This document discusses the ongoing education crisis in America and proposes an alternative view of the problem. It outlines some of the poor academic performance statistics in the US and notes that students, parents, and teachers often have an inflated view of achievement. Common reform proposals aim to increase funding, standards, and competition, but the author argues these will not solve the root issues. The "real myth" is that schools must improve for student learning to increase. However, many students already excel through self-reliance and self-teaching regardless of classroom conditions. The key is shifting focus from teachers imparting knowledge to students creating it themselves through an awareness of their own learning process.

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Adam Robinson1
An Open Letter to Parents, Educators, Business Leaders, Politicians, and Policymakers
By now we're used to reading gloomy headline statistics of the ongoing education crisis:
 SAT Scores Slump to All-Time Lows!
 One High School Student in Four Now Drops Out! Study Finds Tens of Millions of Adults
Are Functionally Illiterate!
 American High Schoolers Rank near the Bottom in Math and Science Ability
Internationally!
With headlines like that, you'd think that parents would be worried and students would be
embarrassed. Curiously, the opposite seems to be the case.
In international academic rankings, American students routinely place somewhere at the
bottom of the top ten nations (okay, okay, so I exaggerated – we're not even among the top ten).
Yet despite their dismal showing, our students are quite satisfied with their academic
accomplishments, thank you very much. Just ask them. The Educational Testing Service did.
ETS recently conducted a national survey in which eighth-graders were asked to fill out a
questionnaire before taking a math test. Many of the students who had described themselves
as math "whizzes" in fact achieved abysmally low scores on the accompanying test! This gulf
between actual ability (very low) and perceived ability (very high) has been confirmed by other
researchers. It's got to make you wonder.
Parents are remarkably unperturbed by this state of affairs; perhaps they are simply unaware of
the truth. In one survey, American parents were far more likely to report that they were “very
satisfied" with their child’s education than were, say, Japanese parents (whose children's
academic performance, by the way, ranks near the top internationally).
Corporate leaders, however, cannot afford to be so sanguine. They see the effect of the
education crisis every day firsthand – in the workplace – and they are terrified of the mounting
international economic competition we face. With an undereducated work force, we're simply
not equipped to fight back. Some major corporations spend millions of dollars annually just
trying to teach their workers to read and write.
Did our schools produce this crisis? And if they did, where did they go wrong? One problem is
that many features of a student's academic experience are dictated not by conventional
educational considerations, but by political, bureaucratic, custodial, and administrative ones.
With millions of students in crowded classrooms, our overworked teachers are often reduced to
just keeping the peace. Workbook exercises might not enhance learning, but they do keep
students quiet and busy. Multiple-choice tests might not require much intelligence, but they are
certainly easy to grade. Textbooks and workbooks might not be the ideal educational vehicles,
but at least we know that everyone is "learning" the same thing.
All the blame cannot be placed on teachers – many of whom, of course, are superb. Teachers
are doing their best to cope with pressures from assorted parties and interest groups: parents,
administrators, school boards, textbook publishers, and the testing industry, not to mention
1
Academic coach, writer, specialist in schooling test in America and co-founder of The Princeton Review

