commonalities which unite English with the Romance and Teutonic tongues. This, in turn, lays the basis for the acquisition of other languages which, while distinct from our own, nonetheless have much in common with it. Far more relevant to introducing students to cultural diversity is to teach that the Spanish word for "hot," and our own word, "calorie," share a common Latin root, as opposed to having them prepare a Mexican meal and then inviting their parents in for the feed. ³ Beyond that, etymology, quite simply, is fascinating.

Other topics treated by Gross include the wholesale "dumbing down" of the general curriculum, the intrusion of psychology into the classroom, a topic covered in greater detail by Thomas Sowell⁴, teacher licensing and certification procedures and the really despicable role of the teachers' unions in perpetuating what one college professor has called the "stultifying mediocrity" of public schools.

The final chapter includes a series of well-taken suggestions for remediating the situation as it now exists. Implementation of these recommendations would both be the salvation of public education and the death knell of the educational establishment as it it now exists. That the former depends upon the latter is sobering.

1. There are, of course, many problems which can't be solved exactly, in which case the use of approximation is not only appropriate, but unavoidable. Moreover, a goodly proportion of the algorithms used to obtain numerical solutions, e.g., with a calculator or digital computer, rely on successive approximation. Introducing students to these "facts of life" is not, however, what whole math is all about. Rather, the object is to teach that in mathematics, as in everything else (their claim, not the reviewer's), there is no one right answer. In the case of what one teaches in grades K-12: arithmetic, geometry, algebra and the calculus, this is silliness. It is also an assault on what mathematics is all about - namely the ability to prove that certain statements are true and, having established such in particular cases, to go on to the next problem.

2. Nor have most of them, it would appear, much appreciation of Greco-Roman achievement as the foundation of Western culture.

3. Teaching the history which resulted in the spread and modification of languages is also useful. Words with Latin roots entered our language because, once upon a time, there was a state called Rome, whose legions conquered much of the known world.

4. Sowell, T. 1993. Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas. The Free Press (Simon & Schuster). New York.