Real Education: Four Simple truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, by Charles Murray (forthcoming) 

Don’t miss the full book description here including the blurb from PJ O’Rourke 

From the AEI description:

With four simple truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America’s educational establishment.

Ability
varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material.
Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we
embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its
best to ignore it.


Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math. Real Education
reviews what we know about the limits of what schools can do and the
results of four decades of policies that require schools to divert huge
resources to unattainable goals.


Too many people are going to
college.
[George Leef will love this] Almost everyone should get training beyond high school, but
the number of students who want, need, or can profit from four years of
residential education at the college level is a fraction of the number
of young people who are struggling to get a degree. We have set up a
standard known as the BA, stripped it of its traditional content, and
made it an artificial job qualification. Then we stigmatize everyone
who doesn’t get one. For most of America’s young people, today’s
college system is a punishing anachronism.


America’s future
depends on how we educate the academically gifted. An elite already
runs the country, whether we like it or not. Since everything we watch,
hear, and read is produced by that elite, and since every business and
government department is run by that elite, it is time to start
thinking about the kind of education needed by the young people who
will run the country. The task is not to give them more advanced
technical training, but to give them an education that will make them
into wiser adults; not to pamper them, but to hold their feet to the
fire.