I just read yet another article on the need for education reform in the United States, with its semi-standard prescriptions of better teachers, more focused resources, higher standards, and greater accountability for teachers and schools. This particular article was written by a former CEO of one of the larger U.S. corporations, and he should have known better. In fact, most of the so-called reformers should know better, because almost all of their solutions fall into the “emperor has no clothes” category.

That’s because of the fallacious assumptions that lie behind their recommendations. I may not identify all of the faulty assumptions, but here’s my list:

All or at least most students want to learn.

All students can and should succeed.

The responsibility for student learning lies primarily, if not entirely, upon the teacher.

Formal, classroom-style education is the only way to success in a modern technological society.

First off, speaking as someone who has taught, and coming from a family with a long and broad line of very successful teachers, I can say that very few students actually want to learn if the subject matter is difficult and if they’re given almost any options or excuses not to learn. They talk about wanting to learn, but most don’t want to put in the work required. This is nothing new. It’s a fact of human nature noted all the way back to the time of Socrates. Most students would prefer to be spoon-fed just enough knowledge to obtain their goals.

Second, ALL students will fail at something, somewhere, if they try enough subjects, although the most able may not fail until they’re on the doctoral level in a subject not tailored to their background and inclination. A small percentage of students simply lack more than very rudimentary intellectual skills; a much larger number are good at basic subjects; from then on, the percentage of success will decrease as the difficulty of the subject matter increases. Contrary to popular and political opinions, this is not debatable, but a simple fact of the distribution of human abilities and intelligence.

Students vary greatly in their levels of intellectual capability, their ability and willingness to concentrate, and in their emotional maturity. Setting uniform standards penalizes both the most able and the least able and effectively limits excellence. Equally important, given the variability in student abilities, any system or curriculum designed on the basis of universal student mastery of skills is doomed to failure, either because some students will indeed be unable to master the subject matter and under current political conditions, that is unacceptable, or in fact the standards will be so watered down that they are meaningless, or students will be taught skills by blind rote so that they can pass the appropriate assessment tests. Educational systems — those serving large student bodies — with either excessively high or inordinately low failure rates are themselves failures.

Third, as I’ve noted in an earlier blog, if the teacher is solely responsible for a student’s learning, most students will take the path of least resistance and show little or no initiative. Since they will achieve little, more blame will fall on the teacher, especially if no meaningful adverse consequences from failure to learn fall on the student. The assumption of total teacher responsibility means that the student faces no adverse impacts for failing to learn and can take no earned personal credit for whatever learning is achieved.

Finally, just how many indifferent business school and college graduates, or drop-outs, do we as a society need? We need electricians, mechanics, information technicians and a whole host of professions requiring specialized on-the-job training or at least on-the-job internships. We also need people in service industries. Assuming that classroom education is the only effective form of education is a one-size-fits-all solution that serves no one well and packs too many high school and undergraduate college classrooms with high numbers of students who have little real interest in being there, and even less in learning.

The bottom line, in my book, is simple enough. If you design a system on faulty assumptions, it won’t work, or not well, and the vast majority of proposed educational reforms incorporate at least one of the assumptions I’ve listed above.

Why do they persist? That’s simple, too. It’s the Lake Wobegon syndrome: As a society we have to maintain that all children are above average in intelligence, initiative, and ability, even when it’s painfully obvious that they’re not. But until the “reformers” address their faulty assumptions, American education will face an increasing downward spiral, regardless of standards, legislation, and increased resources.

A survey of almost 30,000 high school students in 100 randomly selected public and private high schools nationwide revealed that 64% of all students have cheated on a test in the past year, and almost forty percent did so repeatedly, while 36% plagiarized assignments from the Internet and 30% stole something from a store. These figures represent an increase of 5% over the past two years, according to the Josephson Institute, which conducted the survey. Most disturbing was the finding that 77% of the students believed that “when it comes to doing what is right I am better than most people I know.”

