One of the more popular ways to feel superior these days is to complain about the schools. We adults just love to drone on about how much better educated we are than our kids. We say stuff like: “These kids today. They get out of high school and they don’t even know how to read and write. Why, in my day we read Moby-Dick eighty-four times in the fourth grade alone.” And so on. Adults just eat this kind of talk right up.

Well, I hate to disillusion everybody, but it’s all a crock. We aren’t better educated than our kids: they’re just less drivel-oriented.

The main evidence adults offer to prove kids are less educated is the fact that Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are declining. You remember SAT’S. You got your number-two pencils and sat in the cafeteria for two hours answering questions like this:

Fred wants to redo his bathroom in pink wallpaper, so he invites Sam over to help. If Fred’s bathroom is eight feet by five feet and has a seven-foot ceiling, and each roll of wallpaper is 32 inches wide, how long will Sam take to realize there is something just

a little bit strange about Fred?

SAT tests are designed by huge panels of experts in education and psychology who work for years to design tests in which not one single question measures any bit of knowledge that anyone might actually need in the real world. We should applaud kids for getting lower scores.

When you and I were in high school, we thought we had to learn all that crap so we could get into college and get good jobs and houses with driveways. The problem is that so many of us went to college that college degrees became as common, and as valuable, as bowling trophies. Kids today are smart enough not to waste brain cells trying to figure out how long Train A Will take to overtake Train B just so they can go to college. That’s why so many colleges are desperate for students. Any day now you’ll be watching a late movie on UHF television and you’ll see this ad:

“Hi! I’m Huntingdon Buffington Wellington the Fourth, dean of admissions at Harvard University. I’ll bet more than once you’ve said:

‘I sure would like to go to a big-time Ivy League university, but I lack the brains, the background, and the requisite number of dinner jackets.’ Well, this is your lucky day, because Harvard University is having its semiannual Standards Reduction Days. That’s right: we’re admitting people we once wouldn’t have allowed to work in our boiler room. And for the first one hundred applicants who call our toll-free number, we’re offering absolutely free this honorary degree written in genuine Latin words.”

Another reason you shouldn’t feel better educated than your kids is that almost everything your teachers told you is a lie. Take the continents. I bet they told you Europe was one continent, and Asia was another. Well, any moron with a map can plainly see Europe and Asia are on the same continent. I don’t know who started the lunatic rumor that they were two continents. I suspect it was the French, because they wouldn’t want to be on the same continent with, say, the Mongolians.

And what about those maps they showed you? Greenland looked enormous, bigger than Russia. If Greenland were really that big, it would be a Major Power. All the other nations would stay up late nights worrying about it. But the truth is Greenland is smallish and insignificant. The other nations rarely even invite it to parties.

So don’t think you’re so smart.

Every so often I see a news article in which some educator gets all wrought up about the fact that people don’t read books anymore:

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)—Noted educator Dr. Belinda

A. Burgeon-Wainscot, speaking before the American Association of People Who Use the Title

‘Doctor’ Even Though They’re Not Physicians, but Merely Graduate School Graduates, Which Are As Common These Days As Milkweed Pollen

(AAPIVUTDETTANPBMGSGWAACTDAMP), said today that people don’t read books anymore. At least that’s what we here at the Associated Press think she said. She spoke for about two hours, and used an awful lot of big words, and frankly we dozed off from time to time.

Well, I am not a noted educator, but I know why most of us don’t read books. We don’t read books because, from the very beginning of our school careers, noted educators have made us read books that are either boring or stupid and often both. Here’s what I had to read in first grade:

“Look, Jane,” said Dick. “Look Look Look. Look.”

“Oh,” said Jane. “Oh. Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh. Look.”

“Oh,” said Spot. “Oh my God.”

Now I’m not claiming that we first graders were a bunch of geniuses, but we didn’t spend the bulk of the day saying “Look,” either. We thought Dick and Jane were a drag, so many of us turned to comic books, which were much more interesting and informative. When I was in first grade, the Korean War was going on, So I read comiC books with names like

“GI Combat Death Killers,” featuring American soldiers with chin stubble who fought enemy Communist orientals with skin the color of school buses. These comic books had lots of new and exciting words:

“Commie attack! Hit the dirt!”

BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA

“Grenade! Grenade!”

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMKABOOOOOOM

“Joe! They got Joe! Eat lead, you reds!”

BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA

“Aieeeeeeeeeeee.”

And so on. This is how we developed our language skills. If we had stuck with Dick and Jane, we’d have sounded like morons.

After the first grade, our schoolbooks got longer, but they did not get more interesting. The history books were the worst. Take, for example, the Civil War. I think we can safely assume that the Civil War was fairly lively, but you would never know this from reading elementary school history books:

THE CIVIL WAR

“The Civil War was very serious. It was caused by slavery and states’ rights, and it resulted in the Gettysburg Address.

Discussion Questions: How serious was the Civil War? Would you feel nervous if you had to give the Gettysburg Address? Explain.”

The other big problem with history textbooks was that they always started at the dawn of Civilization and ended around 1948. So we’d spend the first three months of each school year reading about the ancient

SUMerians at a leisurely pace. Then the teacher would realize that time was running short, and we’d race through the rest of history, covering World War II in a matter of minutes, and getting to Harry Truman on the last day. Then the next year, we’d go back to the ancient Sumerians. After a few years of this, we began to see history as an endlessly repeating, incredibly dull cycle, starting with Sumerians and leading inexorably to Harry Truman, then going back again. No wonder so many of us turned to loud music and drugs.

Things were a little better in English class, because we didn’t have to read the same books over and over. On the other hand, we had to read

a lot of books nobody would want to read even once, such as The Last of the Mohicans, which was written by James Fenimore Cooper, although I seriously doubt that Cooper himself ever read it. We also read a batch of plays by Shakespeare, which are very entertaining when you watch actors perform them but are almost impossible to understand when you read them:

FLAVORUS: Forsooth ‘twixt consequence doest thou engage? Wouldst thou thine bodkin under thee enrage?

HORACLES: In faith I wouldst not e’er intent fulfill, For o’er petards a dullard’s loath to till.

(Shakespeare wrote this way because English was not his native language. He was Sumerian.)

Anyway, that’s why I think people don’t read books anymore. The sad thing is that there are many fine books around, just waiting to be read. You can see them on convenient display racks at any of the better supermarkets; they have titles like The Goodyear Blimp Diet and Evil Nazi War Criminals Get an Atomic Bomb and Threaten to Destroy Uruguay. These books are easy to read, and minutes after you read one you’re ready for another. What we need is some kind of federal program to get people interested in them. Maybe the President could read some of them aloud on national television (he is very good at reading aloud). Or maybe we could give people an additional tax exemption for every book report they attach to their income tax returns. Whatever we do, we should do it soon, to get people out of the habit of getting all their information from television and poorly researched newspaper columns.