In 1996 it was declared that after a steady 30 year decline in SAT scores, such scores were "rising" once again. Only in the small print could most people learn that the SAT examination had undergone "social adjustment". You see, there had been too many individuals in preferred victim groups who were getting low scores, so all of that had been "fixed." The "average" scores have been "adjusted" upward by some 100 points, and you can now fall far short of a perfect score and still get a "perfect score".

A "perfect score" is still 1600, but you can now miss several questions and still get a "perfect score". Mathematics, meet the new American politics.

The unhappy news for the social do-gooders is that, far from seeing a 100 point rise in "average" scores, we see only a "rise" in a few points. Is it back to the drawing board? Shall we add a hundred more?

There is no argument that American public education was the envy of the world some 30 years ago and is the laughing stock of the world now. The only argument is why, and how it should be fixed. The NEA - behaving like the leftist union it is - argues that the whole decline is simply a matter of not having thrown enough money at public education. Those of higher IQ (in the main, educated prior to the Great Collapse) know, instead, that the whole NEA business (and their programs - the older scheme called "Goals 2000", and the newer scheme called "Common Core") centers on educational fads and a loss of parental control at the local school board level.

The reason we are even engaged in these shenanigans is because education must be "fixed" in a socially acceptable way, which is another way of saying that the fix must be Politically Correct. In the socially desirable goal of getting more of the academically challenged to enter and graduate from college, the do-gooders must:

1. Use grade inflation in the public schools to raise the self-esteem of those of mediocre, or worse, ability.

2. Eliminate any measure of actual talent or achievement that would reveal the hollowness of Step 1, so that these artificially elevated "achievers" cannot be separated from the rest of the herd.

3. Provide incentives (government money) for public schools to engage in these ruses and provide incentives to colleges (government money) to accept "things other than test scores" (eg skin color) for competitive places.

4. To any evidence that the grand scheme is failing, announce that the problem is only one of proper funding, and place the blame on anyone seeking to return "to basics." As all politically correct educationalists know, a return to "basics" is simply a code word for a return to elitist dead-white-male Western cultural capitalist indoctrination, whereas the only happy direction in which America should be heading is toward diversity, multiculturalism, and The New World Order. A proper prescription for cultural ruin.

That New World Order, increasingly, is one in which the better educated students (I have in mind those of Korea and Japan, but there are other examples) are crowding out Americans in the better science programs of American universities, the last place where political correctness is likely to win the day. Since the world is increasingly paying its dividends to those in the sciences and the providers of information, Americans are headed toward becoming a second rate nation.

We are, in essence, witnessing the real evidence of a great civilization on its way to the garbage heap of history. Some Romans of the third and fourth centuries must have been painfully aware of a similar process in their own golden culture even while the official voices proclaimed that the Roman Empire was "as good as it ever was". I submit that when a great civilization is in decline, we see exactly what we are seeing right now: a thorough decay in morals and values; declarations that achievement has no merit and that Everyone should win every race - by government fiat if not by virtue of equal talent; by declarations that character does not matter, and that Truth is something that is culturally biased and not to be accepted. When we are told that the Truth is a Lie, and a Lie is the Truth, the end is probably irreversible, and we are being told just that, every day, by the highest office in the land.

The barbarians are not AT the gate, they are CONTROLLING the gate. Who demands greater proof? Who will restore order?