STOP BEATING THE DEAD HORSE
​Why the System of Public Education in the United States Has Failed and What to Do About It

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​Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. In regards to the system of public education, however, lawmakers and educators often try other strategies for fixing the dead horse (a.k.a. public schooling), including the following: 

1. Buying a stronger whip. 
2. Changing riders. 
3. Saying things like, "This is the way we have always ridden this horse." 
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse. 
5. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses. 
6. Lowering the standards to include dead horses. 
7. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired. 
8. Creating a training session to increase our riding ability. 
9. Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment. 
10. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed. 
11. Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance. 
12. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders can increase the dead horse’s performance. 
13. Purchasing technology to make dead horses run faster. 
14. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. 

Published by Amazing Things Press. 

​People like to blame someone for problems. Many people blame the president, Congress, local school boards, administrators, or teachers for the shortfalls of the public school system. The problem is not that the educators and lawmakers aren’t trying to improve the system; it’s that they just haven’t realized the proverbial horse is dead. If the basic system doesn’t work, all the money and strategies and dedication in the world will not help unless the system itself is replaced.

​One of the most crucial things the system has failed to do is differentiate between equal educational opportunity for all and equal (or identical) education for all. Instead of trying to make everybody the same, an educational system must ensure equal rights for everyone while still allowing them to develop at their own rate and in their own way. Only then can we have the diversity, creativity, and ingenuity needed to compete in the world today.

In this book. I explain why our system has failed (The Dead Horse) and what we can do about it (A New Horse).

​THE DEAD HORSE
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There is a lot of evidence that public schools were instituted for the sake of industry: to provide free babysitting so that women could work outside the home and to provide a training ground for future workers, who would be required to work in large groups and not do too much thinking on their own. Some people believe an additional goal for public schools was to create a nation of consumers to drive the industrial age. Early industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie spent huge sums of money (actually more than the government did at that time) on public schooling between 1900 and 1920. They would be very pleased with the nation of consumers they helped to create.

Horace Mann believed that a common education in a common school would create good citizens, unite society and prevent crime and poverty. It is ironic that the very system that was created to control the masses and force obedience and morality – the public school system – has failed miserably at those basic functions. 

Our current system is using the methods and curriculum developed for an early industrial age to educate students for the entirely different world of today.

A NEW HORSE

It is vital to the future of our country that we replace the current, flawed system of education with something new that will educate our citizens to live and prosper in the world today. The Level Mastery System is a system that completely changes the way we think of public education. In order to fully understand and embrace this system, we must first erase all the preconceived notions of what public schooling is: that public schools must be run like prisons, that children must learn each task at exactly the same time and in the same manner, that public schooling should replace parental control and responsibilities, and that students need to be institutionalized and given identical educations. 

The Level Mastery System would completely replace the current system; it would throw out the proverbial “dead horse” and replace it with a new dynamic one that can, in turn, be replaced as needed before it dies. Only in this way can the system be turned around and made viable for educating students in the 21st century and beyond. 

It is time for all the skeptics and the people who are afraid to make a real change to leave the dead horse where it lies and embrace a new one.