STUPID IN AMERICA (Sunday on FNC at 9pm EST)

FBN ^ | November 6, 2011 | John Stossel

[FreeKeys]

School spending has gone through the roof and test scores are flat.

While most every other service in life has gotten faster, better, and cheaper, one of the most important things we buy -- education -- has remained completely stagnant, unchanged since we started measuring it in 1970.

[massgopguy]

Deval Patrick wants children to be able to read by the 3rd grade. How did they get out of the 1st grade?

[RipSawyer]

“Deval Patrick wants children to be able to read by the 3rd grade. How did they get out of the 1st grade?”
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Good question, I started public school in a poor county in a poor state in 1950 without benefit of kindergarten and by the end of first grade I could read, at a first grade level of course but reading nonetheless. By third grade I could read well enough to enjoy books. By fifth grade my father was already complaining that I loved reading too much.

[MissNomer]

I think a return to a Classical/Traditional Education model would solve a myriad of problems.

My daughter attends a school along this model. There is no computer lab and no wi-fi. The facts that children need to master and the skills of logic and rhetoric are not technology-dependent. That having been said, a classical home-school program could probably be conducted quite well over the Internet, but the technology is not the content; it is merely a vehicle for delivering content, in the same way that a book or an instructor might be. Too much of the high-tech appliances I saw in my daughter's first (public) school was actually edu-tainment and/or babysitting.

Yes, in the upper grades students use computers for writing papers and for some research, but they don't use them in the classroom.

[Lucky Dog]

BTTT

[Safetgiver]

is that education has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.....If you go by that graph, there is another factor to be included; back in the 1960’s we had a movement to change the United States. These were the protesters finanaced by the Communist party ostensibly against the Viet Nam War. These protester went to college, became teachers (many of them) and administrators. They had “ hopey/ changey in mind for the education system and, like our now selected “Hopey/ Changey” in Chief has ruined everything just as the Marxist party had indoctrinated them to do.