These figures not only indicate that American public behavior is headed in the wrong direction, but they also suggest that American students are very perceptive. They see misleading advertising on television and understand that it’s effective in selling products. They see unethical behavior in the financial community and note that those who practice it are rewarded with multimillion dollar salaries and bonuses. They read about or watch superheroes who aren’t bound by conventional law and ethics and reap the benefits, as do their creators.

They also see that the people who are the pillars of the community — the teachers, the firefighters, the police, the social workers, nurses, and others — aren’t nearly so well compensated as those who use their intelligence to game the system, regardless of the ethical implications and the adverse effects on others. They also learn that the highest test score counts, no matter how the score is obtained, whether from the high-priced cram school, the higher-priced private school, or outright cheating, and that those high scores are the passports to better colleges and graduate schools and high income professions.

And, alas, the writing community hasn’t done much better. Even in F&SF… and especially in its spin-off sub-genres, various writers and publishers have sold out, in the name of profit and popular entertainment, in order to boost sales in an industry historically plagued with low margins and profitability. Understandable? Yes… but at what cost?

As I noted sometime back, one of the main critics for The Atlantic Monthly effectively trashed F&SF because it didn’t have enough sex. Recently, The New York Times notable book list for 2008 included several novels with passages cited as possible contenders for The Guardian’s “Literary Review of Bad Sex in Fiction” award, at least according to Andrew Wheeler, and not only were such sex scenes bad, but exceedingly graphic. What exactly does the “sex quotient” have to do with the excellence, or lack thereof, of a book? Not much, if anything, but from the best-seller lists, it’s clear that “sex sells,” and it sells big time. Just look at the Laurel Hamilton books and others of the same ilk… and all those hurrying to emulate such sales success.

Now… I certainly understand the need to sell books in order to stay in business, but there are more than a few authors who manage to sell well without resorting to graphic descriptions of human plumbing. I’d also be the first to admit that, at times, in some types of books, a certain amount of sex is necessary to both plot and resolution, but its necessity is far less than all too many authors will insist. Writing sex has always been the fast and dirty way to avoid hard and honest writing, and, in that sense, using bad and graphic sex as a sales tool is only a half-step removed from misleading advertising. For that matter, so is writing “action at all costs,” whether in thrillers or in SF. Again, I’m not against action. I’m just against filling a novel with gadgets and body-counts and pages that might as well be printed in blood for the sake of thrills and pseudo-action that have little to do with either plot or character.

After all, if we blame the financial types for cutting corners in their fields, shouldn’t we look at our own field? Just because the costs aren’t so obvious, or so immediate, doesn’t mean that there aren’t costs. How many of those “cheating” students were hooked on meaningless action movies or graphic novels or books? Or F&SF erotica pumped out as romance? Or vampire sex and slash best-sellers? The message is exactly the same: Self-satisfaction and more dollars at any cost and don’t let ethics, excellence, and good taste get in the way if they’re not convenient.

After all, we are a society that values results, no matter unethically they’re obtained — just so long as we can claim legality… and sometimes, even that doesn’t matter.

In past blogs, I’ve commented, not necessarily in the most positive terms, about the explosive growth of anime and manga. Yet, to be fair, the art in the best of these and of the current graphic novels can be indeed inspiring and fascinating, not to mention eye-riveting, and certainly contributes to the genres’ popularity.

In large part, that growth, and the change in the creation of current “art” itself, is being driven and inspired by electronic technology. The entire process of creating visual images is changing. Once, all artists who created the artwork for book covers did actual physical paintings, usually in oils or acrylics, but whatever the medium, they created a static physical product. Today, more and more covers are created digitally. For example, I may have the only physical artwork that exists of the cover painting for my novel Ghost of the White Nights, and the only reason I have it was because my son persuaded the artist to print out a large copy on a design printer and sign it. Even artists who are skilled in the physical media, such as John Picacio, often create multiple physical paintings and merge them digitally

There are doubtless thousands of on-line galleries of electronically created artwork, but such artistic developments and their growth, however, are only one facet of an even larger change in American society… and possibly Western European and Asian cultures as well. With the development of visual communications media — primarily television, personal computers and image/texting cellphones — our means of communications have become more and more visual.

