It's not the current state of education that's at fault, after all, they don't survey children. My kids are 14 and 15 years old and they and their friends (the ones that come here anyway) know the answers to all those questions but many of my friends probably would not and I'm 69 years old.
Many people remain ignorant because they just don't care.
Let me preface my comments by offering apologies to you, Graybeard58. My tirade is not directed at you, specifically (I don’t even know you), but to the entire FreeRepublic community)...
I’m a Christian, conservative school teacher. Everything everyone has said about the state of public education is absolutely, positively true. As it has been said and re-said ad nauseam here at Free Republic, our public schools are failing. The solution proposed? Blow them up...take your kids out...close the the buildings. Guess what? That’s not the solution. You will still have a vast percentage of the population that are ill-equipped to handle life as free, independent, responsible citizens. There is only one solution: take the schools over. But, you are not going to take them over from without. You must take them over from within. Conservatives must be willing to join the fray...and take up the cause...in front of the young skulls full of mush. All of you that think that your biting rhetoric against an obviously failing system is going to accomplish anything show yourselves to be a bit naive. Talking the talk...and that’s it. How long have schools been a failure now? How long have you all been singing the same old song? How have your tactics worked? The ship just keeps on sinking (faster and faster with each passing school year) and all you have is a bunch of empty (void of effect) rhetoric.
If this is the sum total of your “plan” - to sit and wring your hands, then please move on to the next thread/next topic. Discontinue your talk. Take up some other cause. You have nothing to say, nothing to add. You are a mere gas bag belching out the same tired old smoke that makes you feel good for the moment but only serves to temporarily putrefy the air before fading into nothingness. As a teacher, I can tell you first-hand there is nothing worse than listening to a bunch of whiners complain and bemoan the fact that they have work to do...and won’t lift a finger to do it (I hear it each and every day from about 100 or so resistant students.) If you are serious about changing schools, if you want to change the results of surveys like this, then you’d better go to the place where the proper results can be achieved - in front of the classroom, before 20-30 young know-nothings/do-nothings and fill them with the knowledge (and, better, understanding) that will inculcate them with the values necessary to become productive American citizens (for there is no better kind on this good earth).
Until such time as there is a vast increase in the number of conservatives willing to become school teachers and board members and even “educrats”, willing to counter the directionless, pointless state of public education, willing to recognize that this is not a hopeless cause, but one of the most vital causes facing our nation today, willing to FIGHT to return American education to the place of preeminence in the world, we should not be surprised by anything the enemy does to young people. He is a slave-master, he is a deceiver, he is a liar. He plays for keeps. You may imagine that I am talking about the Devil, and, to a degree, I suppose that I am. But I am also talking about the liberal/progressive, whose plan it is to destroy this country, and is succeeding without ever having to fire a single shot. Where’s the loyal resistance? Where’s the fight, conservative American? Have you, too, lost touch with your history? Would the Founders have stood for this? what would they say to YOU about your shrinking back from this [apparently] necessary fight?
Public education has inflicted a long train of abuses on American school children for some time. It is, for all intents and purposes a war being waged on the very underpinnings of America (I don’t believe that to be an exaggeration, given some of the comments I’ve read over the years here at FR). ‘How long will loyal Americans tolerate this,’ is really the question. How long before talk becomes action, words become movements, ideas become actual plans? the answer is not to withdraw from this fight but to engage this fight - where it is waged, with more powerful weapons (ideas) and to win.
Anything less is ceding the battlefield.