Posted on 08/27/2024 5:06:55 AM PDT by MtnClimber
It’s not nuclear war. It’s not global warming. It’s closer to home.
Once, America had the world’s best educated workforce. Today, our average American high school graduates are two and a half years behind those in top-performing countries. The curriculum of our colleges is at the level of high schools in top-performing countries.
The U.S. has “gone from being the world’s best educated workforce to the least well educated in the industrial world: an existential crisis,” according to a National Center On Education and the Economy (NCEE) policy brief, co-authored by Marc Tucker.
Having the lowest level of basic skills of any nation in the industrial world means that American Millennial workers can’t compete in the global market. The authors concluded that the enormous gap in income and the dynamics of the global economy and digital technologies threaten our economy and social stability and could lead to the collapse of our constitutional republic.
Public education is now workforce training
NCCE president emeritus Marc Tucker seemed surprised at the results of his group’s study. Yet he must share the blame for the despicable education of American students and its consequences for our economy — both short- and long-term. It was Tucker who wrote the infamous “Dear Hillary” letter, in which he laid out the German-based master plan to centralize education and change it from academic learning to workforce training for a nationally planned and managed economy.
Academics is watered down, with class time reduced for academic subjects to allow time for field trips, encounter groups to discuss feelings, and sessions with counselors about workforce choices. Individual achievement is replaced by cooperative learning, group grading, peer tutoring, block scheduling, job shadowing, mentoring, job site visits, and horizontal enrichment.
Road to Mediocrity
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Our teachers have become less educated as they spend more of their college time in marxist indoctrination.
Alexander Pope really nailed this with The Dunciad
Just last week the government schools in NC took a rain day.
All by design. Stupid/ignorant/dependent people are easier to control by the government.
Government-run schools have no place in a free nation. Period. THE END.
Since the 1930s, there has been a gradual dumbing down of the U.S. public school curriculum with undemanding, non-academic courses and the lowering of standards for academic courses required for graduation.
In was in the 1930s (during the Great Depression) that Marxist indoctrination programs were set up in our major universities.
This period saw an increasing interest in Marxist ideas among intellectuals and students, driven by the economic hardships of the time and the influence of prominent Marxist scholars who were part of Columbia's faculty or who visited the university.
One key figure during this period was the philosopher Sidney Hook, who was a Columbia alumnus and an advocate of Marxist thought, though he later became a critic of Soviet communism. The Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist scholars who fled Nazi Germany, also had an influence on American intellectual circles, including Columbia, where some members lectured or engaged with faculty and students.
To teach a dog a trick, you need to know more than the dog.
Yup.
Rush Limbaugh alluded to this by stating today’s children that attend public school are growing up lazy, selfish, and stupid.
Unfortunately many of those students he was referring to are now woke teachers and woke college professors, and the downward spiral remains intact.
One caveat... this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. And while I absolutely do recognize how poor our education “system” has become (100% due to public schools becoming nothing more than indoctrination camps), but - I was one of those teachers in public schools in my previous career - and what I observed - especially after traveling since then to many areas around the world is this:
Few nations have a compulsory, “free”, K-12 education. Even those that offer it - not every student gets the same opportunity - they have merit systems and serious tracking of students based on grades, effort, capacity, etc.
In the US - thanks to the Marxists and courts - every student has to have the same opportunities - no matter their effort, ability, or intelligence.
In nations that DO offer the equivalent of K-12, most split them at a mid-grade into trade track or academic/higher education track.
Quite a few only offer “free” public education through a certain grade level (often around what we would call 8th grade, some earlier) - and anything beyond requires payment of tuition.
Toss in the GW Bush-approved “no child left behind” policy- what was really the final nail in the “no child gets ahead” reality - the die was cast. The dumbing down of America was set in law.
But comparing America’s education system to radically different models is a bent measure.
The REAL question: why are we not taking back the schools? Trump’s campaign statement regarding the US Department of Education - to close it down - is a pipe dream - yet ought to be a reality. The federal reach into LOCAL education directly correlates to the acceleration of the failures of public schools.
Thank Marxists (especially those in the teachers unions) and courts that decided all kids must receive the exact sam eeducaion - aka the lowest common denominator. You know - “equity”...
Form follows function.
Previously, the function was to create a resilient and dedicated workforce that would grind their lives away as dutiful citizens.
Now, the elitists can import the workers, and the citizens can be dumbed down to just keep voting for handouts and believe that they have any ‘agency’ in the social structure.
Hey, but give them a break ... at least they are woke and know when to use the right pronouns.
The dumbest person I know is a teacher.
It was embarrassing watching two foreign nationals, green card holders, try to explain the US Constitution to her.
And she thinks that because she went to an expensive private school she’s well educated.
Young people are very pliable. They can be corrected in childhood.
'Teens' and young adults not so much.
Lastly, we need to bring them along rather than condemn them. It is absolutely not their fault that they were raised so badly. And it can be remedied.
“Until Lukács showed up, classical Marxist theory was based solely on the economic changes needed to overthrow class conflict. Weil was enthused by Lukács’ cultural angle on Marxism.
“Weil’s interest led him to fund a new Marxist think tank—the Institute for Social Research. It would later come to be known as simply The Frankfurt School.”
“As fate would have it, the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933. It was a bad time and place to be a Jewish Marxist, as most of the school’s faculty was. So, the school moved to New York City, the bastion of Western culture at the time.”
“In 1934, the school was reborn at Columbia University.”
“The school published a lot of popular material. The first of these was Critical Theory.”
“The theory was simple: criticize every pillar of Western culture—family, democracy, common law, freedom of speech, and others. The hope was that these pillars would crumble under the pressure.”
“Next was a book Theodor Adorno co-authored, The Authoritarian Personality. It redefined traditional American views on gender roles and sexual mores as “prejudice.”
“Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany when WWII ended. Herbert Marcuse, another member of the school, stayed in America. In 1955, he published Eros and Civilization.”
“The book called for “polymorphous perversity,” a concept crafted by Freud. It posed the idea of sexual pleasure outside the traditional norms.”
“Marcuse would be the one to answer Horkheimer’s question from the 1930s: Who would replace the working class as the new vanguards of the Marxist revolution?
“Marcuse believed that it would be a victim coalition of minorities—blacks, women, and homosexuals.
“The social movements of the 1960s—black power, feminism, gay rights, sexual liberation—gave Marcuse a unique vehicle to release cultural Marxist ideas into the mainstream.”
“The Frankfurt School’s work has had a deep impact on American culture. It has recast the homogenous America of the 1950s into today’s divided, animosity-filled nation.
“In turn, this has contributed to the undeniable breakdown of the family unit, as well as identity politics, radical feminism, and racial polarization in America.”
https://christianobserver.net/how-the-frankfurt-school-changed-america/
Great points.
Teachers unionized and took over education and nationalized it, controlling curriculums and text books and made everything a left agenda with incompetence and low quality making up the teacher force.
It is interesting that Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany and played an influential role in inventing a new culture (heavily influenced by Critical Theory).
They were Marxists who hated authoritarian rule (in the USSR for example) but went about destroying representative government and unwittingly assisting Deep State authoritarianism in post-WWII Germany and the U.S.
They both blindly failed to recognize that Marxism, in any form, leads to authoritarianism.
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