As Americans, we tend to be pretty full of ourselves, and this is especially true of our young people. But do we really have reason for such pride? According to a shocking new report from the Educational Testing Service, Americans between the ages of 20 and 34 are way behind young adults in other industrialized nations when it comes to literacy, mathematics and technological proficiency. Even though more Americans than ever are going to college, we continue to fall farther and farther behind intellectually. (emphasis added) So what does this say about us? Sadly, the truth is that Americans are stupid. Our education system is an abysmal failure, and our young people spend most of their free time staring at the television, their computers or their mobile devices. And until we are honest with ourselves about this, our intellectual decline is going to get even worse.
According to this new report from the Educational Testing Service, at this point American Millennials that have a four year college degree are essentially on the same intellectual level as […]
You blame the parents and people who choose and create alternatives for public schools which have become total failures, but you say nothing at all about the supposed educators who ran the public schools into the failures they are. You blame our failing educational system on “fascists and Christian fundamentalists” you accuse of destroying our educational system to create profits “for a small group of rich investors.” I know of no private school which generates profits of any substance. You have let your left wing political beliefs blind you to the real facts..
In the first place, parents who take their children from public to private schools do not give a damn for the profits or lack thereof of the school. They care about their children’s education, and they know, they have learned from experience and observation, that the public schools of this country are utter failures. These parents take on a huge financial burden because they have no other choice.
Yes, some of them do it because of their religious beliefs, because the government/public school system is hostile to the parents’ understanding of God and morality, but for most parents even that is secondary to their desperate hope that their children can actually learn their basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The destruction of public schools in this country began in the late 60s as ideologues began to take the system over and substitute their social engineering theories for the teaching methods which had worked for two hundred years. They didn’t want to harm student’s little egos, so they mustn’t ever tell a child he was wrong. Spelling, pronunciation of words, vocabulary, in short everything central to intelligent reading, was abandoned. Literally they would not correct a student’s spelling because that was somehow “limiting his creativity.” Ditto math, which clearly was a threat to student egos since every problem had correct answers, answers which did not depend on how a student felt about it at that moment. These theories, and the people who forced them on our schools, destroyed public education.
What this yielded was chaos, generations who can’t and don’t read. Meanwhile, the ideologues also “knew” how enlightened they, as opposed to the rest of us, were, so it was only right that they tell their captive students what to think. Not how to think, God forbid that students should be able to think for themselves. No, public education became lectures in what to think; what all obedient servants of the greater good — the big, controlling government the self-styled elites, and, sadly, you, promote so regularly — must think in order to be proper peon subjects.
So far I have written of the ideologues as if they were malignant. Their result was, but they weren’t. They actually believed they were so much smarter and better than everyone else, so they felt justified in manipulating the educational system and their captive students’ minds. They did not intend to destroy the system, but it was the net result of their social engineering.
They solidifed their control of public through unionization of the teachers. Strange that you castigate the alternate schools so strongly, yet don’t even mention the people in control of the public schools have been such gross failures for the past forty years. You might attribute this to money allegedly lost due to students leaving for private schools, but in fact the actual money spent on public education in America has increased — INCREASED — every year since 1960. Yet public education has increasingly failed over the same period.
There were no charter schools in 1968, and very few church schools. The failure of public schools which began in the sixties has generated a steady demand for alternatives. You blame it on everyone seeking an alternative, but you give a complete pass to the very people, and government, responsible for the failure.