All Trees; No Forest

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, our total annual expenditures on public education (Kindergarten through Grade 12) are projected to be $654 billion this year, or just shy of $13,000 per pupil. That sounds like a lot of money, but spread across a not-quite-ten-month school year, it averages out to about $342 per student, per week, or about $68 per day, all expenses included. Not a bad deal, actually, for educating our children.

But are we educating our children while we're schooling them? I wonder, sometimes. What are we getting for our money and time? I'm not even counting what they learn in college, for those who go to college. Just think about the inputs and outputs in our K-12 system:

• Our children spend 13 years studying reading and writing, but thousands and perhaps millions of graduates can't distinguish a fact from an opinion, assess an argument for logical validity, or figure out when to use their, they're, or there.

• Our children spend 13 years studying mathematics, but thousands and perhaps millions of graduates can't figure out Annual Percentage Rates on loans, can't figure out whether a sale price is actually a good deal, may not realize that 1/3 is greater than 1/4, and in general can't protect themselves from getting ripped off.

• Our children spend 13 years studying social studies and history, but thousands and perhaps millions of graduates can't identify other countries on a map, can't place key events of world or even American history in chronological order, do not understand the basic functioning of our government, and are increasingly in danger of selling our democratic birthright to the next authoritarian strongman who promises easy answers to their problems and satisfying punishment of their enemies, both foreign and domestic.

• Our children spend 13 years studying science, but thousands and perhaps millions of graduates have no real understanding of the scientific method as a system of learning and discovery, rely on faith or mythology instead of empirical evidence to teach them how the world works, and think that a scientific "theory" is no more reliable than a guess.

In each of those disciplines, students learn facts, figures, definitions, and processes day in and day out, year in and year out. Some of them, they remember; some of them, they forget. But how can so many people who have graduated from our schools have so little conceptual understanding of the core concepts that lie at the heart of those disciplines? If they don't "get" those basic, critical ideas, then what was the point of all those days and years, all those tests and papers and project? What was the point of any of it?