You’re mumbling, consistent with your tag line.
You’re right about a motivation crisis, but haven’t yet dug down to the underlying causes.
You’re right that the quality of today’s average university student resembles that of the average High School student from 20 years ago, which resembled that of the average grade school kid from twenty years before.
There HAS been a steady decline in the degree to which the students give a rip about their education, and it tracks with the degree to which social engineering projects have invaded the classrooms with their efforts to bring students’ minds into conformity with project goals.
So, screw arithmetic, we’ve got to talk about “public health”. Forget sentence structure, maybe we’ll get to it AFTER our Social Studies.
My grandmother used to talk about studying “civics” in school; understanding the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the principles of good citizenship. By the time I came through it was this nebulous “Social Studies”, wherein we explore all of the many ways that unfettered American Capitalism has heartlessly ruined vast swaths of the globe and left millions impoverished and starving in the Third World. Nevermind whether that’s actually TRUE or not, just the fact the there are starving people in a country where American corporations are doing business is all we need to pronounce damnation on ourselves, or so we were told.
I can’t imagine it’s better than that, now.
Is it any wonder children are less and less motivated? What child could maintain motivation to excel in a society that was the cause of all that misery? Who wants to become a Mechanical Engineer if it means going to work for a company that makes big machines that destroy things in other parts of the world?
I really think Gatto would resonate with you far more than you presently believe.
Oh, FWIW, the tagline’s sarcastic humor; a blend of the anti-war left’s incessant mantra with themes from The Lord of the Rings. It pains me to have to explain that; I’d hoped it would be self-evident.