Are we the only animal species that’s puzzled about how to educate our young?

I’m not a fan of “Animal Planet.” But my mate tunes it in with some regularity. This is because we live in a household with three cats, none of which cares for me. In fact, they actively disdain me. We pointedly ignore one another. They’ve got something against me that I haven’t figured out yet.

Anyhow, I’ve seen enough “Animal Planet” shows to know that educating the young comes naturally to lions, tigers, raccoons, even rats.

From what I’ve seen, all of these lesser creatures teach their young to survive in a very short time. In fact, having done their job, some of these gifted parents don’t even recognize their own offspring two years after they have been born.

Once they’ve been taught, they are out of the nest or the lair and on their own. The offspring won’t slink back home and say, “Gee, Ma, the mating isn’t working out. Can I move back in and bring my brood?”

But we creatures at the tip-top of the food chain are in a constant quandary about how to parent. Speeches are made. Proficiency tests are dreamed up, and their results fudged. When it comes to education, we may be the most dysfunctional animals in the whole kingdom. But we keep trying.

For instance, we have a new governor in Ohio. And he has vowed to be the education governor, like the one before him and the one before him.

But before he’s had a chance to do anything, a new educational group wants to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ensure that every kid in Ohio gets a quality education.

Now, constitutional amendments ought to be handled with kid gloves. Otherwise, the lawyers have a field day. If it’s against the Constitution to deny a kid a quality education, you have to know what “quality” is and what “denial” means.

Normally, they both mean money.

Somehow the shallow thinkers think that money solves stupidity. I wonder who dreamed that up. I’ll bet it wasn’t the teachers. The teachers, God bless them, are trying to teach. But they are rowing upstream against parents and a culture tuned to erode – even disdain – achievement.

We can’t just throw money at education and expect results. We’ve pretended that would work for decades now. And through those decades, quality education has been there. It’s there now.

But you can’t give kids a quality education if you haven’t got enough quality kids. And quality kids come from quality homes. And that’s just true.

And even the quality homes – including the poor, single-parent homes doing their best, breaking their backs – have to compete with more than just poverty. They have to compete with the culture.

Ours is a culture that rewards dumbness. Dumbness gets a break in America. One of our hottest shows is “American Idol,” which celebrates a lack of quality and makes media celebrities out of tin-eared boobs.

Things were bad enough when every inner-city kid thought he might skip school and grow up to be Michael Jordan. But Jordan earned his idolatry. He had talent. It’s a lot worse if we train kids to think they can do nothing worth anything and still be an “Idol.”

So naturally, we’ve got the kids confused. And their parents, a lot of whom never grew up, are clueless, too. Books around the house, a library card, some exposure to artists who really are artists – that would help.

But without that, what do we expect the schools to do? Raise our children? Can’t be done.

A wolf whelp gets an education in two years. We give our children at least 12 years. Twelve years of education. That’s plenty of time to teach them the things that any whelp ought to know.

How to communicate clearly. How to sense danger and avoid it. How to work together in a pack. How to survive for the good of all.

You add math, a little history and some rudimentary geography and you could train a wolf to pass a proficiency test in one semester. And that’s without a constitutional amendment.

Maybe we’re just dumber. Makes me want to go home and howl.