The San Francisco Examiner ran an article today comparing the positions of Obama and McCain on education.

Big differences in candidates' education plans

The main difference between the candidates’ plans is in pre-school support. McCain would add less that $1 billion to education. He would give principals more say over funds while redirecting spending to online schools, home schools and tuition vouchers. Obama, on the other hand, would devote most of his increased spending to preparing children for kindergarden on the premise that children who enter school 2 years behind seldom catch up.

I wish that the candidates would spend a little time discussing the content of education. I’m convinced that generations of American students have been dumbed down by a curriculum that teaches little history, literature, economics, geography, or logic, and the results have been catastrophic. If you don’t believe me, show a teenager a map of the world and ask them to locate Venice, Baghdad, New Delhi and Beijing. Ask your teenager if he or she can identify Horatio, Brutus, Marcus Aurelius and Alaric. Ask him or her one thing that the Federal Reserve does and why. Finally, ask your teenager to name one American Nobel Prize winner in literature.

More pertinently, ask your teenage to name the three branches of the federal government and briefly explain the roles of each.

None of these questions are on the level we call “rocket science.” I was taught the answers to most of the foregoing questions at Mary Lee Boyd Elementary School on Northside Drive, here in Jackson, between 1950 and 1956.

Several years ago I reviewed a book by John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education: a schoolteacher’s intimate investigation into the prison of modern schooling, that related the whole sorry story of compulsory education in America. The book is well-worth reading and pondering. Gatto regards the educational system not as a failure but as a resounding success when judged in the light of its original purpose.

According to the New York Times, a commission on higher education consisting of -- you guessed it -- businessmen appointed by Bush has started pushing standardized testing for colleges.

Businessmen are experts in education. That's why they run school local boards: they know better than teachers.

Now that the Federal government has, by the way it finances education, made it more and more difficult for families of modest means to send their children to college without burdening them with mountains of debt, it proposes to dictate through high-stakes testing what college students should know when they graduate. Considering the incredible diversity in curriculums and academic programs now existing, a single high-stakes test that all students would have to pass to graduate would radically change our universities into assembly-line factories of learning, with the shots all called by the feds.

We should have expected this development sooner or later. He who pays the piper calls the tunes. Really open and free inquiry frightens businessmen and especially Republican ones. This is a perfect opportunity to bring into line one of the last bastions of free thought.