The Dumbing Down of America – By Design

[DesertRose]

Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the "overt curriculum." But beneath it lay an invisible or "covert curriculum" that was far more basic. It consisted—and still does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations.

THE THIRD WAVE ,alvin toffler

Need to get that book! Thank you.

Point blank, our schools are intentionally turning out incomplete at best students.

Rockefeller didn't want thinkers but workers.
Higher Indoctrination: Universities and Corporate Control

Good points.
Amazing how corporate interests run schools in cahoots with the government. It is also apparent that they did not want competition so the stunt curiosity, depth and initiative, and end up with kids having zero entrepreneurial spirit. Corporate interests such as Rockefeller did not want competitors but they want servants professional or not.

Excerpt from John Taylor Gatto's book:
Chapter 18 of The Underground History of American Public Education
"The souls of free and independent men and women are mutilated by the necessary soullessness of corporate organization and decision-making. Think of cigarettes as a classic case in point. The truth is that even if all corporate production were pure and faultless, it is still an excess of organization — where the few make decisions for the many — that is choking us to death. Strength, joy, wisdom are only available to those who produce their own lives; never to those who merely consume the production of others. Nothing good can come from inviting global corporations to design our schools, any more than leaving a hungry dog to guard ham sandwiches is a good way to protect lunch.

All training except the most basic either secures or disestablishes things as they are. The familiar government school curriculum represents enshrined mudsill theory telling us people would do nothing if they weren’t tricked, bribed, or intimidated, proving scientifically that workers are for the most part biologically incompetent, strung out along a bell curve. Mudsill theory has become institutionalized with buzzers, routines, standardized assessments, and terminal rankings interleaved with an interminable presentation of carrots and sticks, the positive and negative reinforcement schedules of behavioral psychology, screening children for a corporate order.

Mudsillism is deeply ingrained in the whole work/school/media constellation. Getting rid of it will be a devilish task with no painless transition formula. This is going to hurt when it happens. And it will happen. The current order is too far off the track of human nature, too dis-spirited, to survive. Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn’t an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life.

At the heart of any school reforms that aren’t simply tuning the mudsill mechanism lie two beliefs: 1) That talent, intelligence, grace, and high accomplishment are within the reach of every kid, and 2) That we are better off working for ourselves than for a boss.3 But how on earth can you believe these things in the face of a century of institution-shaping/economy-shaping monopoly schooling which claims something different? Or in the face of a constant stream of media menace that jobs are vanishing, that the workplace demands more regulation and discipline, that "foreign competition" will bury us if we don’t comply with expert prescriptions in the years ahead? One powerful antidote to such propaganda comes from looking at evidence which contradicts official propaganda — like women who earn as much as doctors by selling shrimp from old white trucks parked beside the road, or thirteen-year-old boys who don’t have time to waste in school because they expect to be independent businessmen before most kids are out of college."

 

[DesertRose]

Here is a video of John Saxon making his points about the new math. Apparently in these times we have new new math

 

[DesertRose]

Chapter 18 of The Underground History of American Public Education
Empty Children

Not far to go now. Here is my recipe for empty children. If you want to cook whole children, as I suspect we all do, just contradict these stages in the formula:

1. Remove children from the business of the world until time has passed for them to learn how to self-teach.
2. Age-grade them so that past and future both are muted and become irrelevant.
3. Take all religion out of their lives except the hidden civil religion of appetite, and positive/negative reinforcement schedules.
4. Remove all significant functions from home and family life except its role as dormitory and casual companionship. Make parents unpaid agents of the State; recruit them into partnerships to monitor the conformity of children to an official agenda.
5. Keep children under surveillance every minute from dawn to dusk. Give no private space or time. Fill time with collective activities. Record behavior quantitatively.
6. Addict the young to machinery and electronic displays. Teach that these are desirable to recreation and learning both.
7. Use designed games and commercial entertainment to teach preplanned habits, attitudes, and language usage.
8. Pair the selling of merchandise with attractive females in their prime childbearing years so that the valences of lovemaking and mothering can be transferred intact to the goods vended.
9. Remove as much private ritual as possible from young lives, such as the rituals of food preparation and family dining.
10. Keep both parents employed with the business of strangers. Discourage independent livelihoods with low start-up costs. Make labor for others and outside obligations first priority, self-development second.
11. Grade, evaluate, and assess children constantly and publicly. Begin early. Make sure everyone knows his or her rank.
12. Honor the highly graded. Keep grading and real world accomplishment as strictly separate as possible so that a false meritocracy, dependent on the support of authority to continue, is created. Push the most independent kids to the margin; do not tolerate real argument.
13. Forbid the efficient transmission of useful knowledge, such as how to build a house, repair a car, make a dress.
14. Reward dependency in many forms. Call it "teamwork."
15. Establish visually degraded group environments called "schools" and arrange mass movements through these environments at regular intervals. Encourage a level of fluctuating noise (aperiodic negative reinforcement) so that concentration, habits of civil discourse, and intellectual investigation are gradually extinguished from the behavioral repertoire.

