Victor Davis Hansen has written a succinct piece on what’s wrong with America’s education system; much the same criticism can be legitimately raised here in Canada.

the bleak statistics — whether a 70-percent high-school graduation rate as measured in a study a few years ago by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, or poor math rankings in comparison with other industrial nations — come at a time when our schools inflate grades and often honor multiple valedictorians at high school graduation ceremonies. Aggregate state and federal education budgets are high. Too few A’s, too few top awards, and too little funding apparently don’t seem to be our real problems.

Of course, most critics agree that the root causes for our undereducated youth are not all the schools’ fault. Our present ambition to make every American youth college material — in a way our forefathers would have thought ludicrous — ensures that we will both fail in that utopian goal and lack enough literate Americans with critical vocational skills.

The disintegration of the American nuclear family is also at fault. Too many students don’t have two parents reminding them of the value of both abstract and practical learning.

What then can our elementary and secondary schools do, when many of their students’ problems begin at home or arise from our warped popular culture?

We should first scrap the popular therapeutic curriculum that in the scarce hours of the school day crams in sermons on race, class, gender, drugs, sex, self-esteem, or environmentalism. These are well-intentioned efforts to make a kinder and gentler generation more sensitive to our nation’s supposed past and present sins. But they only squeeze out far more important subjects.

The old approach to education saw things differently than we do. Education (“to lead out” or “to bring up”) was not defined as being “sensitive” to, or “correct” on, particular issues. It was instead the rational ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the abstract wisdom of the past.

So literature, history, math and science gave students plenty of facts, theorems, people, and dates to draw on. Then training in logic, language, and philosophy provided the tools to use and express that accumulated wisdom. Teachers usually did not care where all that training led their students politically — only that their pupils’ ideas and views were supported with facts and argued rationally.

But hope remains; order today your copy of The Encyclopedia of Stupidity.

Matthijs van Boxsel’s rollicking compendium of human follies and foibles is like no other encyclopedia. Cataloging acts of stupidity past and present, van Boxsel introduces us to a world in which peasants collect water with a sieve, men attempt to build towers without ladders, and “village idiots” and “dumb blondes” prove the veracity of the stereotypes-a world that we call home. Van Boxsel’s intent is not only to provide laughs on every page, which he does, but also to show readers how stupidity is the foundation of civilization. Through such anecdotes as “The Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain” and “The Hell of Fools,” he dissects the idea of stupidity and finds that it is a crucial condition for intelligence, that blunders stimulate progress, and that failure is the basis for success.

Hailed as a “warming, enlightening, and invigorating read” (Manchester Evening News) and a “weirdly wonderful compilation” (Observer), The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity quietly instructs while it uproariously entertains, making the unassailable point that to err is indeed to be human.