This Dave Barry column was originally published August 11, 1985

If you read the newspaper, you know the American education system has gone past the point where it is simply failing to educate our young, and is now actively reducing their intelligence. Hardly a day goes by when you don't see an article like this:

WASHINGTON -- The National Association of People Who Worry About These Things (NAPWWATT) today reported that this year's graduating high-school seniors are even dumber than last year's, many of whom are still stumbling around the back of the auditorium trying to get their commencement gowns off. NAPWWATT reported that 66 percent of this year's seniors failed a nationwide scholastic test consisting of the question, "What does a duck say?"

This is pretty pathetic. When I was in high school, we were expected to know what a duck says. Oh, sure, I've forgotten a lot of this stuff, but at least I used to know it, which gives me the right to express smug contempt thinly disguised as grave concern for the young people of today.

I become especially concerned when I compare American students with those being cranked out in countries like Japan, where, as part of their final examination, each high-school senior must construct a working duck from raw protein. As a result of this kind of schooling, Japanese students enter the corporate job market fully prepared to perform complex technological tasks, whereas American students need months of training just to learn to operate the little locks on the bathroom stalls, which they are unfamiliar with because the doors have been ripped off all the stalls in every high school in America since 1963.

Who is responsible for this situation? There are no easy answers, of course, but in my particular high school, I suspect it was either Jimmy Stephenson or Joe Maglio. But I frankly fail to see the point in jabbering about minor bathroom vandalism from two decades ago at a time when our educational system, the very teeth of our democracy, is being undermined by the gum disease of mediocrity and stands in desperate need of the unwaxed dental floss of reform. Strong metaphors, you say? I say a crisis like this demands strong metaphors.

Ask yourself this: If the young people being educated today lack even the basic skills they need to compete in the job market, what does this bode for the future of America as a nation? I'll tell you what it bodes: It bodes that you and I won't have to worry about losing our jobs to some young, well- educated little snotnose, that's what. We'll be able to get drunk at lunch, abuse our Xerox privileges, and hold contests to see who can burp the loudest at staff meetings, and our companies won't dare fire us because the only alternative will be to hire incompetent recent graduates who are forever stapling important contracts to their own clothing.

So I see no urgent need for us to rush out and reform the educational system this instant. I think we can afford to wait until the fall of next year, which is when my son will enter first grade. Like any responsible parent, I want my son to get the best possible education, because I am sick to death of having to read his Masters of the Universe comic books to him. All the male characters wear loincloths, all the females have breasts like grain silos, and all the dialogue sounds like this (from The Stench of Evil):

SKELETOR: Stinkor, with your powerful SMELL, I would like you to spread your FOUL ODOR where the air is clean, and bring MISERY to a place that is full of happiness!