John Taylor Gatto

 

[TempestOfTempo]

Chapter 18 of The Underground History of American Public Education
Empty Children

Not far to go now. Here is my recipe for empty children. If you want to cook whole children, as I suspect we all do, just contradict these stages in the formula:

1. Remove children from the business of the world until time has passed for them to learn how to self-teach.
2. Age-grade them so that past and future both are muted and become irrelevant.
3. Take all religion out of their lives except the hidden civil religion of appetite, and positive/negative reinforcement schedules.
4. Remove all significant functions from home and family life except its role as dormitory and casual companionship. Make parents unpaid agents of the State; recruit them into partnerships to monitor the conformity of children to an official agenda.
5. Keep children under surveillance every minute from dawn to dusk. Give no private space or time. Fill time with collective activities. Record behavior quantitatively.
6. Addict the young to machinery and electronic displays. Teach that these are desirable to recreation and learning both.
7. Use designed games and commercial entertainment to teach preplanned habits, attitudes, and language usage.
8. Pair the selling of merchandise with attractive females in their prime childbearing years so that the valences of lovemaking and mothering can be transferred intact to the goods vended.
9. Remove as much private ritual as possible from young lives, such as the rituals of food preparation and family dining.
10. Keep both parents employed with the business of strangers. Discourage independent livelihoods with low start-up costs. Make labor for others and outside obligations first priority, self-development second.
11. Grade, evaluate, and assess children constantly and publicly. Begin early. Make sure everyone knows his or her rank.
12. Honor the highly graded. Keep grading and real world accomplishment as strictly separate as possible so that a false meritocracy, dependent on the support of authority to continue, is created. Push the most independent kids to the margin; do not tolerate real argument.
13. Forbid the efficient transmission of useful knowledge, such as how to build a house, repair a car, make a dress.
14. Reward dependency in many forms. Call it "teamwork."
15. Establish visually degraded group environments called "schools" and arrange mass movements through these environments at regular intervals. Encourage a level of fluctuating noise (aperiodic negative reinforcement) so that concentration, habits of civil discourse, and intellectual investigation are gradually extinguished from the behavioral repertoire.

John Taylor Gatto

Would you mind elaborating on this a bit? Im interested in learning your take on the sources of info you have been providing, especially this one. It seems you have a pretty good handle on this already........

 

[Maes17]

I blame college for today's youngsters

 

[Maes17]

Don't ask why. I'm just turning into a bitter old gran pappy who frowns upon the young whipper snappers and their ll cool j's

 

[DesertRose]

Would you mind elaborating on this a bit?

In this age there is a consolidation of education, the uniformity of values and practices. Although these issues are becoming worldwide it is very advanced in the US.
Gatto explains how all state education departments lost their independent identity and authority so that they can join in a partnership with the federal government and how they now have a role as 'change agents' and 'on site enforcers' that ensure local compliance for central directives.
Hence, local state departments, the local school boards and the teachers have lost much autonomy and control.

Now we have mass schooling. Gatto calls it "an enclosure movement for children'.
An analogy would be farmers in India being forced to used GMO products instead of their normal age old practices and products. Another example would be a small business being taken over by a chain and having to change their age old business practices that were tailored to the needs of their local customers.
Many public schools are failing to adequately teach reading and math. They are no longer teaching the way children learn.
Moreover, children are now being taught values that may not be in accordance with the values of their family or community..
In regards to the teaching of values, Gatto highlights the ideas of people such as Harold Rugg a writer of textbooks for teacher training colleges.
"Rugg became a spokesperson for the reconstructionist perspective, which viewed formal education as an agent of social change."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Rugg

There are teachers who manage to teach well despite these reforms however classroom practices are getting more regimented and it is getting harder and harder to teach around the set curriculum.
Here are two teachers that did excellent jobs in their respective inner city classrooms, however, things have changed much after their time as well.

