It's the start of another school year with those first magical weeks of classes, when each student is eager and everything seems possible.
 
    But for me this year is different. Though I've been a teacher since 1977, this September school is going on without me. These first months of retirement should be, I suppose, a time to reflect proudly on what I've accomplished and perhaps even to wax a bit nostalgic. Instead, I find myself tired and troubled, overcome by the notion that I've escaped rather than retired.
 
    Over the years that I taught both junior and senior high, there's been a notable decline in the quality of our schools. Standardized test scores have diminished; college professors complain that high school graduates -- some of them straight-A valedictorians -- are incapable of writing a decent paragraph.
 
    Of course, the issue is well publicized. Countless studies and dollars have been focused on poor public school performance and how to address it. The two-year-old No Child Left Behind Act is merely the latest and most elaborate fix offered in a quarter century of handwringing, finger-pointing and pontificating.
 
    Unfortunately, most of that time, the effort and money have been wasted, bypassing the issue's true heart. There is something terribly wrong with our schools, but it has nothing to do with the quality of teachers, the curricula or textbooks -- or even how much money we spend. The problem is far simpler and more ominous: the students themselves.
 
CCCInc. Note: Increasing corruption, dysfunctional families, evil labour policies, poor teachers, stealing, waste, etc., prohibits quality education in the public sector.
 
    This opinion is common among teachers who've served double-digit years in the trenches. Kids these days ain't what they used to be. I know that rant has been popular since the time of the Romans. But these children are different from those of just two decades ago -- not in raw ability, but in their essential attitudes and readiness to learn. If I had a hundred bucks for every time a student cheated on a test, or had the nerve to tell me, in the middle of an impassioned lecture, that my presentation was "boring," I could be driving a new car.
 
    I'd suspect I was at fault, except that teacher friends of mine from Michigan to California to Alaska (where I taught) have similar stories.

    Of course there are many wonderful students. But today's kids, as a group, just don't buy into the entire adult-run institution that is modern public education. Caught up in the narcissistic values of hip-hop, immersed in ultra-violent video and computer games, casually and brazenly sexual, these kids consider themselves grown and independent by age 14, in no need of further guidance.
 
    Consider, for example, an April study by Jupiter Research indicating that 95% of teenage boys and 67% of teen girls regularly play video games -- including the best-selling Grand Theft Auto, where players gain points by murdering cops and beating prostitutes to death with bats.
 
    At the same time, a national survey in Education Week found that 74% of students admitted to engaging in "serious" cheating during the past year. Is it any wonder that a 2000 Gallup poll cited education and a decline in ethics as the two most serious problems facing our country?
 
    If we consider that the main function of schooling is to socialize tomorrow's citizens and acclimate them to our values, America is in big trouble. Schools, after all, mirror society; the shortcomings of the former are inextricably tied to the latter's failings. Blaming teachers because your kid can't read makes as much sense as blaming the dentist for a mouthful of cavities.
 
    So if not the schools' fault, whose?
 
    The music, movies and computer games are just symptoms. The fault lies squarely in the failures of the home, and in the disintegration of the traditional family. For many reasons -- dual incomes, divorce, separation and more -- quality face time between parent and child has shriveled. Schools struggle to take its place.
 
    Today, our public schools are expected to provide (in addition to academic instruction) up to two meals a day, homework help, daycare, entertainment, a sense of well-being and a basic respect for society and its laws.
 
    Not so long ago -- certainly in the supposedly turbulent 1960s and early '70s, when I was in school -- everyone assumed these were the home's provinces. Yet while today's parents have abdicated these basic responsibilities, they become incensed if a school disciplines their child for an issue as basic as academic dishonesty or cussing out a teacher. And, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, parent satisfaction with secondary schools continues to decline.
 
    Am I just another buck-passer? I sincerely hope not. I agree that our public school system bears responsibility for instructing our children. I believe it faces that task head on. U.S. schools are, in most respects, the best they've ever been. Ho-hum books and hands- off approaches disappeared decades ago. Educational theory has become a well-honed science, and new strides are being made and applied daily.
 
