https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/16/our-kids-cant-read-write-or-do-math-but-are-no-1-in-critical-race-theory/
America’s crumbling education system is in the news. On October 5, 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 stupidity a far more pressing problem in modern-day America than homegrown terrorism.
Yet conservatives have continued to insist, throughout the COVID lockdowns and quarantines, that kids are missing out on an education.
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 surroundings, 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 or should be corrected; and when they are corrected, they 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 clichés 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.
