I know a lady that has been substituting in various elementary schools this year. Wanna know what goes on in the schools? Get your sub card and go see.
She speaks of subbing in 2nd grade classes where the kids don’t know the most basic facts such as their address or phone number (My kids knew their address and phone number before they went to Pre-K). They can neither add nor subtract, when they should be learning multiplication tables at that age. The can’t read a lick, and the teacher reads everything to them, including their tests. When they do poorly on a test they are allowed to correct their mistakes until everyone has 100. She happened to be there when report cards were given out in this class - surprisingly all of these dullards are pulling A’s and B’s.
How can kids be expected to learn if they are not required to read? These kids are set up for failure later on in school because they are not being taught the fundamentals in the lower grades. And their parents likely think they are doing great because their grades are good.
Phonics and reading were the reasons I began looking into homeschooling my children. I taught my kids to read and never looked back.
Public schools teach to the test and they still can’t pass them.
But, nevertheless, a surprising number of people turn out to be very sharp, and make a very good living by fooling all the dummies.
Textbooks have already been written stating President Trump is insane and illegitimate.
When I took over as Dept. Chair for high school history department, I reached out to the History chairs at the colleges and universities to which my high school typically sent kids to ask what skills/ knowledge sets incoming students lacked, especially in U.S. History.
Universally, those professors told me that incoming students just didn’t know enough historical facts, including basic things like the dates of the Civil War or names of presidents in different periods.
High school teachers pride themselves on teaching kids to think, but they forget that underlying knowledge is requisite for higher level thought.
Why should they need to know the dimensions of a sheet of plywood?
Keeping up on the K-12 lobotomy?
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Few if any could actually recite the multiplication tables and often have trouble distinguishing addition from multiplication.
It is painful watching young men mentally counting to find the product of two one-digit numbers.
“It’s guaranteed those two-thirds will never be literate, as that term has been traditionally used. Some may learn to read in a painful struggling way, but they won’t be reading a daily paper or curling up with a good book.”
I’m certainly not defending the public school system - far from it. But isn’t this a bit over the top? I went to a very good private school, but still did poorly in elementary school for whatever reason - I was a bit of a social misfit, easily overwhelmed, usually distracted and unfocused.
Around eighth grade, my curiosity began to develop and I became interested in everything around me - I discovered I had a good brain and could even compete in school. No thanks to my droning teachers, I began to self-educate and then there was nothing stopping me.
That was in the 50’s and early 60’s. In the 80’s and early 90’s, I watched some of my children (also at a fine private school) go through the same transformation. I don’t have first hand knowledge of public schools of the past, but I know plenty of people who attended, and their stories aren’t that different from mine.
Today, things are different in public schools. They are an abject failure, but their biggest failure isn’t what they FAIL to teach, but rather what they SUCCEED in teaching - namely, progressivism and political correctness.
All you need to become a fast reader is intellectual curiosity, which comes naturally to our species. Public schools of today are dumbing down that curiosity, punishing dissent and shaming questioning minds. They routinely shame young children who do not conform to the progressive ideology - stifling their natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge.
Falling behind in reading and math skills in the fourth grade is not the end of the world - it’s amazing how fast a child can catch up, once their interest is sparked.
Having said that, I do agree with the gist of the article: the public school system is causing untold damage to our youth - just not in the way the article describes.