Posted on 11/01/2018 6:43:40 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Is there a law somewhere which requires that public schools must aim for mediocrity?
Nobody denies that our toys, including games and robots, are smarter than ever. Meanwhile, everyone seems to agree that we humans are moving in the other direction: dumber and dumbest.
The unanimity of opinion is rather shocking. You see on the Internet a lot of headlines like this: “Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing — and some experts argue it's because humans have reached their intellectual peak.”
As for why, there is a colorful variety of opinion. Some people blame pollution, diet, and/or environmental degradation. Others look for sociological causes, for example, fewer children or too many. Or is there genetic decay? Molecules and genes wear down just because they are old and exhausted.
Star2, a news site, announced: “Science is telling us that we’re getting dumber….An Icelandic study…says we might be headed on a ‘downwards spiral into imbecility’… Researchers at deCODE, a genetics firm in Reykjavik, identified ‘education genes,’ genes that predispose humans to becoming more educated, and noted that there has been a decline over the past 65 years – meaning that the genes that make us want to get educated are becoming rarer.”
A headline in the Daily Mail asks, “Were the Victorians cleverer than us? Research indicates a decline in brainpower and reflex speed thanks to 'REVERSE' natural selection.”
Or maybe we are inflicting this damage on ourselves. According to Charlotte Iserbyt's famous book title, our public schools are engaged in “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.” Public education seems to be cunningly designed to render students less intelligent and less capable, most commonly by making literacy and other basic skills harder to achieve.
Progressive education, according to Ayn Rand, was never designed to educate minds but to mutilate them. Public schools these days, though handsome architecturally, seem to be the intellectual equivalent of a crack house.
The theories and methods now used throughout K-12 education do make students dumber. Here’s the triad most commonly seen: students can’t read except in a fumbling way due to Sight-words; they can’t do basic arithmetic and become calculator-dependent, due to Common Core Math; and they don't learn very much factual information, due to Constructivism.
It was once emphatically understood that the role of teachers was to raise the intelligence of their students and make them smarter. But now the role of the teacher is being cut down to nothing. Even if teachers wanted to raise intelligence, they won’t know how to do it. Constructivist theory, now dominating, drives teachers to the margins. Achtung, teachers: No serious teaching allowed. No direct instruction. Don't even try passing knowledge on to the next generation.
ASCD, a big voice in the Education Establishment, has an illuminating article about “the teacher’s role.” Illuminating because it’s an endless article (11,500 words) in no hurry to say very much. This shows what our experts are mired in: jargon, rhetoric, sophistry, propaganda, posturing, mush. A teacher could spend weeks carefully reading this article and end up further away from knowing what the job is or how to do it correctly.
On the other hand, this is what the government of Ghana states is the role of the teacher: “to communicate information.” So brief, so complete, so beautiful. You probably cannot find that elemental truth on an American website. Facts and knowledge, that’s what genuine teaching is all about.
The changes and decline in K-12 may be a case of extraordinarily bad timing. As the environment and many factors work against intelligence, our own Education Establishment is working hardest of all. These people will not give up their sweet socialist dream of everyone being equal, i.e. mediocre.
If all the prophets of doom are correct, our school officials have chosen the worst time in history to diminish what brains we have left. The bad timing is scary, perhaps even suicidal.
Clearly, we need to go on the opposite direction. Our so-called education experts need to run back to the drawing board. We need to make students smarter than ever before because now the bottom is collapsing under us. We are going to get a doubling affect.
It’s shocking to think that a hundred years ago, teachers were constantly pushing, poking and cajoling to make students work harder. There was a dunce cap for students who didn’t study. But now there’s little pressure not to be a dunce. This is a sad shift.
The Education Establishment has achieved its dumbing-down by the simple device of neglecting the traditional truths of education. Namely, teach basic skills and foundational knowledge. Everything commonsensical has been undermined. That's what we have to go back to. And maybe we could start by eliminating the impostors in our school system. These are the emperors with no clothes. They can talk-talk-talk about education but what they really care about is social engineering. We’ve had quite enough of that.
After a stroke, people sometimes have to teach themselves how to write or tell time. You have to start at the beginning and learn skills again. It’s doable; you can come back 100%. This country has, so to speak, been the victim of a weird stroke engineered by our self-appointed experts. Now we have to go to rehab. We have to work to make ourselves healthy again.
QED: Every American needs to learn more about what goes on in our public schools. If you know what's wrong, then you can fix it.
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Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is “Saving K-12”
It’s not a law, but it’s certainly on the list of Commie goals to have a dumbed-down population that is more easily controlled and manipulated.
Enter the teachers who pick up the tools for this when they get their degrees from a 4-year indoctrination center.
No, it’s all this teaching to the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominators have reached their intellectual peak. Inclusion classes should only apply to those classes where the low IQ students can compete. When they no longer can, it doesn’t mean to dumb down the rest of the class. Everyone gets a participation ribbon!
To the left an informed population is dangerous. The uninformed can be easily deceived. That is why leftist news reports false stories about things that are non-political. It took me a long time to figure out why they were reporting fake stories about almost anything.
bump!
Globalists do not want a us superpower so for 40 years have been watering down education on purpose.
They also knew that teachers would be fine with it because they know the general makeup of he teacher that is fine with it, namely female, lazy but thinks they work hard, and thinks indoctrination is teaching objective thinking.
I know exactly who were education majors at my university. Apart from the journalists they were the dumbest, laziest, most partying people around.
If this theory is correct, then homeschoolers should become the ruling class.
They will if they ever reach critical mass. Right now, just under 4% of students are homeschooled.
Since today a high quality K-12 curriculum can easily be stored on an average iPad, spending billions to keep these buggy whip factories/collectivist indoctrination centers in business is about the dumbest thing America could possibly do with its money.
I think we need a nation wide standard test. It would start in the 5th grade,9th grade, and in 12 grade to graduate to higher course work. The 12 grade test is your college entrance exam. It can’t be called racist as everyone has to pass it. Let teachers, parents, and administrators come up with the test. Doesn’t matter what city or state you reside in you must pass the test to advance to the next grade. We need to eliminate the federal department of eduction and give that responsiblity back to the states. Eliminate government student loans.
By the way, the first standardized test my homeschoolers took was the GRE for graduate school.
I was a good B student in high school. I returned to start a my degree and these kids were stupid. They actually got anger with me cause I kept blowing the curve.
It’s a good strategy for Marxists.
Create a couple of generations of totally dependent lemmings who will elect any vile and evil narcissist as their Dictator in exchange for Free Stuff.
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