Posted on 01/01/2013 5:32:24 AM PST by IbJensen
After watching the viral video of the Obamaphone lady in October, I thought to myself — we are in a lot of trouble.
It forced me to consider just how literate are the voters and people of the US. It’s very hard to tell given so few studies nail it down to specifics. For some reason the federal government does not want to get an exact account of how many illegal immigrants we have or how much illiteracy there is in the US.
The census bureau delves into high school graduation levels, but not literacy rates. Perhaps because literacy and immigration and the problems of inner cities are connected. Such studies would not interest the multicultural US elites who do not really want to know the truth. In order to come to some conclusion about how educated the people of the US might be, one is forced to do guess-and-by-golly observations regarding why so many Americans seem so dumb, crude, and uncivilized.
As I discovered, educating for dumb and a dumber in the US goes back some time in our history.
Up until the late 1800’s a good education in the United States could be obtained without government interference or oversight. Surprisingly, 50 percent of a population of 3 million in 1776 were indentured servants and 20 percent were African slaves. Yet during that time 600,000 copies of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had been sold in the United States and had been read by countless Americans.
By 1812, with a population of approximately 7 million, Pierre DuPont wrote in Education in the United States, “…that out of every 1,000 persons fewer than four can’t read or do numbers.” He attributed this fact to traditional dinner table debates over passages read from the Bible. In other words, children learned how to read with an understanding of what they were reading and they knew their numbers. All this education took place at home or in one room school houses, or “Dame Schools,” primarily taught by women. The children who came out of these schools grew up to be self reliant and individualistic, in marked contrast to the Prussian system which produced an obedient, collectivist trained populace..
Implementation of the Prussian System was to become the goal of Edward Everett, America’s first PhD. As Governor of Massachusetts, Everett had to deal with the problem of the influx of poor Irish Catholics into his state. In 1852, with the support of Horace Mann, another strong advocate of the Prussian model, Everett made the decision to adopt the Prussian system of education in Massachusetts. Unfortunately for the children and poor Irish Catholics of Massachusetts and elsewhere, the system produced a willing, cheap labor force with minimal reading and numbers skills. The Everetts of the world understood that people who could read and understand are dangerous because they are intellectually equipped to find out things for themselves, thus becoming a threat to already established power elites.
Shortly after Everett and Mann collaborated to adopt the Prussian system, the Governor of New York set up the same method in 12 different New York schools on a trial basis. Incredibly, within two weeks he declared the system a total success and took control of the entire education system in the State of New York. In a “blitzkrieg” action with no debate, public hearing, or citizen involvement, government forced schooling was on its way in America.
The Results of the Prussian System
The history of American education since the acceptance of the Prussian system is checkered with failure and elitism. From the time of John Dewey, who felt people should be defined by groups and associations and who believed that people who were well read were dangerous, to our own era, U.S. education has suffered. We have, in this day and age, the disheartening statistics showing 33 percent or our nation’s college graduates can’t read or calculate well enough to perform the jobs they seek.
Working against the concepts and principles the Founding Fathers provided in the Constitution, the Prussian system has produced a gradual but statistically provable decline in literacy and intellectual capability of typical Americans. We can track the five different stages that American education has gone through: 1750-1852—The idea of government controlled schools was conceived; 1852-1900—It was politically debated in state legislatures; 1900-1920—We had government controlled industrialized factory modeled schooling; 1920-1960—Schools changed from being academically focused to becoming socialized; and 1960 to the Present—Schools became psychological experiment labs.
In the year 1941 the Defense Department was preparing for World War II. In testing 18 million men between 1941 and 1944, the Defense Department found 96 percent of those tested were literate. During this same period, among African Americans who were tested—the majority of whom had only three years of schooling—80 percent were found to be literate. By literate we mean that Americans, both white and black, could read with understanding.
During the Korean War the Department of Defense tested three million men for service and only 19 percent were found to be literate. In less then 10 years there had been a 500 percent rise in illiteracy. Perplexed, the Defense Department investigated and found that the same test had been used during the two wars and the only difference was that those men and women tested during the Korean War had more schooling—at a significantly higher cost.