    Compare the schools of today with the first public schools in Puritan New England, when students of all levels sat on rock-hard benches in a single classroom, copying on slates and memorizing passages from dog-eared copies of the classics. The teacher received little respect in the community, and was paid accordingly. Yet no one complained about the failings of the system, and literacy rates were arguably the highest in the world. The difference then was that the home was doing its job.

    Today we indeed face a crisis in education. The stakes are just as enormous, the outcome just as uncertain, as those in the war on terrorism. Our society's very fiber is being tested.
 
    While it's up to our schools to continue to improve, it's also time for parents to take back the responsibility of raising and educating their own children. It's simple, actually: Read to them. Play catch with them. Discipline them. Discuss and model ethical behavior. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, "research supports the belief that high-quality education cannot be successfully accomplished without the active involvement of parents."
 
    Help does indeed start in the home.

When the College Board released its most recent data on SAT scores, most of the attention zeroed in on the jump in the math averages to a level that we haven't seen in three decades. Certainly that's welcome news. But the same data also show that a stubborn racial gap in academic achievement persists. Even worse, it's widening.
 
A decade ago, black students taking the SATs typically scored 153 points below the national average and 187 points below the white average. Today the gap has expanded to 163 points and 206 points, respectively. But instead of working to close this gap in the places where it starts -- primarily, our lousy inner-city public school systems -- the education establishment tries to sidestep the whole thing by lowering the bar at the college level. Which is why affirmative action admissions programs periodically wind up in the Supreme Court.
 
If America were really serious about closing this gap, instead of squabbling over entry to, say, the University of Michigan law school, we'd be redressing the inner-city K-12 system that is so conspicuously failing to educate black children. Black moms and dads understand this, which is why overwhelming majorities continue to tell pollsters that they favor vouchers and other forms of school choice. Unfortunately, their political representatives tend to be folks allergic to any reform that involves actually holding the public school systems accountable.
 
In the introduction to their forthcoming book, "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning," Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom suggest that the learning gap today is America's main source of ongoing racial inequality. "Students who have equal skills and knowledge will have roughly equal earnings," write the Thernstroms. "That was not always true, but it is today." In other words, if you want racial equality, fix the schools. And until we begin to close the racial performance gap at its source, we shouldn't be surprised at the mess it continues to create later on.
 

    Richard Sarkis and David Kinsley were juniors at Williams College, surfing the net for a cheap source for their economics textbook, when they discovered a little known economic fact: the very same college textbooks used in the United States sell for half price -- or less -- in England.
 
    Just like prescription drugs, textbooks cost far less overseas than they do in the United States. The publishing industry defends its pricing policies, saying that foreign sales would be impossible if book prices were not pegged to local market conditions.
 
    But many Americans do not see it that way. The National Association of College Stores has written to all the leading publishers asking them to end a practice they see as an unfair to American students.
 
    ''We think it's frightening, and it's wrong, that the same American textbooks our stores buy here for $100 can be shipped in from some other country for $50,'' said Laura Nakoneczny, a spokeswoman for the association. ''It represents price-gouging of the American public generally and college students in particular.''
 
    But thanks to the Internet, more and more individual students and college bookstores are starting to order textbooks from abroad -- and a few entrepreneurs, including Mr. Sarkis and his friends, have begun what are essentially arbitrage businesses to exploit the price differentials.
 
    ''We couldn't understand why what costs $120 here should cost $50-something there,'' said Mr. Sarkis, who, with Mr. Kinsley and another classmate, has spent three years building a Web-based company, BookCentral.com, selling textbooks from abroad to students in the United States. ''It seemed so sleazy of the publishers. We were sure that college students would be shocked and outraged if they knew about the foreign prices. But it's been this big secret.''
 
    That is changing, though. To the despair of the textbook publishers who are still trying to block such sales, the reimporting of American texts from overseas has become far easier in recent years, thanks both to Internet sites that offer instant access to foreign book prices, and to a 1998 Supreme Court ruling that federal copyright law does not protect American manufacturers from having the products they arranged to sell overseas at a discount shipped back for sale in the United States.
 
    Before the Supreme Court decision, Americans could not take advantage of the discounts abroad without violating the copyright law.
 
    Now, however, ''gray market'' sales are taking off on campuses.

