Want to improve education? Burning down teachers colleges a good start, presidential candidate said

I can’t do math.
Somewhere about the time the kids in my class were learning their times tables, math class became my own private Hell.
I still count on my fingers, and not very well.
I used to be ashamed of this, until one day in journalism school (yes, friends and neighbours, I probably couldn’t pass a Grade 5 math exam, but I’ve got a college education) the class had a math test, just the basics, to show we could do simple figuring in our news stories when we needed to.
Well, there I was back in Hell all over again. When it came time for me to sit down with the instructor to go over my work, my hands were sweating and I was scared out of my mind.
I’ll never forget the look of astonishment on the instructor’s face when he realized I couldn’t do even the simplest multiplication or division, nor what he said next if I live to be 100.
“Wow. Somebody really let you down.”
For the first time in my life, I saw the truth of the matter and I realized it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t do math. Somebody had let me down. A lot of somebodies.
A teacher, whose job it had been to teach me basic math, had not done that job, but passed me anyway, and I went through a succession of teachers in elementary school and junior high and high school who couldn’t be bothered to teach me math either.
So what, you ask?
Well, I read something the other day that had my blood just about boiling.
The news item was about a principal in Alberta travelling around the country preaching that homework, spelling tests and timed exams are bad. This principal encourages schools to extend deadlines for incomplete assignments and discourages teachers from handing out zeros. Why? Because it hurts the feelings of the students.
At one of his presentations, a parent asked him if a lack of spelling skills might get in the way of someone getting a job. For example, what if a person applied for a job with a poorly spelled resume? “Would you hire the person that wrote that?”
“I would hire him and get him a secretary,” the principal replied. He wasn’t joking.
“Parents should be absolutely outraged that students are assigned zeros.”
What a numbskull.
Take it from me, someone who fell through the cracks of the education system and crawled his way back out, parents, no, not just parents but taxpayers in general, should be outraged that people like this fella are being paid to encourage teachers to let students slide through school without the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic under their belts.
“Educators” like this fella are the reason I’m 31-years-old and can’t figure out what 8 x 7 is without using a calculator.
The author Robert Heinlein wrote there’s a special circle in Hell for the “Educators” who decided the three R’s really weren’t that important.
“Concerning our public schools today, never have so many been paid so much for so little. I thank whatever gods there be that I went to school so many years ago that I had no choice but to be tightly disciplined in classes in which the teachers did not hesitate to fail and to punish. My first-grade class had 63 kids in it, one teacher, no assistant. Before the end of the second semester all 63 kids could read.”
Someone once asked Ross Perot (you remember him, the short billionaire who always seemed to be running for president of the United States during the 90s) what could be done to improve education in America.
“Torch the teachers colleges,” he said.
He might have been on to something.
Idiotic educational fads like the one that principal is spouting come and go, but their ill effects last. “Educators” like him should be forced to break rocks into gravel with a sledgehammer to earn their daily bread, because while the world could always use more gravel, it has more than its fair share of dimwit teachers ruining lives.
I know.