Mental Decline

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414585/trigonometry-racist-kevin-d-williamson
It's a pretty good article, for NRO. This was a good bit:

"our current government-dominated model of education has been a catastrophe for African-American students. They are not the only social catastrophe for African Americans, and the effects of those catastrophes are difficult to disaggregate. But the data are reasonably clear."

Claiming that "government-dominated education" is in itself especially harmful is difficult to support. Union-dominated government schools in a nation whose intellectual life is overrun with cultural Marxists would be a more accurate diagnosis of our particular problem. The Bismarckian system he mentions was highly effective at turning out great scientists and engineers--they were the best in the world until WWI bankrupted the system. It is, in my opinion, mainly a question of the intellectual culture that pervades a society and the standards it presupposes on the one hand--and, on the other, the genetic quality of the human beings who move through the educational system. The article properly emphasizes the destructiveness of the Left on the first issue--but, political correctness forbids mention of the second, which is a worsening problem due to our dysgenic immigration policies. Whether public or private schools are preferred is symptomatic of the intellectual culture. By the way, when American students are disaggregated by race, they outperform in virtually every instance their co-racials in their home countries (ie, American Japanese outperform Japanese, American Mexicans outperform Mexicans, etc).