This encompasses all aspects of communication. Television news stories are illustrated with visio-bites. Computer-generated special effects enhance almost all cinema these days. Power-point displays/slide-shows apparently are mandatory for business presentations now. Going beyond art itself, even “texting” is evolving from written language founded on phonetically based aural communication to simplified visual text. Computer icons are replacing words in emails and instant messaging.

Unfortunately, there’s an aspect of this change that appears to be largely unnoticed. Visual communications are less than ideal for conveying complex ideas, ideals, and complicated transactions and situations, yet the comparative simplicity, speed, and appeal of more visual communications results in a continuing dumbing-down and over-simplification of matters, and pushes communicators toward communicating quickly rather than accurately.

If a political or economic concept can’t be expressed concisely and in less than thirty seconds, it doesn’t stand a chance. Nor does a business proposal, nor the idea for a new movie. This isn’t new. I had one of my novels turned down by a major producer some ten years ago, because, while it was a good story, it was “too complex.” But the trend is accelerating. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of the reason for the current economic melt-down was the oversimplification and dumbing down of the explanations of how financial derivatives actually work… because you can’t explain all the ramifications in 30 seconds, and it’s equally clear that those who were selling and those who were buying didn’t understand those implications.

I’m not saying that all types of visually-based or influenced communications are bad, but I am saying that, like anything, there are times when they’re appropriate and times when they’re not. At the moment, unhappily, most people, especially those who should know better, don’t seem to know the difference.

In overall terms, the world of books is rapidly becoming a scary place. Borders Books is teetering on the edge, with an anticipated report of poor sales in the third quarter of the year. While Borders is not the largest of the chains, it still represents a significant chunk of the retail book market, and no author, me included, wants to see something like 400 super-stores vanish. Nor does any publisher. Fall sales of virtually all new titles from all publishers have declined, and one major publisher has reputedly ordered the editorial staff to stop acquiring new titles, at least for a while. Some agents are reporting more difficulty in pitching titles to publishers.

Is all this just because of the economic slowdown? In some respects, I’d like to think that it is. Unfortunately, it’s not. The economic hard times are revealing a real weakness in the market for books, especially for fiction. As I’ve observed in earlier blogs, the modest increases in books sales have come more from greater sales to an ever-smaller percentage of the population, because the percentage of the population that reads is decreasing, and the greatest decrease is among the 16-25 age group. Likewise, historically the over-55 age group, particularly those who are college-educated, has had the highest reading percentage, and retirees, often steady readers, are economically harder-pressed and are likely buying fewer books.

But, there’s far more to the decline in book sales than these factors.

At one point, I’ve been told, there were over 1,500 Waldenbooks, B. Daltons, and small mall bookstores, often two in every mall. In addition, before that, there were individual paperback book racks in almost every drugstore in the country, and those racks were tailored to local reading habits, and often were located right next to the comic book racks. Both the mall stores and the drugstores allowed easy access, what’s called impulse book buying. While the more profitable small mall stores have been replaced by book superstores that are actually mall anchors, these stores tend to be more destinations for already determined book buyers than a source of impulse buying — and there are far fewer of them than there were smaller mall bookstores.

At one time, virtually no mall was without a bookstore, albeit a small one. Now there are hundreds of malls without any bookstores, and whole sections of major cities without bookstores, and most of the corner drugstores are long-since gone, and I don’t see many book displays in the generic drug chains that replaced them. Yes, many supermarkets, and even WalMarts, have book sections, but most Super WalMarts are lucky to have 20 F&SF titles, or for that matter more than 50 titles of any genre or mainstream fiction. In other supermarkets the selection is even more meager. Even the tiniest of Waldenbooks used to have several hundred titles in each genre [and I know, because I visited that store before it was closed].