    At one prestigious university, a sophomore imported 30 biology books from England this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit. Next semester, if all goes well, he plans to expand the operation.
 
    ''The only difference is that they say 'international edition' in little print on the cover,'' said the student, who added that he was not certain whether his project raised any legal issues, and therefore asked that neither he nor his college be identified.
 
    At other colleges, Asian students have banded together to take advantage of textbook prices in Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, which are even lower than those in Europe.
 
    Many students, individually, have begun to compare the textbook prices posted on American sites like Amazon.com, with the lower prices for the same books on foreign sites like Amazon.co.uk.
 
    The differences are often significant: ''Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Third Edition,'' for example, lists for $146.15 on the American Amazon site, but can be had for $63.48, plus $8.05 shipping, from the British one. And ''Linear System Theory and Design, Third Edition'' is $110 in the United States, but $41.76, or $49.81 with shipping, in Britain.
 
    Many college bookstores, meanwhile, have taken matters into their own hands, arranging their own overseas purchases.
 
    ''I buy from Amazon.co.uk and from sources in the Far East, and I knew more and more students were doing the same thing, individually,'' said Tom Frey, owner of the University Bookstore at Purdue University, who sells the new books from overseas at the same price as a used American book. ''Then this fall, for the first time, the Fed Ex man told me that the students at the Indian Association here at Purdue had just gotten a delivery of 14 skids of books, about 50 books each, from India. I think I'm losing about 10 percent of my sales to overseas books.''
 
    Relations between textbook publishers and college booksellers have been seriously roiled by the issue.
 
    ''This has become a very hot issue since last year, when it just seemed to explode all of a sudden,'' said Ms. Nakoneczny, of the college store association. The association's letter to the publishers warned that the pricing structure might be an antitrust violation. ''The sale of identical books to foreign buyers at prices significantly lower than to domestic buyers, while publicly stating that domestic prices are due to high costs, could constitute an unfair or deceptive act,'' the letter said. While there is no longer protection in the federal copyright law for the pricing differentials, the major publishers are still trying to stop the reimporting of texts priced for foreign markets, mostly through contract language forbidding foreign wholesalers to sell to American distributors. Some have placed stickers on covers, saying ''International Edition RESTRICTED Not for Sale in North America'' or added the cover line ''International Student Edition.''
 
    None of the three major textbook publishers -- Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Thomson -- would discuss why overseas prices are so much lower than domestic ones, referring all questions to Allen Adler, the lawyer for the American Association of Publishers.

    ''This is a season when textbook publishers get kicked around a lot, and they're feeling vulnerable,'' Mr. Adler said. ''The practice of selling U.S. products abroad at prices keyed to the local market is longstanding. It's not unusual, it doesn't violate public policy and it's certainly not illegal. But publishers are still coming to terms with the dramatic change in the law.''
 
    Mr. Adler contends that foreign textbook prices are pegged to the per capita income and economic conditions of the destination countries -- and that foreign sales are a boon to America's standing in the world, to foreign students seeking an American-quality education, and even to American consumers, since each extra copy sold overseas, even at a low price, helps to spread the high costs of putting out a new textbook.
 
    As more and more customers turn to reimporting books, it is an open question how long the overseas price differentials will last.
 
    ''We buy from the U.K., France, Israel and the Far East,'' said Bob Crabb of the University of Minnesota Bookstores. ''As long as the publishers are offering books at less than half the price that's available here, we'll take advantage of it. It's great for students. For publishers, the marginal costs of printing a few extra books and selling them overseas are very, very low. But I would guess that shortly, the sales here will begin eating into their U.S. sales in a serious way.''
 
    Disgruntlement over textbook costs has been growing in the United States as prices have risen. Last month, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, announced that the average New York college freshman and sophomore spends more than $900 a year on texts -- 41 percent more than in 1998 -- and proposed a plan to make $1,000 of textbook costs tax deductible. The same week, University of Wisconsin students demonstrated against high textbook prices and in favor of creating a textbook rental system.
 
    To be sure, textbook costs, however high, are only the final straw for American college students, whose tuition costs and fees have been rising rapidly. At Williams and other elite universities, for example, tuition, room and board now tops $35,000 a year. In Britain, though, the cost of tuition is largely borne by the government and students pay much less.
 