Twenty years later, around 1970, the same test was used at the time of a new war. Among the Vietnam draftees and enlistees who were tested for literacy only 27 percent were found to be capable of reading with understanding the material which they needed in order to serve in the armed forces. Again the major difference between American soldiers in the 1940’s and the 1970’s was more schooling for the latter group at a higher cost to the taxpayers.
Consider that the billions of taxpayer dollars were spent over the time period from the 1940’s to the present increased by some 350 percent with totally unacceptable results despite all the increased spending. In 1996 statistics prepared by the National Association of Education for Progress showed that some 44 percent of African Americans could not read at all. The same set of statistics shows that illiteracy among whites has quadrupled. Incredibly, educating Americans continues to cost massive amounts of taxpayer dollars to achieve unacceptable and devastatingly poor results.
Manipulating for the Collective State
As education expert and author Beverly Eakman states in “The Culture Wars: “… Americans bought critical changes in behavior, beliefs, and worldviews. By applying advertising and agitation in just the right proportions, our adversaries learned they could create a mob mentality and suppress independent thinking. Technically, this is called the science of coercion. If done properly, one can fool nearly all the people all the time.”
Mastery Learning, Outcome-Based Education, School-to-Work, Goals 2000, Profiles in Learning – all fads and educational trends put into operation in the nation’s school system since the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Now, those of you who have followed along thus far are asking: What does all this have to do with Emmanuel Kant, Hegel, Marx, the Frankfurt School of Sociology, Freud, Jung, Adler, Rogers and Maslow and the price of tea in China?
All these things are connected because they betray and explain a mindset. A worldview, a philosophy that seeks to shape humanity, the individual as a moral relativist, undiscerning, while building a thought pattern that denies or deconstructs facts – even those in math and science.
Because children are not given the grounding by doing the hard stuff of learning, the memorization, the drills, the creation of pattern and discipline, they will never be truly free to THINK on their own. Without the base, the technique, someone will always be manipulating or recreating them according to the latest fad, trend or totalitarian frame of reference that intellectuals usually succumb to.
According to Bev Eakman, one of the techniques that the educational mind Gestapo uses is that “Teaching techniques were … OBE [Outcome Based Education] inspired: cooperative learning, multi-age grouping, minimal failures, constant retesting and remediation, teachers as coaches or facilitators, inclusive classrooms, and the vacuous mantra, ‘All children can learn [at a high level].’ ”
The problem is that for most children, especially recent immigrants, inner city kids, and some rural areas, education is not obtained at a high level. Pew Hispanic Research claims that 75 percent of Hispanics graduate from high school. Meantime, American born black males have a 47 percent high school graduation rate. What this means is we have a home grown lower class that is ill educated and ill prepared in an era when college grads are flipping burgers and driving cabs. The outlook is not good and Obamaphone lady may be the new normal.
Conclusion
The cost to America of the under or ill educated can’t be measured in just dollars and cents. While the economic cost is monumental as indicated by the $30 billion annual Department of Education budget and billions more spent by local communities, the lack of results for the dollars we spend is catastrophic. We are paying billions to maintain a system which is ineffective and dangerous—because it is not teaching people the critical intellectual skills which are crucial to making economic and political decisions for themselves.
What is the answer? While the privileged class may choose to send its children to private schools, most Americans have only one option, public education. Public schools are the country’s largest employer and the largest mediator in contracts. Unfortunately, the public education establishment is so powerful it can outlast public outrage. Consequently Americans face a dismal educational future unless we insist on parental choice. Until then there is little likelihood that a Prussian inspired educational system will change and deliver the desired results—a literate, intellectually capable citizenry.
won’t work. There are many red parts of blue states and vice-versa.
If you'll look at the silent letter rules I posted, which were known and used in the 1830s, you'll see there are phonics rules for the words you mentioned.
Before I found the sets of rules from the early 1800s I believed the same as you that there were many words such as those without rules.
There were 11 words in the english language in 1830 that couldn't be deciphered using all the known phonics rules.
As far as other languages, you're right, I prefer Russian, as you pronounce every letter, no substitutes, no silent, no words meaning different things, 10 endings for conjugation and declension, far better than english.
Do I ever wish you were right!
I could dig out many tests from elementary school books from the 1800s, but it was easier to do a quick search.
I searched by, "1800s 5th grade exam". I got an 8th grade 1895 one that from what I have personally seen and used in books in homeschooling.
