The magnitude of mental confusion in which this society exists–actually, considered normal and permanent by historians endowed with a sense of humor–overwhelms us on occasion. In August, three months before the elec­tion, a Gallup poll found that Walter Mondale and his ultra-liberal Democrat­ic Party are believed by the majority of Americans to be better suited “to im­prove the qualityof public education” than President Reagan and his conserva­tive Republicans. Nothing short of despair will invade the mind of an American who can remember the rapid downfall and disintegration of the American public education that began in the mid-60’s with the wild experimenta­tion by liberal doctrinaires and psycho­logical charlatans who took over the NEA–their storm troopers’ organiza­tion. It was then when education had abandoned its goal of forming character through knowledge and became the distributor of ideological cliches about the transformation of society and the destruction of antiquated pride in what America was, is, and should be. A nar­row-minded, if not nasty, vision of an unmoored value-free individualism had been declared the civic ideal. Twenty years later, the big city schools all over the country have been transformed into enclaves of random but lethal crime, where bathrooms became places of sex and mugging. Playgrounds turned into stock exchanges for drugs. It was all the vision and the creation of liberal Democrats theoretically fortified by the liberal intellectual establishment, fiercely protected by the liberal Supreme Court, and by the liberal bureaucracy in D.C. entrenched there by Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter. And now, in 1984, the American public still thinks that those who have smashed to pieces the old, precious timepiece should be more trusted with fixing it than those who have discovered the damage and the loss.