    For example, tuition alone for undergraduates at Harvard is currently $26,066 a year as compared with $1,840 at Oxford University.
 
    In the United States, one in five students does not buy all the required texts. And more and more, like Mr. Sarkis and Mr. Kinsley, are willing to go to great lengths for a cheaper alternative. ''I got mad when I found out that our labor economics book was something like $90,'' said Mr. Kinsley, who, like Mr. Sarkis, graduated in 2001. ''I didn't think I would read $90 worth in it, so I was determined to find something cheaper, and I spent five hours searching on the Web.''
 
    Mr. Sarkis said Williams's campus bookstore made the high costs all too visible. ''They really rubbed it in,'' he said. ''If you were the highest spender of the day, they'd ring this little bell and say they had a new winner, and give you a lollipop. I got the lollipop twice.''
 
Correction: October 22, 2003, Wednesday A front-page article yesterday about sales of American textbooks overseas at lower prices than in the United States misspelled the given name of a lawyer representing a textbook publishers' association and misstated its name. He is Allan Adler, not Allen. He represents the Association of American Publishers, not the American Association of Publishers.

Some examples:
 
Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry
AMAZON.COM: $146.15
AMAZON.CO.UK: $71.53
DIFFERENCE: $74.62
 
Physics, Volume 1
AMAZON.COM: $93.75
AMAZON.CO.UK: $63.37
DIFFERENCE: $30.38
 
Macroeconomics
AMAZON.COM: $114.00
AMAZON.CO.UK: $71.78
DIFFERENCE: $42.22
 
Linear System Theory and Design
AMAZON.COM: $110.00
AMAZON.CO.UK: $49.81
DIFFERENCE: $60.19
 
Domestic shipping is free for orders over $25 on Amazon.com, though there are some exceptions. British prices have been converted to dollars and include shipping to the United States.

    The meeting of the commonwealth ministers of education is taking place in Edinburgh this week. High on the ministers' agenda is how poor member countries in Africa and Asia can meet their "education for all" targets for universal primary education by 2015. Missing altogether is discussion of how private education can help.
 
    Some may wonder why this is an issue. Surely private education is only for the elite and middle classes. But in urban slums and villages in developing countries more and more poor parents are sending their children to private schools run by education entrepreneurs, with fees of $2 a month or less.
 
    My research has found such schools in battle-scarred buildings in Somalia, in the shanty towns built on stilts above lagoons in Nigeria, scattered among the cardboard huts of Africa's largest slum in Kenya, in crowded villages across India and even in remote mountain regions of China. And these schools are not some minority pursuit. In the Indian city of Hyderabad, for instance, 61 per cent of children attend private unaided school; and in the slum areas 80 per cent of the poorest families got to private schools.
 
    Development circles are aware of this trend but there is a blinkered refusal to think through its implications. Oxfam's education report, for instances, says that private schools for the poor are emerging and that these schools are superior to government schools for the poor. But then it repeats the same old mantra, that "there is no alternative" to blanket public provision to achieve education for all. The World Bank is funding the provision of free primary education in Kenya to the tune of $80m but suburban state schools get all the money and the slum private schools get none. Meanwhile, the British Department for International Development is pouring money into government education in west Africa; simultaneously, poor parents are fleeing the state sector to send their children to private school.
 
    Parents are opting for private schools because of the failure of state schools across Africa and Asia. The Indian government-approved Probe report* on education paints a disturbing picture of the "malfunctioning" of government schools for low-income families. When researchers called unannounced on their random sample, only in 53 per cent of schools was there any teaching activity. In 33 per cent, the headteacher was absent. The low level of teaching occurred even in those schools with relatively good infrastructure, teaching aids and pupil/teacher ratio.
 
    The report says such problems were not apparent in the private schools. In the great majority -- again, visited unannounced -- there "was feverish classroom activity". So much so that most parents reported that, "if the costs of sending a child to a government and a private school were the same, they would rather send their children to a private school".