Jaime Alfonso Escalante Gutierrez (December 31, 1930 – March 30, 2010) was a Bolivian educator known for teaching students calculus from 1974 to 1991 at Garfield High School, East Los Angeles, California. Escalante was the subject of the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, in which he is portrayed by Edward James Olmos.
In 1993, the asteroid 5095 Escalante was named after him.[2]

Marva Delores Collins (née Knight; August 31, 1936 – June 24, 2015) was an American educator who started Westside Preparatory School in the impoverished Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago in 1975.[1][2]
(There is a movie about her as well on YT).

 

[Maes17]

Post #47 solidifies my stance

 

[DesertRose]

I blame college for today's youngsters

​

That too!

Don't ask why. I'm just turning into a bitter old gran pappy who frowns upon the young whipper snappers and their ll cool j's

I agree, it seems that the changes are happening very quickly.Unfortunately!

 

[peridot]

Chapter 18 of The Underground History of American Public Education
Empty Children

Not far to go now. Here is my recipe for empty children. If you want to cook whole children, as I suspect we all do, just contradict these stages in the formula:

1. Remove children from the business of the world until time has passed for them to learn how to self-teach.
2. Age-grade them so that past and future both are muted and become irrelevant.
3. Take all religion out of their lives except the hidden civil religion of appetite, and positive/negative reinforcement schedules.
4. Remove all significant functions from home and family life except its role as dormitory and casual companionship. Make parents unpaid agents of the State; recruit them into partnerships to monitor the conformity of children to an official agenda.
5. Keep children under surveillance every minute from dawn to dusk. Give no private space or time. Fill time with collective activities. Record behavior quantitatively.
6. Addict the young to machinery and electronic displays. Teach that these are desirable to recreation and learning both.
7. Use designed games and commercial entertainment to teach preplanned habits, attitudes, and language usage.
8. Pair the selling of merchandise with attractive females in their prime childbearing years so that the valences of lovemaking and mothering can be transferred intact to the goods vended.
9. Remove as much private ritual as possible from young lives, such as the rituals of food preparation and family dining.
10. Keep both parents employed with the business of strangers. Discourage independent livelihoods with low start-up costs. Make labor for others and outside obligations first priority, self-development second.
11. Grade, evaluate, and assess children constantly and publicly. Begin early. Make sure everyone knows his or her rank.
12. Honor the highly graded. Keep grading and real world accomplishment as strictly separate as possible so that a false meritocracy, dependent on the support of authority to continue, is created. Push the most independent kids to the margin; do not tolerate real argument.
13. Forbid the efficient transmission of useful knowledge, such as how to build a house, repair a car, make a dress.
14. Reward dependency in many forms. Call it "teamwork."
15. Establish visually degraded group environments called "schools" and arrange mass movements through these environments at regular intervals. Encourage a level of fluctuating noise (aperiodic negative reinforcement) so that concentration, habits of civil discourse, and intellectual investigation are gradually extinguished from the behavioral repertoire.

John Taylor Gatto

I think most of this is very true.
But with this caveat: kids are by nature very undisciplined.
It takes a while before they have the maturity to do profitable things well and voluntarily. If you do not train discipline in them early, it will take a very long time (if ever) before they are able to discipline themselves to learn or do anything useful in life.

The word "independent" is often used by speakers and motivators, but it usually means "let the kids do whatever they want."
I do NOT agree with that because the kid usually has no better sense than to want a bunch of bad stuff, and then take that bad stuff and exponentially decay it to something horrific.

But I do agree with looking at the kids' inclinations and preferences. Understanding what really does interest them and what they can do well usually leads them on the best path for their lives.
But that doesn't mean, for example, they shouldn't do math because "they're not good at it," or other subjects because they are not interested.
The purpose for learning math is to learn the way the world works, not to torture small children.
That doesn't mean the kids have to become statisticians, but they should know how statistics work, if for no other reason to know when the news media use them in fake-elaborate lies.
Many other subjects fall into the same category -- learn it because your world uses it, and being nescient of it will damage yourself and those around you.