I doubt many present day college grads would stand an icicle's chance in Hell of passing it.
Here's the link to it:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2008/04/then_and_now.html
And here are some questions from it:
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of 'lie', 'play', and 'run.'
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 65 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus .
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas .
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865.
Orthography (Time, one hour) (Do we even know what this is???)
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, and syllabication.
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, sub vocal, diphthong, cognate letters, and lingual.
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.' (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi-, dis-, mis-, pre-, semi-, post-, non-, inter-, mono-, and sup-.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication
Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco
. 6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of: Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.
The Way We Are
Case Western Reserve's Ted Gup, in the April 11, 2008 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes about how little his students know:
"Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries - China, Cuba, India, and Japan - not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses - half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975."
A study by the National Center for Education Statistics found that only 31 percent of college graduates could read a ''complex book and extrapolate from it." Furthermore, the study found that far fewer college graduates are leaving school with ''the skills needed to comprehend routine data, such as reading a table about the relationship between blood pressure and physical activity."
From "Failing Our Students, Failing America", the Intercollegiate Studies Institute report on the testing of 7,000 college students at 50 colleges, 2007-2008:
"College seniors know astoundingly little about America's history, political thought, market economy and international relations... Not one college surveyed can boast that its seniors scored, on average, even a 'C' in American civic knowledge. Harvard seniors scored highest, but their overeall average was 69.9%, a 'D+'."
It's the same here. Let their greed rule their little greedy hearts. Offer them everything so we can get the hell out of Dodge. It'll take them time to loot all we've left - and by that time our “Blue United States” will have a fence around it and Border Guards tasked with keeping them out.
They can also have the ‘brown’ country they speak of with such longing - as if there aren't any ‘brown’ countries in the world. And we'll have all those ‘mean’ people - the ones who insist on work and stuff.
I think they'll love to leave. Why would they want to stay when they can have it all their way? Marriage between any groups? Free abortions and birth control for anyone old enough to get pregnant. Every job run by a Union. Every union boss paid with forced ‘membership fees’.
They can open their borders to all the third world countries - no restrictions on drug usage. No cops... No rules - just right... as they say.
And we can build fences to keep them out. It's a win win. The financial incentives will work. Most Democrats will leave willingly. The elites might be smart enough to figure out where they're ideas really lead - but they'll probably have too much pride to admit it... and they'll leave too. It's worth working toward. Why should we hold democrats back from their dreams? Why should they fight us in congress? They can have it all... we just want the hell out of here before they get it all....
Try this link http://www.thudfactor.com/reading-education-military-literacy-scores-and-john-taylor-gatto/
There is not a simple correlation between years of schooling and overall knowledge, at least not for all schools.
There are several flaws in your correlation argument. One is clear if you look at what comes out of Detroit schools after 12 years of 'education'. Another is that we are talking about literacy, not overall knowledge. And you also assume that the schools were of the same quality over the time in question.
More years at a good school might have a correlation, but more time spent at a crap school is just wasted time.
It wasn't much better up north outside the cities. Even in the cities it wasn't until after WWII that the high school graduation rate rose above 50%. If you're trying to tell me people with eighth grade educations or less are more knowledgeable than kids who graduated from high school or college, I think you're sadly mistaken.
My elderly relatives didn't spend their spare time reading Shakespeare or going to the history lecture. They were busy working many hours a day in their early teens. None of my grandparents or great grandparents attended school beyond high school. Neither of my grandparents graduated from high school. I have no elderly cousins on either side of my family who went beyond high school.
When as a child I visited my elderly relative's homes, I saw no reading material other than newspapers and magazines, and rarely even those. No books. I was the weirdo in my family because I used to read the encyclopedia. My father never picked up a volume except to read the volume that had information of golf. It sounds like you're of the opinion that everybody 100 years ago received a great education, and all children who went to public schools after WWII all had lousy educations. I sincerely doubt that.
I think that test you discovered has been found to be bogus. I sincerely doubt 99% of the schoolkids of that time period could have passed that test. I’ll reiterate: few kids from the 1800s went to school. Most kids were needed at home to help on the farm.
If you go to Snopes the first thing you see in red letters is FALSE.
