What this country needs is fewer malpractice suits against doctors and a start of suits against malpracticing educators and politicians.
The American taxpayers have generously given enormous sums of money to well-paid teachers so that our young people would have the best schooling that money can buy. Malpracticing educators, however, turned their backs on the tried-and-true phonics method of learning to read, on memorization of multiplication tables, and on discipline and order in the classroom.
Instead, the educationists used our children as guinea·pigs for experimentation with every new fad that came down the pike, including the look-say “Dick and·Jane” readers, the esoteric polysylla bic vocabulary of “new math,” the undisciplined and open classrooms, and an assortment of psychological tests.
The result is that thousands of children have been defrauded of the basic tools of learning for which their parents have paid. Giving a child a grade school diploma when he hasn’t been taught to read and spell, or add and multiply, is just as culpable malpractice as leaving a clamp in your abdomen when the surgeon takes out your appendix.
Remedial reading is taught in the fifth grade to those who were not taught to read in the first grade. Parents are often pay ing double and triple to shore up reading deficiencies all the way to college freshman English courses to teach students what they should have been taught in high school.
While we are initiating new malpractice suits, let’s not over look professional politicians. Every Secretary of Defense in the Johnson, Nixon and Ford Cabinets should be called to account in court for their malpractice in losing the Vietnam War to a backward country with only one-tenth the population of the United States. The Vietnam War caused many more deaths and crippled bodies than all the medical malpractice cases combined.
Likewise, the directors of the Export-Import Bank who gave a half-billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money in unsecured long-term low-interest loans to a poor credit risk, namely, the Soviet Union, should be sued for financial malpractice. If your local banker handled your savings deposits like that, you wouldn’t give him the chance to make a second mistake.
Let’s help the doctors to get out from under the sword of Damocles that hangs over them from malicious malpractice suits. American doctors are the best in the world, and an incompetent doctor will soon lose his business because his patients have the freedom to shop around and choose a better doctor.
But millions of school children, draft-age boys, and taxpayers have been victimized by the harmful effects of malpracticing educators and politicians — and they deserve their day in court.