By concentrating resources in book superstores, the book chains have largely eliminated what was effectively a feeder network that helped make books available to a larger segment of the population. It’s unscientific, but I’ve traveled most of the United States in the past fifteen years and found that very few malls in minority sections of most cities have bookstores. The bookstores tend to be concentrated in or near affluent white, higher-income neighborhoods. This is a great way to maximize an existing customer base, but given the fact that a considerable number of children in lower income areas will grow up to be higher-wage earners, it’s a very poor long-term strategy, and another example of our cultural mindset to maximize short-term profits, regardless of the long-term implications.

Add to that an educational system that tries to do too much with too little discipline, too few teachers and inadequate resources, and it shouldn’t be any surprise that effective reading levels continue to decline, regardless of what the school “tests” say, since more accurate Department of Education tests on college graduates show that almost 60% lack the capacity to read and understand a complex newspaper editorial. On top of that, regardless of the intellectual brilliance of students, the current teaching systems and the video culture have created a mindset where long-term concentration is difficult, if not impossible, for all too many students — and long-term concentration is definitely required for reading books.

So… I suspect that the majority of publishers [excepting mine, who has spoken out long and hard against these trends and taken steps to counter them] and book store executives will console themselves that the declining sales are merely a function of economic hard times. But those who believe that recent declining sales are all a function of lower income and higher unemployment are seriously deluding themselves.

Last week the business section of several papers had headlines reading something like, “Retail Sales Plummet.” Because I’m an economist by educational background and training and also because I’m skeptical of scare-style headlines, I read the stories. The bottom line was simple. Retail sales dropped off about 2.8% in October compared to sales in October 2007. Now, the papers also had a graph that showed what appeared to be a convincing drop from one month to another — unless you read the numbers. The scale showed only the range of sales figures from $360 billion to $400 billion, or roughly ten percent of the total sales range — so of course a drop of nearly 3%, close to $12 billion, shows a “visual” drop of one third of the graph. Pretty scary — but it would have been hard to pick out that three percent drop on a graph that showed the entire $380 billion.

Needless to say, following the news story, which doubtless ran coast to coast, the stock market sank, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if more Americans decided not to purchase unnecessary goods.

All of this illustrates one of the greatest problems in a generally free market economy: everything literally rests on the margin… and much of what happens on the margin reflects popular perception. Since mid-summer for example, the price of crude oil has dropped from almost $140 a barrel to about $50, a decline of more than 60%. Did crude oil supplies increase by 60% or even 20%? Or did demand for gasoline drop by 20%-60%? Hardly. In fact, crude oil production has been cut, and demand for gasoline is down around 5% from last year at the same time. The same sort of marginal “tightness” and increased demand in housing was what fueled the housing boom… and a comparatively small, in percentage terms, number of defaults and lessened demand led to the subsequent bust.

A similar set of circumstances is wracking the stock market, if with slightly different mechanics at work. Hedge funds and private investors seemed convinced that the market would continue to rise, and they leveraged their investments through buying stock on margin and in various other creative ways. But when the market turned down, and investors in those funds wanted out, the hedge funds had to liquidate huge blocks of stock at whatever price they could, and prices headed down. That panicked more investors into selling… and so the cycle went. Then, because business outlooks deteriorated, a number of dividend-paying stocks cut or eliminated dividends — one financially solvent Canadian power trust even cut its dividend by over 70% — and the prices of those stocks deteriorated even more.

Effectively, on average, most pension and retirement funds have been cut between 30%-60% over the last few months, but especially in the last month. As more Americans saw their assets melt away, they further decreased their buying, and sales of large items like automobiles fell dramatically. Now the big three American manufacturers, who never understood that they couldn’t sell oversized and overpriced SUVs forever, are begging for a bailout from Congress.

In an economy as large as that of the United States, comparatively small changes in supply and demand, generally all on the margin, so to speak, can have enormous financial and economic consequences.

Now… when you add to that the scare tactics of the media, always in search of the next headline, small problems get bigger, and moderate problems become major… and that, unfortunately, is what is happening… and it will most likely get worse.