    What is happening in India is increasingly occurring in other countries across Asia and Africa. Oxfam's education report points out that the "inadequacies of public education systems...have driven many poor households into private systems" across the developing world. In particular, it cities government teacher absenteeism as a reason for poor households sending their children to private schools.
 
    The Probe report says the main advantage of private education is accountability. In private schools, it says, "teachers are accountable to the manager [who can fire them] and...to the parents [who can withdraw their children]". The government schools were less transparent and "this contrast is perceived with crystal clarity by the vast majority of parents".
 
    If poor parents are transferring their children into private education en masse, why are the development experts saying they should be dragged back into government schools? Instead, there should be an exploration of ways in which private schools for the poor can be assisted, through loan schemes and low-cost school improvement packages. Indeed, these experts should find ways to make private schools even more accessible, with public and private vouchers.
 
    Poor parents have made their preferences clear. They want schools that are accountable to them, where teachers turn up and teach. It is time the politicians caught up with them.
 
* Public report on basic education in India, Oxford University Press 1999.
 

    With the help of outside donors, principally the United States Agency for International Development, the institute was patched up enough by 2000 to admit its first full class in a decade. "That class of 840 was largely kids who had been combatants, who had lost their parents, or had been displaced by the war," Mr. Jackolli said. "They were thirsty for the skills to make a living."
 
    About 55 teachers and aides taught the 840 freshmen and sophomores that year. Day students paid $20 a semester; boarders $250. They learned accounting, engineering, business, home economics, secretarial work, auto mechanics, agricultural sciences, carpentry, masonry and plumbing -- skills needed to rebuild the country.
 
    Then came Wednesday morning, April 3, 2002. At about 11 a.m., the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy attacked Kakata and raided the institute, where they raped and kidnapped students, Liberia's Defense Ministry says. Government forces retook Kakata the next day, but the students were too terrorized to return that spring.
 
    School started again last September. But the government did not continue paying the teachers and administrators their salaries of $20 to $40 a month, and the war kept many students away or robbed them of their means to pay tuition. Only a handful remained for classes this spring. The campus is deserted now except for staff members who saved it and a steady stream of refugees.
 
    Last Tuesday, Mr. Walker and six of his colleagues took a visitor on a stroll around the campus, explaining its history.
 
    C. D. B. King, Liberia's 16th president, visited Tuskegee Institute, the black college in Alabama, in the late 1920's, and decided he wanted to transplant it to Africa. He hired Robert Robinson Taylor, the first black graduate of M.I.T., to design the campus and a course of instruction. A white man from Georgia, James L. Sibley, was the first principal. Though he died of malaria on June 28, 1929, the coeducational school was by then in business, backed by the Phelps-Stokes Fund, an American philanthropy, and Firestone Rubber, which controlled a nearby million-acre plantation.
 
    "B.W.I. played a very important role in building this country," Mr. Walker said. Those who built "its roads, its bridges, its public works, its banks," he added, "graduated from here."
 
    "Before the war, we had students from all over West Africa, and faculty from all over the world."
 
    Now, he said, "Students come here every day asking if they can enroll -- they are thirsty. But what happens to them when they graduate? Every industry in this country is closed."
 
    Jacob B. Swee, 39, the head of the institute's agriculture department, said a generation had been lost to war in Liberia. "The young people who should be taking over from us are lying in the bush holding a gun or sitting in a refugee camp," he said.
 
    The institute will reopen as soon as possible, perhaps this winter if Mr. Jackolli can raise the money to buy books and pay teachers. It will take years to restore the campus. Bids submitted in 1999 for that job ranged from $18 million to $25 million.

    The other necessary ingredient for reopening is security; there is little here today. Alumni in the United States sent a container with thousands of dollars' worth of teaching supplies last month. All were looted in Monrovia's port. Hundreds of people fled Kakata last week after rumors spread that the rebels were returning.
 
    The institute's 75th anniversary will be next June 29. Mr. Jackolli hopes, somehow, to raise the money needed to rehabilitate the campus and pay wages by then.
 
    This is how the day would go, in Mr. Walker's mind: "Our school would be reopened. We would have a homecoming. Some of our thousands of alumni in the States would come. Some of our instructional materials would be replaced. There would be jobs for our new graduates. These are some of my dreams."