‘This is just a small tidbit, but when I lived in Denver I taught at a community college. I really could not believe does the high schools have let those students graduate with the level of reading and writing skills they had. unbelievable.’
...and yet nothing gets done. 25 years ago I read ‘Inside American Education’, a book by the legendary Thomas Sowell detailing how horrible American education had become - and that was A GENERATION AGO. That was all that I needed to know to NEVER send my kids to public school, and they never stepped into one, at least as a student. It took some work for me, moving to Texas, to keep living costs down, living in a lower class area near work [not a slum, but not where Senators live either], not caring about what I drove [since I could walk to work, if needed], and certainly not giving a crap about what the Jones’ thought of me.
But having such a terrible education system in the US ended up making the lives of my kids great. All that I had to do was give them a traditional education in reading [phonics] and math [times tables, no calculators] and they were years ahead of their [now dumbed-down] grade level, got into good colleges, and got good degrees. And my kids were no Einsteins - they could care less about doing school work and it often took some ‘tough love’ to get them away from their toys [obviously they didn’t have video games or internet access], but it was dumbing down of all the other kids that made it so easy for them - Had this been 50 years ago, or Japan/China/India/Russia today, my kids would have been average, at best. So, in a way, I don’t really care if our education system improves, since if it doesn’t, my grand kids will again have a huge advantage over ‘normally-educated’ kids.
But most people, virtually everyone that knows my kids, what they’ve done, how they were educated...still send their kids to the public schools [but they do drive nicer cars than us, that’s for sure!]
Conservatives punted education to the Left and don’t seem to have any serious interest in getting it back. The really wealthy simply send their kids to expensive private schools, so they don’t give a crap. The Upper Middle Class live in ‘wonderful’ neighborhoods, with ‘wonderful’ schools, at least that’s they believe, so they don’t want anything to change, and so they elect people, mostly Republicans, but who keep the Leftist education system in place, and of course Democrats have no interest in improving anything.
Stalemate.
Yep. And they sure are interested in propping up this public school.
To me, the reason to homeschool wasn't about the schools' "dumbing down." It was that school officials were treating the kids like numbers, forcing medication onto the boys, and pushing a political agenda. They didn't really seem to care about the kids.