MARINA DEL REY, CA--Imagine that the pilot of the airliner you are flying in dies of a heart attack just as the plane enters a violent storm at twenty thousand feet. The young copilot, educated under the new "fuzzy math," for the first time has to plot and fly a course through the storm to a distant airport. Will he make it?
      This is the intriguing story premise developed by Dr. Edwin A. Locke, senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, to dramatize the frightening real-world consequences of contemporary American education. The story probes the desperate mind of the young copilot as he is confronted by multiplying threats. When the computer malfunctions, for example, he has to compute by hand and tries to figure out an "approximate" answer, unconcerned with exactitude "because every teacher he had ever had in school and college had assured him that 'you cannot be certain of anything.' In school he had never been held to absolute standards."
      The ultimate result? The copilot's "carefully cultivated illusion of self-esteem--based on a lifetime of having met no standards, having acquired no certain knowledge, and having answered no questions requiring an objectively correct answer--began to crumble, confronted by an inexorable reality that could not be faked. The realization slowly hit him that his self-esteem was a sham and that, in fact, he was unfit to function in the real world." The plane never reaches its destination.
      Dr. Locke's point: today's students learn no objectively correct answers, no exacting standards, no certainties, no absolutes, no valid foundation for self-esteem--and as a result they are a generation of mental cripples flying blind in the real world.

ARI senior fellow Dr. Edwin A. Locke is available for interviews.