Posted on 10/15/2021 5:33:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
America’s crumbling education system is in the news. On October 5th, Joe Biden managed to disgorge some dismal indicators as to the future prospects of America’s youth compared to the rest of the developed world.
Joe didn’t quite say it, but America’s kids, the product of an obscenely well-funded school system, rank last in the developed world in reading, writing, and math, making homegrown imbecility a far more pressing problem in modern-day America than homegrown terrorism.
Yet conservatives have kept insisting, throughout the Covid lockdowns and quarantines, that kids were missing out on an education because they were out of school.
To paraphrase Joan Rivers, how can you miss out on a rash? (When Madonna accused Lady Gaga of stealing her music, the great, late, lady Joan wanted to know how you could steal a rash.)
A particularly startling fact caught my attention in the Economist. "At 15, children in Massachusetts, where education standards are higher than in most states, are so far behind their counterparts in Shanghai at math, that it would take them more than two years of regular education to catch up."
This last fact is enormously telling and alarming. It tells you that America’s best schools and students can’t compete with the world’s best.
As the author further quipped cynically, “American children came top at thinking they were good at math, but bottom at math.”
There’s no doubt that American kids are drowning in self-esteem. As someone who had warned, in the early 2000s, about unrealistic, dangerous levels of self-esteem—I would contend that inflated self-esteem and narcissism not only mask failure, but create pumped up nihilists, ready to unleash on their surrounds, unless met with palliative praise.
Yes, self-esteem is the royal jelly upon which America’s children are raised. Our child-centered, non-hierarchical, collaborative, progressive schooling has produced kids who do not believe they can and should be corrected; and when corrected lash out in anger or bewilderment.
Indeed, to listen to our university students speak—is to hear a foreboding amalgam of dumbness and supreme confidence combined. Yet they are often high achievers in the kind of schools “tailored” for just such sub-par output. The achievement Bell Curve has been skewed.
With welcome exceptions, the young can hardly string together coherent, grammatical sentences. They open their mouths and out tumble nothing but inane, mind-numbing cliches and banalities spoken in gravelly, grating, staccato tones. Vocal fry, the linguists call this loathsome sound.
Once upon a time, linguists would have sent our Eliza Doolittles for elocution lessons. Make her sound less rough, more refined.
Eliza, of “My Fair Lady” fame, was treated paternalistically, no doubt. Pedagogic paternalism can be fixed; not so a student’s studied ignorance. And these days, the Kardashian-style guttural growl is considered precious. Linguists name it and study it, instead of crushing it.
In fairness to the kids, anyone under 50 seems to be similarly afflicted: This cohort can’t use tenses, prepositions, and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase, or conjugate verbs correctly. Has anyone noticed that the past perfect tense is dead in our country? People will relate that they “had went” to school or “had came back from the cinema.” Pidgin English is what the young, high-school graduate now speaks.
Inanities and redundancies make their way into compositions, too, where sentences are audaciously prefaced with, “I feel like”:
“Like, I want to give back.”
“Like, I want to make the world a better place.”
“I feel like, it’s important to love myself” (teaching textbook narcissism).
“I feel like, we need to unite.”
“Like, follow your passion.”
Hallmark cards are edgier, more original, and intuitively truer than the monolithic minds of America’s young, and those who’ve raised and taught them.
Clearly, people even more illiterate than the students are setting these sub-standards, giving kids A’s for output that showcases an inability to distill, summarize and generate ideas, and ethically cite sources. In use is only the most rudimentary, emotionally evocative language, for lack of a solid, ever-accreting vocabulary, higher-order thinking, and proper restraint in effect.
As to restraint: Not coincidentally, an asphyxiating hysteria simmers beneath the surface of the prose to match the vapid vocabulary, whereby breathy figures of speech are deployed to fit a febrile, emotionally overwrought state-of-mind:
“Unbelievable, incredibly embarrassing, amazing, OMG!” In short, exclamatory utterances.
As to edginess: America’s young have not been given the analytical tools with which to question received opinion. And, in tackling the “tyranny and arrogant authority” tied to Covid and Critical Race Theory, the kids have been mostly establishment-compliant: 40% of millennials favor the suppression of insensitive speech. It is the oldies who’ve stood up. Young people have, sadly, been readily inclined to accept and follow authority’s orders at all time.
