Posted on 07/31/2014 7:22:34 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
It’s sad but true. Nearly 50% of high school seniors know the names of The Three Stooges (Larry, Moe and Curly) but can’t name the three branches of government. And fully one-third of students asked for the origin of the statement “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” responded that this came from the Bill of Rights when it actually came from The Communist Manifesto.
So says Dr. Walter Williams, the eminent free market economist and higher education critic, who explained in a recent column at Townhall.com that examples like this are a testament to the “success” of the education establishment in dumbing down America’s students.
Dr. Williams, who still teaches at George Mason University, points out that the topic of global warming/climate change/climate disruption is a perfect example of how students have been dumbed down. “Are you for or against global warming, later renamed climate change and more recently renamed climate disruption? Environmentalists have renamed it because they don’t want to look silly in the face of cooling temperatures. About 650 million years ago, the Earth was frozen from pole to pole, a period scientists call Snowball Earth. The Earth is no longer frozen from pole to pole. There must have been global warming, and it cannot be blamed on humans.”
During Obama’s first presidential run in 2008, Dr. Williams recalled that his pronouncements about “hope and change” were greeted by thunderous applause. And even more applause greeted the candidate’s statement that “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” To Dr. Williams, who does not suffer fools gladly, “Only a deranged environmental wacko and duped people could believe that a non-god can change ocean depths.” Another area where the pointy heads have succeeded in dumbing down the nation is in the area of history, which has been replaced by “historical amnesia.” As historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote in “The Disuniting of America:” “History is to the nation ... as memory is to the individual. As an individual deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, not knowing where he has been or where he is going, so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.”
To support his statements, Dr. Williams pointed to results of a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress test where “just 20 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders and 12 percent of 12th-graders were at grade-level proficiency in American history in the 2010 exams.”
socialist indoctrination bump
I used to love when Williams sat in for Rush.
I used to ask, in a sarcastic way, of course, if they were proud of being illiterate. They had no answer to that, of course. I continued the "mini-lecture" by telling them that those teachers did them a GREAT DISSERVICE and prepared them only to have menial, low-level paying jobs...which they wouldn't get anyway since all the illegals took THOSE jobs for pennies on the Yankee dollar.
Most of those of whom I speak HAD some brains but took the "low path," were on welfare and were going to stay there for their entire lives. WHAT a waste.
WHO could the GOP put up in 2016 to WIN?
A degree in “education” points to a very high probability that the owner knows absolutely nothing of use to any modern society.
History became stupid when they removed God, Christianity, and the Bible from it. The history of Western Civilization is the history or Christianity. It became dates, names, places with no cultural context. It’s pointless. You may just as well know the names of tribal chiefs of the Marshal Islands, and when they built a hut as know when Hagia Sophia was built.
Special education teachers kniw and do much og great use to the student and society.
Our Dear Leaders like ignorant people because they will vote for corrupt government.
Dr. Williams, claiming it is a widely held view in academia, calls education schools “the ghettos of universities.”
Historical Alzheimer’s — every day a new, unsoiled day — no sin, no guilt — do your thing today.
They scrape out the SAT barrel, and what sticks to the bottom become teaching majors.
ATTENTION ALL STUDENTS: Womyn’s Studies, Queer Studies, Black Studies WILL NOT prepare you for a decent career! If you are black and on an athletic scholarship, DO NOT rely on being drafted by the NFL or NBA. Not enough openings!
I almost fell out of my chair when I was watching “Boyz N The Hood” and a prospective black student was told he only needed a 700 on his SAT to be accepted at UCLA.
ah, you realize that the truly progressive course does not put men in the title. It reminds me of the anchor in Harrisburg, PA about 40 years ago who legally changed her last name from Zimmerman to Zimmerwoman
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