Also learning new and potentially disliked subjects is both important and necessary, as said before, kids usually have NO idea what they like or don't like at first.
Sometimes just an exposure to a subject makes them realize -- wait, this is actually kind of cool.
Or it may have the opposite effect -- HATED It! -- BUT that knowledge directly leads them to something else they like better.

 

[Bacsi]

I think most of this is very true.
But with this caveat: kids are by nature very undisciplined.
It takes a while before they have the maturity to do profitable things well and voluntarily. If you do not train discipline in them early, it will take a very long time (if ever) before they are able to discipline themselves to learn or do anything useful in life.

The word "independent" is often used by speakers and motivators, but it usually means "let the kids do whatever they want."
I do NOT agree with that because the kid usually has no better sense than to want a bunch of bad stuff, and then take that bad stuff and exponentially decay it to something horrific.

But I do agree with looking at the kids' inclinations and preferences. Understanding what really does interest them and what they can do well usually leads them on the best path for their lives.
But that doesn't mean, for example, they shouldn't do math because "they're not good at it," or other subjects because they are not interested.
The purpose for learning math is to learn the way the world works, not to torture small children.
That doesn't mean the kids have to become statisticians, but they should know how statistics work, if for no other reason to know when the news media use them in fake-elaborate lies.
Many other subjects fall into the same category -- learn it because your world uses it, and being nescient of it will damage yourself and those around you.

Also learning new and potentially disliked subjects is both important and necessary, as said before, kids usually have NO idea what they like or don't like at first.
Sometimes just an exposure to a subject makes them realize -- wait, this is actually kind of cool.
Or it may have the opposite effect -- HATED It! -- BUT that knowledge directly leads them to something else they like better.

Discipline isn't always good for learning. Unruliness is very problemtic. But too much discipline and by cruel means, and children's innate inquisitive curiosity is mudered. It's bad... There must be balance.

 

[peridot]

Discipline isn't always good for learning. Unruliness is very problemtic. But too much discipline and by cruel means, and children's innate inquisitive curiosity is mudered. It's bad... There must be balance.

Tried very hard to make the difference between discipline and and cruelty VERY clear here.
They are NOT the same thing, but a lot of people err on either side thinking they are preventing the other.

 

[Helioform]

Worthless degrees and dumbing down

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-liberal-arts-degrees-worthless-steven-waechter

Some interesting portion of that article (some may object to #5, since this is a conspiracy forum, but you have to admit that certain conspiracy theories are also plainly false or exagerated):

WHAT DOES A USELESS MAJOR LOOK LIKE?

1. It is all soft skills.

If the department only discusses the great instruction in cognitive ability, critical thinking skills, writing, and analysis and is without reference to any hard skills like running a computer, keeping the books, or designing a satellite; it is probably a worthless major.

2. It prepares you for graduate studies.

I was a Political Science major. It is a terrible major. It prepares you for law school, which is a graduate program that churns out about 3 graduates per available job in that field. That is all Poli-sci does. The ultimate soft skill is preparation for more school.

3. It contains absolutely no math

Mathematics is the language of the universe. Deal with it. Any major that has no arithmetic at all is likely to be a massive waste of time. It doesn’t have to be calculus, but if you hardly ever add, subtract, divide, or multiply, your major is worthless.

4. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the field are terrible.

If there are no jobs in the field, or the starting salaries are lower than the median salaries of jobs that don’t require a college degree, your major is a waste of time.

5. The course matter are conspiracy theories.

Things like Gender Studies, Post-colonialism Studies, Sociology, and the like are dripping with post-modernist, Marxist Critical Theory nonsense… Perpetrators, Victims, Patriarchy, Oppression everywhere, taught in an “intersectional framework.”
Some colleges (Macalester, Occidental) actually have a major in Critical Theory. The big, bad Patriarchal, colonialist, imperialist, capitalist, white male power structure is oppressing Humanities students. These are the collegiate equivalent of conspiracy theorists on AM radio who’ve “seen behind the veil of society and know the truth of the all-powerful Illuminati"…. Down the rabbit hole you’ll go. Graduates of these sorts of programs will be oppressed by serious underemployment as they try to build careers as professional left-wing political agitators.