2. local, state, and federal governments. And to be sure, schools are struggling in socially and
economically troubled times.
It's not as if all this bleak news has discouraged the optimists. Indeed, they believe that schools
should reach for even loftier goals. According to some, public education should strive not
merely to enhance students' intellectual development, but their personal, social, civic, and
vocational development as well. Wonderful – the same schools that currently have trouble
teaching students to read write and reason competently, should also be trying to teach ethics,
interpersonal relations, and career strategy. Given our school system's dismal results on the
academic front, these aspirations are either astonishingly farfetched or unabashedly
hypocritical, depending on your point of view.
Let's face reality – most schools are doing a terrible job. Numerous solutions and education
reforms have been proposed, including the following:
• decreasing federal control over local schools
• tying teacher pay to student performance
• providing more money
• mandating a tougher curriculum of required courses
• creating a series of national standardized exams
• relying more on computers and multimedia technology
• establishing longer school years
• providing more money
• allowing "school choice"
• allowing competition from for-profit schools
• requiring minimum competency testing of students
• insisting on tougher standards for everyone
• providing more money
Take your pick.
These proposals are all well-intentioned. Most, however, will do little to raise the quality of
education. Indeed, some are sure to lower it. There is no question that many schools are in
desperate need of greater funding, especially those in inner cities. But money alone is not the
answer.
Keep in mind that any improvements to the school system will take years to implement.
Remember too that the goal of our school system has less to do with education than its
institutional survival. As a bureaucracy, the school system has an interest in blocking any
reform that would threaten its monopolistic Control over education. By its own institutional
standards, our education system is a major success: it graduates a majority of students, and
keeps itself in business.
The assumption behind most proposals for educational reform is that schools are doing an okay
job. According to conventional wisdom, all schools need is a few alterations, tougher standards,
more money and some prodding from marketplace competition and they'll soon be back on
track toward fulfilling their noble mission. Yet I am convinced that even if we doubled the
number of teachers in the classroom tomorrow, the impact on education and academic
performance for most students would be negligible.
The truth is this: our education system rests on erroneous assumptions about how students
think and learn. It doesn't matter how much money is poured into schools, the vast majority of

3. students will continue to learn little until schools overhaul their fundamental beliefs about the
learning process. This is unlikely to happen any time soon.
The real myth lurking behind the education crisis is that academic standards in this country will
not improve until our school system improves.
Nonsense! Tens of thousands of students manage to learn a great deal and excel, no matter
what's going on in school. These are the smart students2
. This book shares what they have
always taken for granted – that knowledge and understanding are not bestowed by the teacher,
but generated by the student. Smart students aren't any "smarter" than other students. They
just realize that it's their responsibility to learn. Smart students do not rely on teachers because
one day they discovered a fundamental truth: nobody can teach you as well as you can teach
yourself. And it wouldn't matter if all their teachers were brilliant and charismatic – smart
students would still be teaching themselves.
Because of the way school is structured, most students see themselves as passive passengers
in the learning process. They think it's the teacher's job to teach and their job to listen and learn.
So they sit back and wait for learning to happen. But learning doesn't just happen – the student
must make it happen.
In the classic movie The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man journey together
on an odyssey to a distant land. Despite their fears, they endure hardships, overcome
obstacles, and fend off great dangers. Why? Because they have heard that there is a great
wizard in Oz. Once there, however, they discover that the man behind the curtain cannot grant
their wishes. Instead he gives them something far more valuable: the knowledge that they were
always able to get what they wanted on their own.
The message of this book is that teachers are not wizards; and that if students want to learn,
they must teach themselves. To do this they must become aware of the process of learning,
and of the satisfactions and empowerment it brings. If at times I sound preachy, my gospel is
only that forgotten American virtue: self-reliance.
We face a serious education crisis. All the solutions proposed to date assume that students are
incapable of learning without "innovative" programs or inspired teachers. Sure our classrooms
are overcrowded – especially if we view teachers as the exclusive givers of knowledge to row
after row of passive students. Smart students learn what they need to know no matter what's
going on in class.
I propose that we shift our focus by refraiming the education problem. Instead of viewing
students as passive receivers of knowledge, we see them as knowledge creators. Smart
students have always seen themselves in this light; my goal is to inspire all students to see
themselves in the same way. This attitude shift will not be easy to achieve since almost
everything about the way school is run conspires against the student trying to learn on his or her
own.
Hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of man-years are being wasted annually, all in the
name of education. As Albert Einstein once said, however, "There is too much education
altogether, especially in American schools." Improving our education standards will require an
enormous coordinated effort from government and business as well as the education
community.
And yet the most important initiatives will come from the students, themselves. While we work
toward improving the school system for tomorrow, this book shows students how to teach
themselves and get an education today. And when that happens, we will produce an
educational transformation that I will astonish the world. (Ssshhh, if you're quiet you can hear
the rumblings of I the coming educational earthquake.)
2
“What Smart Students Know: maximum grades, optimum learning and minimum time” (Adam Robinson, 1993)