A few years ago, in the north-central of the state, we regularly watched the Native Indian tally up the bill for a list of what was once commonly known as “dry goods” – cans of tomato paste, boxes of tea, packages of coffee, assorted sachets of spices, canned evaporated milk and so forth, usually about thirty items. The shopkeeper’s assistants would pile the purchases on the counter, hold up a can or carton and call out the price for each one so the owner could write it down with a pencil on a scrap piece of paper as the staff packed the things to be purchased into boxes. When the invoice list was complete, the addition began. Running his pencil down the column, he would lean his elbow on the counter and murmur, 5-9-14-17-21… and so forth, his pencil rising each time to the top of the next column to mark to carry over another ten. It was a pleasant bit of idle entertainment watching him, the mind stimulated by the calculations in progress, discreetly peering at the paper for a little silent competition to see if we could keep up. After about three minutes of adding over thirty, three digit numbers, the man would straighten up and consider the total he’d written at the bottom. Then, after all that had been completed, he opened a drawer next to him, pulled out a calculator and added it all over again to double-check his work.

This week, in a north-central region of the state, we watched the local staff of a restaurant, frozen in ineffectualness, unable to sell the mountains of food ready to be sold behind them; they hunched over a scrap of paper, pens clutched in nervous hands because the computer system had gone on the fritz and they didn’t know how to add up the orders. That restaurant, dependent on a huge morning business was practically deserted, customers abandoning the unmoving queue, the blocked off drive-through, to rush off to find some other establishment elsewhere to buy their meal, all because the staff, even though hard-working and diligent, couldn’t handle simple addition and multiplication.

The Native Indian shopkeeper is not in this state of Arizona, but in-between the states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana; not of the Yavapai-Apache or Navaho Nation, but of the nation of India; in the capital of New Delhi. India is amongst the world’s poorest countries. Power outages are common even in the capital – a bustling city of over ten million people, with theaters, shopping malls, open air markets, silks, sarees and computers. Elephants, horse carts, donkey carts, three wheeled rickshaw taxis, busses, camels, and all sorts of vehicles share the busy streets. But that merchant, due to his day-long practice of adding, subtracting and multiplying could out perform in speed and accuracy most of the American public. He’s not brilliant, he’s a normal fellow with a small, but active business with rent and employees he must pay, and he’s not of the upper castes so his highest achieved education level is no more than what we would call, “Middle School.” If the power went out or not, he can sell. In contrast, this week in Arizona we watched aghast as a restaurant lost hundreds of dollars of profits in a few hours, because the employees, all having high school diplomas from schools in the world’s richest country, did not have reliable skills in basic arithmetic. They were totally dependent on the computer to think for them and when the computer died, their productivity died with it. While the shopkeeper of India turned to the calculator after he did his manual calculations, trusting his work more than the machine, the Arizonians searched about desperate to find a calculator to simple work they should have been able to do, but couldn’t, having no confidence in their abilities.

This should not have happened. If one of the world’s poorest countries, “Lower Middle Income,” according to the World Bank, (compare with Arizona’s neighbor, Mexico – an “Upper Middle Income” nation), http://web.worldbank.org/, can produce average working people who can do their arithmetic, at levels of education funding that redefine Arizonians’ concept of “rock bottom” as in Grand Canyon-like depths, then America, as a World Bank “High Income” and every state in it, has no excuse for not producing the same and better for its people. Arizona may suggest its abysmal bottom national ranking in education is due to “poor people,” or “Native” people or” immigrants who don’t speak English,” but it cannot suggest its poor residents are poorer than the poor of India. It cannot claim to have a worse language problem than India has, a country where the majority of citizens don’t even speak the two national languages, Hindi and English. Arizona, with a climate very similar to north central India, has poor residents with housing and resources which exceed most of the Southeast Asian Indian middle class. So what excuse is there for not delivering the basics of arithmetic to all Arizonians, especially when all is required is a pencil and paper and practice, practice, practice? In India and Africa, it can be less than that: drawing with a finger in the dirt – a naturally occurring, zero trash-generating “write-on, wipe-off board.”

Actions and lack of actions have consequences. It’s a fallacy and a trap to tell students and parents that they don’t have to drill arithmetic, the functions on which all higher math depend – adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, because “the calculator will do it,” or no need to learn cursive writing because “everything will be typed” or memorize world geography, because one can “look it up on the computer.” If that was true, then American students, loaded with the latest computers in schools would be outperforming the Chinese, Japanese, French, Russian, Czech students. If that was true, how is it that the computer-deprived Southeast Asian Indian Middle Class outperforms the American Middle Class in basic math?

And the power will go out.

The human mind is a tremendous thing. So wonderful, we do not know its true limits. Knowledge is weightless, no bulk, it goes everywhere with them. The school stays behind; computers and calculators are costly, they break, the battery dies, they can be stolen. They should be tools, not crutches.

In this modern day and age, this nation must solidify the traditional three Rs- readin’ ritin’, ‘rithmetic. On these two pillars, language and math, is all other learning dependent.

Arizona has an opportunity, and parents cannot wait years for change. The awful performing LA United just voted to start alternatives, a start to breaking up their huge, inefficient and oppressive monopoly. http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/29/reason-tv-cracking-the-education-monopoly/

Arizona has nothing to lose and everything to gain in breaking this cycle of failure. Plenty of money is there, already exceeding other countries budgets for education, the failure is how it’s been used. http://www.uschamber.org/icw/reportcard/default Arizona’s education system achievement has been amongst the lowest in American rankings for decades, holding back Arizona’s generations to lower level work by not adequately preparing students for college and greater achievement. http://nationsreportcard.gov/

The American High School diploma should be restored to its traditional purpose of providing every graduate a solid educational background to go on to a college major or to enter the trades with a high level of competency which can be built on for the rest of one’s life. Foreign students increasingly snap up slots that plenty of American students have the aptitude for, but don’t have the skills background needed to move up. Shut out of opportunity due to missing or poor skills, an increasing number of American and Arizonian youth are unhappy, aimless, and jobless.

Arizona was one of the leaders in the nation, in the mid 1960s rushing into implementation of untested and experimental progressive education which relied on “open classrooms, student “self-teaching” and faculty as “facilitators” rather than “teachers.” If it was easy enough to overturn centuries of what works, why not now lead the nation in implementing a curriculum and teaching model of, “back to the future?” If the X Prize spectacularly revived space exploration why not apply that same innovation to schools?

These are not revolutionary concepts, this is how the American education system functioned before the so-called “progressive,” untested education programs were introduced and became dominant in public schools. There is much talk of “global communities” but few dare to actually face the fact that when put up against traditionally educated foreign students, American and Arizonan students have just not been equipped properly by the education system which has been in vogue for over four decades, and worsening by the year, in the basics of their own language and the nitty-gritty of solid math, science and humanities studies. It’s a set up for failure. Arizona could lead the nation in returning to what works; cheaper, faster, effective, with busy, achieving students. Keeping to the track Arizona is currently on will deliver it to last place; more human potential wasted. It doesn’t have to be.