6. You’re planning to teach it to other college students.

Majoring in Anthropology, to go to grad school for Anthropology, so you can become a Teaching Assistant in the Anthropology department, teaching Anthropology to Anthropology majors… as Sterling Archer put it, “thus continuing the circle of Why Bother?!” Ignoring this could be condemning yourself to a long sentence as a transient adjunct professor, since colleges churn out too many PhD's.

7. It’s all for helping people, but it doesn’t.

Sociology majors like to pretend that they’re going to have a career in the non-profit sector where they will help people; usually by nagging people. Somehow, that‘s helpful. They end up working as part-time HR Generalists who reject job applicants for “not being a good fit.” People with Nursing degrees help people by being nurses. Kindergarten teachers, and pharmacy techs also help people… by helping people.

...

College is too expensive, and too time-consuming, to be entered with a whimsical disregard for the student’s future in the real world. That is the hard truth of life, and hiding away in the collegiate land of Humanities make-believe will only make the eventual crash much more devastating.

 

[saki]

...a couple of important points, in support of the original post... 'Dewey' here refers to the inventor of the "Dewey Decimal System".... which actually DID seem to work for everybody just fine..... the rest of his notions?...

****Edit**** I presumed that this 'Dewey' (below) is the same as the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System... Wrong...
...here's the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
....apologies for the miscue!...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/socialists-used-public-schools-to-destroy-literacy-in-america_3129084.html?fbclid=IwAR0FgzJfU3xK4DeZEm0AEJHoX5MLflKhchnKTh8BWUid6d3mER6d9m0Jkfo
Socialists Used Public Schools to Destroy Literacy in America
....
Dewey also left smoking-gun evidence of his desire to intentionally destroy the high literacy rates among children that existed throughout America at that time. In his controversial 1898 essay “The Primacy Education Fetich [sic],” he openly argued that schools should de-emphasize the teaching of reading, which he believed led to individualism.

In fact, he said children in the early grades were better off not receiving much instruction at all in the so-called “3 Rs;” reading, writing, and arithmetic. Instead, Dewey, an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union, thought young children mostly needed to be properly socialized to become functional members of the collective.

He knew his ideas would not go over well with parents, teachers, or taxpayers of the era. “Change must come gradually,” Dewey wrote in that essay. “To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.”

So instead, he went to the Rockefeller dynasty and the elites.

-----break for brevity----

Consider: People who cannot read cannot readily educate themselves. They are much easier to control and manipulate, too. And perhaps that is the point.

With Mann, it’s entirely possible that this was all an innocent mistake. Certainly that’s true of most teachers in the United States today as well who have not been trained to teach reading properly.

But the fact that this giant “mistake” continues to be supported by the education establishment to this day—and that it always seems to be socialists, communists, and collectivists pushing it—suggests that there is a much more nefarious agenda at work.

***much more at article***
https://www.theepochtimes.com/socialists-used-public-schools-to-destroy-literacy-in-america_3129084.html?fbclid=IwAR0FgzJfU3xK4DeZEm0AEJHoX5MLflKhchnKTh8BWUid6d3mER6d9m0Jkfo

 

[DesertRose]

***much more at article***
https://www.theepochtimes.com/socia...eZEm0AEJHoX5MLflKhchnKTh8BWUid6d3mER6d9m0Jkfo

Thank you Saki relevant thoughts on this subject and the Alex Newman article.
Here are a few points from the article you posted and my thoughts on them.

1.That as a result of the dismal failure to teach this 'whole word' reading method school principals revolted and dyslexia became an issue! Please note that rates vary around the world and I have found that some languages allow for better reading rates:
"With the emergence of cross-linguistic studies of dyslexia came the realisation that the manifestation of dyslexia is different in different languages (Goulandris, 2003; Smythe, Everatt & Salter, 2004). It follows that the assessment of dyslexia should consider specific linguistic features of the language spoken by the individual to be assessed"
"Within a few years, the schoolmasters of Boston joined forces to expose and repudiate the quackery before it did more damage. In a stinging paper, over 30 school chiefs wrote that “such a change, as that proposed by Mr. Mann and others, is neither called for, nor sustained by sound reasoning.”
2. That Dewey knowingly restored this method in his schools whilst acknowledging that he wants to destroy individualism and focus on socialization. Jefferson one of America's founding fathers stated the necessity of having an informed citizenry to check government.
". . . whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right." (as cited in Padover, 1939, p. 88)
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." (as cited in Padover, 1939, p. 89)
3. That Dewey went to Rockefeller and other elites which proves that this agenda was deliberate and for their benefit.
"Years later, Dewey disciples—a motley collection of socialists and racist eugenicists—would create “reading” primers based on the whole-word quackery. William Gray at the University of Chicago, where Dewey led the education faculty for years, would produce the “Dick and Jane” series."
4. The persistence of those who want centralized control of education and the socialization (molding)of the young seems breathtakingly apparent. It proves Gatto's point that they want complete control and zero competition to their monopolies in governance and economy:
"Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about.”
and:
“Think of the things killing us as a nation: narcotic drugs, brainless competition, dishonesty, greed, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all -- lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy -- all of these are addictions of dependent personalities. That is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.”
“A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people -- and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.”