Language mediates thought—and actions. You cannot express or develop worthwhile thoughts without a command of the language.
I feel for the kids. They are not to blame. Their arrogant ignorance, inculcated in schools, is carefully cultivated and then reinforced with incontinent praise from pedagogues and parents alike, from K to university.
Progressive schools and teachers—overseen by teachers' unions—are responsible for the quantifiable rot; for the monument-smashing, monumental ignorance among America’s youth.
As to the formative figures in the child’s life. More shocking numbers: “Less than half (48%) of all American adults were proficient readers in 2017. American fourth graders (nine-to ten-year-olds) rank 15th on the Progress in International Literacy Study, an international exam.”
“And only 12% [of us] are considered by the country’s health department to be ‘health-literate’. Over one-third struggle with basic health tasks, such as following prescription-drug directions.” The numbers come via the Economist.
Conservatives like Candace Owens have equated keeping kids out of school with keeping kids dumb and compliant. How is that so, if schools are producing kids this banal, boorish and bossy?
**
WATCH: “American Kids Come Top At THINKING They’re Good At Math, But Bottom At Math, Reading, Writing”
https://youtu.be/Vsjy6E6gD2Y
If you are a well-educated person with good self-control in today’s America, you can really get ahead. There just isn’t much competition.
A surprising number of millennials are moving up rapidly in their careers. They have figured it out.
It’s all a distraction.
Quite and indictment.
"So, like, the label said take two tablets and skip an hour. But after twenty minutes of skipping I nearly passed out."
Ok, so our Schools are producing children that are Dumber than Dirt, but they are the Proudest Morons on the Planet
We ostracize the smart kids and coddle the dumb ones.
Two word summary: They’re dumb*sses.
We now have middle schoolers identifying as trans. Adolescents have been seeking attention since forever, but our culture now teaches them the best way to get attention is to be a victim. Should the student be so unfortunate as to be born affluent, white, and male he can simply claim to be trans and receive an outpouring of sympathy he would be unable to obtain otherwise. Remember the good old days when kids got attention for academic or athletic achievement?
Of course that's what the leftists want, a bunch of ignorant, indoctrinated drones that they can easily manipulate.
The teachers unions are doing to the el/hi education system that universities have done. They’ve become centers of propaganda for the left in order to dumb the students down and make them more dependent on the government. Teaching STEM is not as important as teaching CRT.
Hallmark cards are edgier, more original, and intuitively truer than the monolithic minds of America’s young, and those who’ve raised and taught them.
—
“Monolitic minds” is the perfect descriptor. Much like the Irish Potato famine was in part caused by reliance on a single variety of potato, which once infected spread and destroyed all the potato crops; a monolithic mind culture is subject to being destroyed by an event outside its boundary of response.
We really do need the “crazies”, the people who “think different” (remember that Apple ad from back in the 90’s) to be the alarm bells of danger to which the masses are blind; to be the discoverers of new things following an unconventional path. Without them, society is dead; first spiritually dead, then intellectually dead, and finally physically dead.
They can hardly communicate properly and they have absolutely no concept of what ‘work’ is.
It's worse all the time. I wrote a check yesterday at the register and the clerk told me three times, "you need to fill out the check, completely". Three times I had to remind her that I was waiting for her to give me a total so I COULD complete the check. Finally, she realized she had to give me the total, in order to complete the transaction
Don’t forget Administration kow-towing to the leftists, then calling the police when the public starts asking questions.
It does seem strange that teachers and Admin.(two groups that disagree about almost everything) are coming together on CRT.
Strange days indeed.
“Yet conservatives have kept insisting, throughout the Covid lockdowns and quarantines, that kids were missing out on an education because they were out of school.”
____________________________________________________
Yeah, but they have done little to nothing to stop the plandemic.
Churning out AOCs since 1968
The Economist article referenced comes from 2016 and has no links to the studies it refers to. I will continue to look.
I am also highly skeptical about the quality of Grade School education in the US and see the revamping of curricula as a deckchair exercise.
I have a simpler explanation: If the math proficiency of the teachers is low - as it generally is based on SAT scores of Education Majors - why would we be surprised at the subsequent outcomes. To add to Economist author’s story line, if the swimming coach cannot swim, are you sure you want to have him or her teach your kids?
https://steemit.com/education/@gungasnake/the-situation-with-public-education.
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