SCHOOL CHOICE; CORRUPT CURRICULUM IN PUBLIC EDUCATION RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NUMB STUDENT BODY.

Byline: Scott Holleran

IF a student's education is the standard in judging whether public education is successful, what are the results? Are today's students appropriately knowledgeable in reading, writing, math and history?

The answer is tragically obvious everywhere in today's culture - public education is a failure. Choice in education, whether through vouchers or education savings accounts, offers the key to success for future generations of students.

The Education Department's recently released study shows that national reading skills have not improved in 25 years; writing skills have declined. In California, the news is worse: 54 percent of the state's fourth-graders do not understand basic math and, by the time they reach eighth grade, 49 percent still don't know how to do basic math.

Reading skills are atrocious in the Golden State; most California schoolchildren do not know how to read by fourth grade and the report warns that reading skills will deteriorate.

That hardly seems possible; according to the study's latest results, California ties with Louisiana for last place in reading. These are the federal government's results; real results may be much worse.

Not that parents need federal reports to tell them their child's education is dreadful. They need only observe the results of their child's education. If they dare to peek beneath the lousy results, at their child's curriculum, parents may be truly horrified.

Public schools teach collectivism over individualism, environmentalism over science, multiculturalism over history. One teacher, speaking at a California conference on multiculturalism, instructed her colleagues on how to deal with students who hold a favorable view of Christopher Columbus as a hero of exploration. Citing her own response to one student in her class, she said: ``That would be like a Jew celebrating Hitler because he had a dream.''

Recent educational developments are like a list of sinister science fiction schemes to indoctrinate children: the new math, ebonics, the whole language method.

But for today's public school students, these methods are real.

Students do not learn to think in concepts, integrate ideas with their acquired knowledge and form judgments. Instead, they learn to evade thought, accept instruction and obey commands.

Environmentalism, for example, teaches students to evade the quest for scientific knowledge, to accept certain tenets without question, such as global warming, depletion of the ozone layer and recycling, and to obey these edicts. Consequently, children learn theories which are in profound scientific dispute.

Schools are teaching children to become unthinking soldiers of dogma. Instead of learning how to form concepts, public schools teach that acquiring knowledge matters less than acting on feelings.

By emphasizing feelings over thinking, public education teaches that feelings are the proper guide to knowledge. Emotions can give a child many important clues, however, emotions alone will not reveal the truth about reality. Acquiring knowledge requires full development of the tool children use to understand the facts of reality - the faculty of reason. The child must learn to evaluate the meaning of his feelings and decide whether or not to act on them; he must learn to think in order to survive.

But today's maimed student struggles in society, functioning like a computer with a damaged hard drive. Today's student mumbles during conversation, unable to find words he wasn't taught. He fumbles at cash registers, unable to calculate equations he doesn't know.

The weapon against the assault is: unrestricted, absolute choice in education.

School choice puts parents in charge of their child's education, leaving them free to choose schools that nurture the child's ability to think, learn and grow. Parents are responsible for their child. That responsibility implies the right to choose how, and, therefore, where their child is educated.

Parents, and every American, are forced to pay for public schools. They deserve a choice to pull their child out of public education. School vouchers allow the parent the right to choose and leave funds in the public school system, however, each of the current major ideas for school choice - home schooling, school vouchers or education savings accounts - are steps in the right direction.

Each idea promotes the rights of parents. The groundswell of support for school choice comes, not surprisingly, from the poorest in America: blacks.

Black parents in Milwaukee fought against liberals for school choice and won - polls show remarkably high satisfaction with the voucher experiment.

Poor black parents are delighted with school vouchers.

No wonder. Vouchers provide a ticket for their child to get out of the public school ghetto. Today's brutal, bureaucratic public education system doesn't produce educated students because the curriculum is utterly corrupt. Children need serious instruction, not propaganda.

Parents have a sacred right to choose to provide their child an escape.

Childhood innocence holds the promise of intelligence; parents have a right to protect that promise against the assault on their child's mind - they have a right to reject public education before it's too late.

That means they have a right to choose.