The best solution for many bureaucratic problems is to push for greater autonomy as an individual, as a community etc.. Something has to be said for quietly opting out of what these people push. However, this will only be successful in a freer society where many elite agendas are not mandatory.

 

[saki]

...from Betsey DeVos.....

https://conservativefighters.org/news/after-years-of-common-core-betsy-devos-announces-devastating-results/?fbclid=IwAR3OjP_MroiBhCafaNyGNrnacU881_V3pBIn5RCk-OuelKzz21iKEL_vkxI
After Years of Common Core, Betsy DeVos Announces ‘Devastating’ Results
November 2, 2019

Years after Common Core made its debut in many state education systems, the disastrous long-term results of the program are finally being seen.


The revelation came as part of the Department of Education’s 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress report.

“Every American family needs to open The Nation’s Report Card this year and think about what it means for their child and for our country’s future,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a media release. “The results are, frankly, devastating.”

“This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students,” she added.

The NAEP is a test administered in alternating years to students in the fourth and eighth grades. The government-mandated assessment covers both math and reading proficiency.

The students’ reading assessment paints a grim picture of educational readiness, with tested fourth and eighth graders failing to best the previous test’s results.

This year’s results were only marginally better than those from 1992.

The mathematics scores show the most damning results — an upward trend until the year 2015, when the momentum seemed to grind to a halt. Although there were double-digit gains since the ’90s, fourth graders only managed to score a single point above their previous tests.

Eighth graders failed to meet that low standard, sinking below their predecessors from two years before.

“This must be America’s wake-up call,” DeVos said. “We cannot abide these poor results any longer. We can neither excuse them away nor simply throw more money at the problem.”

The dip doesn’t seem to be without cause, either. By 2015, most states had implemented some form of Common Core standards, according to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Studies have linked Common Core to declining test scores and generally poor student performance.

This failure in U.S. schools comes at a time when Chinese students appear to be blowing American children out of the water.

Results from the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students internationally on their proficiency in math, science and reading, show that China ranks a full 21 spots ahead of the United States.

The 21st century needs to remain an American century. Letting the Chinese take the global lead would have disastrous results across the world.

If we expect our future engineers, scientists, and mathematicians to compete in an increasingly globalized world, it’s clear that Common Core needs to be abandoned.

 

[Dalit]

From my very limited experience in a semi-rural school district for a brief student teaching stint, teachers were even encouraged to let athletes who previously failed their classes to have a chance to retake the class. Okay, more than encouraged; they were required to let the football stars retake classes. Required not to fail failing students. No child left behind. But is that good? A friend of mine kept failing tech/community college because she was never taught how to write, just passed along. She should 've been kept back a year probably. Sure, it's a bit embarrassing, yet certain skill sets must be mastered for life. Math, writing, reading.

I later taught in grad school and had to fail 2 students. One for cheating and one for not putting forth any effort. It was hard to fail the latter one because he wrote a moving essay about being the first in his family to go to college, yet he did not complete all the required work. I gave him multiple chances to turn in the work. Good natured kid but kind of glassy eyed and probably was on drugs. Had to fail him anyway. With a 45 average, that is failing. Can't believe I still remember that.

I wonder if we're not already dumbed down to the point prophesied in the movie Idiocracy, where average intelligence is considered a real accomplishment.

 

[DesertRose]

The 21st century needs to remain an American century. Letting the Chinese take the global lead would have disastrous results across the world.

If we expect our future engineers, scientists, and mathematicians to compete in an increasingly globalized world, it’s clear that Common Core needs to be abandoned.