But then if you go all the way through the long explanation, you'll see Snopes NEVER says the test itself isn't real, in fact you'll see it verbatim there.
What Snopes claims is false is the premis that 1895 students were better educated than modern ones, as these were specific questions of the era and things like art weren't included.
Admittedly, I was lazy just searching for this test and using it as an example.
It was faster and easier than digging into my considerable library of 1800s texts and hand typing in a test.
You would be amazed at the quizzes and tests scattered throughout the school books of that era and the level of knowledge required.
For instance, about any 5th grade math book of the era teaches how to generate, read and interpret a P&L statement. As most math teachers today what a P&L statement is. Good luck
Your partly and mostly right.
Few kids went to school for long would be a better way of putting it. Many quit by the end of 5th grade.
That's why P&L statements and much other knowledge needed to run a family farm business was taught by the 5th grade level. Not all of running a farm is shoveling crap and milking cows, haying etc. A great deal of it is dealing with the financials and measurement, breeding and genetics, etc. There's a LOT more to it than most folks know, especially if you have a SUCCESSFUL farm.
As a genealogy nut I spend a LOT of time looking at cunsus data from 1850 on up.
Most kids were listed as "at school" at least to 5th grade, and a larger amount than I (or you) would have thought up to 8th grade.
8th grade in 1890 would have been the equivalent of 15th grade now.
If you're trying to tell me people with eighth grade educations or less are more knowledgeable than kids who graduated from high school or college, I think you're sadly mistaken.
It depends on which high school. If you take Detroit, then I'm not mistaken at all, since those kids seem to learn precious little these days. If you are talking about Exeter Academy, then you are probably right.
There is still evidence around of what was expected of an 8th grade education in the 19th century - from the Kansas State Library web site: http://skyways.lib.ks.us/genweb/saline/society/exam.html
‘Mark my words. I am going to have more problems with members of my own party than I will with Democrats…If anybody comes to me demanding this and telling me to do that, they’ll be finished. They tried to do that in Texas with English-only [an attempt to dismantle bilingual education]. But I said: “No. You are going to destroy this party by being extremist”…I had to change the imagery in [sic] my party. I had to change the idea that my party was against things. Against immigrants. Against public schools. I wanted people to know I was for something, so that people wanted to hear what I stood for.’
- George W. Bush, quoted in London Financial Times, December 12, 2000.
That might have been a test for a very small segment of the student population i.e. the very few students preparing for college, but the idea that an average school kid could answer test questions like that is utterly ridiculous given the little schooling most Americans received at that time.
I don’t doubt a lot of farmers from those days had to be sharp on a variety of subjects. But that’s a specific kind of knowledge. But very few American school kids received the kind of education that would allow them to discourse on a variety of subjects like little Socrateses or Platos.
As a side note, my father and a lot of my cousins were graduates of Detroit high schools. While they undoubtedly received a better fundamental education than today’s Detroit school kids, less than half graduated from high school. My father graduated from a Detroit high school, but going to college was unthought of by most people in his economic class.
Because they want to force us to change to their immorals
Think of "Gay marriage" -- the Episcopalians allow this, but there are gay Catholics who want the CAtholic church to allow this -- why? Why do they want to stay Catholic if the Church "oppresses them"? Who not join the ECUSA?
No, they want everyone to be forced to 'accept them' -- that's the way with liberals
I have no idea about Russian -- can't read Cyrillic :( but still know a few words
I agree with you that it is a lot more precise and has precise conjugation and declension so that by one sentence with a minimum number of words you can identify the number of people or objects, their gender, direction etc.
I understand that Sanskrit and Latin are equally or more precise
hey, but the rules still don’t indicate why bough and bought are pronounced differently.
Liberal elites won't have to fight for gay marriage or brother/sister marriage or man and chimp marriage. They can have it all - without us objecting - because we'll be living somewhere else. They'll be FREE - free at last as they like to say...
You might be right - that their real goal is to bring us to our knees - to humiliate us. But they don't have the courage to speak that truth so they won't. They'll 'get their religion' and my guess is they won't bother attending. It's all a stunt for them - if you're right - and you might be... If so, they'll totally lose interest when they've 'won'.
When we're gone, how will they entertain themselves? Luckily we don't really have to know or care... This is a goal worth working toward.
ping
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