The biggest stories of the age? But everyone missed them?? How’s that possible?

Unless someone lives at the Arctic Circle, they surely know about tofu dregs projects now collapsing throughout China. From fine homes to skyscrapers, bridges, and malls, many, many thousands of these structures are so shoddy they fall apart soon after they are constructed. Imagine that plastic rods are substituted for rebar. Plaster and sand are substituted for concrete.

Five years ago, China was counted as the next superpower. Now it's engaged in massive self-destruction. Here they are in 2025, real estate and financing have collapsed; even menial jobs are hard to find. The country is broke because the people in charge allow their CCP comrades to make money by not enforcing building codes. Everyone else is a mark (as con artists call their victims). If the project is an airport, subway or skyscraper, every aspect of the project is built with unacceptable flaws. The buildings look great, but in a few years, they’ll very likely become uninhabitable.

Many people were swept along by the national motto, if you have a bank account, you should buy a home. These people believed they acted prudently; now they are suffering more misery than most Americans can even imagine. You wake up one morning and see a crack in your bedroom wall. Your building is settling. You probably can't save it but you still have to pay your mortgage. When you go to sleep, you know the ceiling could fall on your family.

Here's the strange thing. Ask Americans if they have heard about tofu dregs? Almost everyone will say, no, what's that? (If this subject is new to you, there are hundreds of videos on YouTube. These two serve up great details.)

And by the way, have you read anything in your local media about the Chinese economy collapsing? Probably not a word. These weird shysters have one main skill, conducting elaborate crimes in plain view of the community without fear of the law.

So, not many people know the two biggest stories. How about the next biggest story in line? Why are American schools so bad and children can't read? It's much the same story throughout. Unscrupulous people (arguably, all are members of the same reckless cult) lie and scheme for money and power. But your own life gets worse and worse. Recent headlines casually claim that China’s once-rising middle class is almost a memory.

For many years we've watched the collapse in American education. Everybody agrees on the central mystery. Our schools get worse each year, but nobody is punished.

So we see remarkable parallels between building hijinks and education hijinks. Mainly, the top people are shockingly shameless. Their crimes will inevitably be exposed because buildings collapse in highly visible ways. Meanwhile, there are millions of children walking around illiterate (conspicuously so if they are ever tested), as they surely hope for rescue and indictments of the pseudo-educators.

Chinese leaders conspire against the ability of ordinary people to keep their money. Americans are kept dumb and their children are made dumber as they live inside a conspiracy against knowledge. For example, few Americans can tell you why children can't read nor what can be done about it.

Meanwhile, we have so-called experts, aka literacy professors, and they debate over how many sight-words should be learned each week and how kids will learn reading, grammar, and everything else if you'll just leave them alone and don't make them memorize anything. Don't emphasize what children should learn as that might hurt their feelings.

The experts in charge pretend not to know that the very famous book titled Why Johnny Can't Read explained in 1955 the whole mysterious rush to illiteracy but nobody put a stop to it. Meanwhile in American education, just like in Chinese society, everybody was living through historic events and they didn't know anything unusual was occurring.

We all have a ringside seat to one of history's great national suicides, and our media don't even mention it. Isn't that the quintessential problem? The people in charge of knowledge don't care about knowledge.

So our schools are fraud and our media are fraud. We should assume there's a connection. People promising a better life for the peasants conspire against the peasants. That's the common pattern starting in 1920, when the Communist International announced they would be taking over the world.

Tofu dregs (roughly equivalent to coffee grounds) are the perfect symbol for buildings that fall down and for education that does not educate.

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Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of Saving K–12 and The Education Enigma. His new thriller is The Boy Who Saves the World (suspense, crime, intrigue, romance, A.I.). See Lit4u.com for info on Price’s books.