This education is more about changing values, attitudes and beliefs. As Charlotte Iserbyt puts it the agenda is about, " limited learning for lifelong labor."
Charlotte Iserbyt on Education, Common Core & Solutions

I wonder if we're not already dumbed down to the point prophesied in the movie Idiocracy, where average intelligence is considered a real accomplishment.

Good point Dalit and kudos on keeping up the standards, hopefully, that young man will learn to produce better work and cover all the material.

 

[Orwell's mentor]

From my very limited experience in a semi-rural school district for a brief student teaching stint, teachers were even encouraged to let athletes who previously failed their classes to have a chance to retake the class. Okay, more than encouraged; they were required to let the football stars retake classes. Required not to fail failing students. No child left behind. But is that good? A friend of mine kept failing tech/community college because she was never taught how to write, just passed along. She should 've been kept back a year probably. Sure, it's a bit embarrassing, yet certain skill sets must be mastered for life. Math, writing, reading.

I later taught in grad school and had to fail 2 students. One for cheating and one for not putting forth any effort. It was hard to fail the latter one because he wrote a moving essay about being the first in his family to go to college, yet he did not complete all the required work. I gave him multiple chances to turn in the work. Good natured kid but kind of glassy eyed and probably was on drugs. Had to fail him anyway. With a 45 average, that is failing. Can't believe I still remember that.

I wonder if we're not already dumbed down to the point prophesied in the movie Idiocracy, where average intelligence is considered a real accomplishment.

This might interest you as I found this insightful article on Twitter by Frank Graves: Why Canadians need to wake up about populism. I’ll just post some of what I thought to be poignant in the article:

“You’ll see that what the German social scientists uncovered 75 years ago pretty much fits with today. Ordered populism, the kind overtaking Canada and the rest of the developed world, has four key conditions:​

• A declining middle class, wage stagnation and hyperconcentration of wealth at the very top of the system;

• Major shifts in social values which see more progressive values displacing traditional social conservative values which, in concert with the conditions listed above, produce a cultural backlash by those seeing themselves falling victim to loss of identity and privilege;
• A growing sense of external threat expressed in a rise in the belief that the world has become overwhelmingly more dangerous as well as a rise in the perception that the country and its public institutions are moving in the wrong direction;
• Declining trust in public institutions plus a rise in ideological polarization.

All those conditions are present in Canada. They predominate among less-educated males...​

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...So to conclude:​

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There are virtually no examples of ordered populism serving the public interest, no examples producing positive societal impacts. It typically doesn’t solve the problems that it’s supposed to solve. It’s mainly bombast and rhetoric (“For the People”) but little of positive substance although from the past there have been horrifying historical conclusions. It tends to be xenophobic, nativist, and mistrustful. While there is justification for sympathetically understanding the fear and anger that engender this force, its expressions are not healthy for democracies, economies, or societies.​

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At the same time, ignoring the problem or sneering at it as deplorable and wrong-headed is ineffectual. That merely strengthens the emotional engagement of those drawn to this force, and denies the empirical reality that most of those drawn to populism’s outlook are the losers in the new economic machinations of hyper-globalization, automation, and lingering neo-liberalism and the withering of the middle-class dream of shared prosperity.​

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So Narnia bears of Canada, don’t shake your furry heads and say you don’t understand — or, worse, say the problem doesn’t exist. There’s an appalling low level of awareness. Get to work.”​

I should also add that our current Premier, who only has a grade 10 education, is doing what he can to gut our current education system as the elementary teachers have voted to strike due to our provincial gov’t wanting to increase the class size and mix the special ed children in with the regular classes, despite the fact the former provincial gov’t had set aside money for it, but these jokers don’t want to use it for whatever reason – sigh.

 

[DesertRose]

t the same time, ignoring the problem or sneering at it as deplorable and wrong-headed is ineffectual. That merely strengthens the emotional engagement of those drawn to this force, and denies the empirical reality that most of those drawn to populism’s outlook are the losers in the new economic machinations of hyper-globalization, automation, and lingering neo-liberalism and the withering of the middle-class dream of shared prosperity.

One has to ask are these schools that are failing kids designed to give us an unemployable and uncritical populace that will be only fit to fight wars of conquest and oil thievery for a current or a future world empire.