It goes like this: Teachers are victims. They function in a broken system that does not support them. They are fighting a losing battle with changes in society that make children more difficult to teach and discipline. Blaming them is simply teacher bashing.

There is some truth in that. Teachers are doing the best they can. The question is whether our children are being shortchanged in public schools by an education establishment that has grown too ossified to care about fundamentals, and doesn't demand enough of teachers and teacher training?

The agency that creates the SAT tests, which most colleges use to gauge the capability of high school students to do college-level courses, recently announced that it will add a written essay section. The reason is that colleges now need to assess how well students can write on the spur of the moment. These SAT essays will be compared with those packaged with college applications.

College admissions officers are getting suspicious that the formal essays, which can be written, edited, rewritten and, in some cases, vetted by helpful teachers or professional services, might not really reflect how well some students can handle written communication without help.

Technologies have changed the way we communicate through writing. Computer word processors have programs that check spelling and grammar (though relying on them is decidedly risky). E-mail and text messaging on cell phones have induced users to invent a shorthand involving alternative spelling and abbreviations. Sometimes it is quite creative, and it has its place. But problems are arising when written English has to be produced for more formal purposes.

Faced with the need to write formally, many students are complaining they have never been systematically taught how English grammar works. Somewhere over the past 30 years, teaching grammar has been largely relegated to the back burner.

Most of us educated more than a few years ago were taught grammar laboriously. There must be better ways. The drills that broke down written language into diagrams made our eyes glaze, but we endured it because understanding tenses, declensions and sentence structure was deemed essential. "Subjunctive" was not a dirty word. The ability to write clearly and correctly was considered a measure of successful secondary education.

When did this stop, and why? Did it happen because it bored both teachers and students, or because teachers weren't taught how? Was it the same reason that ended teaching numerical calculations? Did it end because everybody got lazy and figured out elaborate ways to avoid it through alternative teaching systems?

Who dumbed down our public schools and why? And why did the dumbing down still fail to be appealing enough to induce most students to learn to meet minimum standards?

Who decided that teaching fundamentals was either too hard or unnecessary?

I can't answer these questions, but they need to be confronted seriously without the mumbo-jumbo of modern pedagogy that contains more pompous pretense than practicality or productivity -- unless measured by hocus-pocus grading systems.

It won't be easy because most of our tax-supported educational systems have become protected job pools for adults, rather than quality systems for children. These systems are very efficient. They are designed to move millions of children through school in ways that minimize stress on all involved.

The truth is our public education systems are letting down the nation. The critical question is why have we put up with it?