RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/shortcircuiting_the_natural_love_of_learning_in_young_people.html

There can be little doubt that the majority of today’s students are largely incapable of literate performance. They are also collectively devoid of humility before the majesty of the Great Tradition and the lessons of experience that would allow them to grapple with a strenuous and comprehensive curriculum of study.

They have been deprived of genuine instruction in the academic disciplines, indoctrinated in the political shibboleths of the time, and coddled into a state of self-assured autonomy of judgment. This is common knowledge.

Grasping the rudiments of grammar and style, learning how to write coherently (by which I mean both the cursive of penmanship and the cursive of thought), and reading with comprehension in history, literature, philosophy and politics have become dead letters, quite literally. The state of juvenility and ineptitude in which they loiter bodes ill for the culture.

The default procedure among administrators and teachers is to ignore the obvious, to install largely useless computer instruction in the acquisition of writing skills and language proficiency, insist that “fairness” justifies weakening admission standards at the expense of quality, and that ‘social justice” rather than scholarly achievement and disciplinary merit is the aim of education.  

While these institutional debits and failures remain in place, the crux of the issue lies elsewhere. Nothing can supplant early reading — that is, actual reading and being read to — in the home. This is an advantage that cannot be overestimated. Education, as the adage has it, begins in the home with loving and responsible parents. According to Aristotle in the Politics, a child’s character and potentialities are formed by the age of seven, and there is considerble truth to that. Failing such parental supervision, students enter the education system at a deficit. Reclamation is always difficult though differentially possible, assuming native and untapped inclination in the student, a curriculum stressing the basics and expanding outward, an administration concerned with education rather than entrenchment, and teachers who are themselves well-educated and professionally accountable — a Sisyphean proposition.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/20/common-core-screen-overdoses-ruining-american-kids-intelligence/

Between ineffective teaching methods at school and an overdose of screen time at home, our children are becoming intellectually deficient. We need to reverse the trends.

By every metric (SAT, ACT, and even IQ), the intelligence and aptitude of American students has declined in recent years. As Joy Pullmann documents in an article about the results of using Common Core, student performance on state standardized tests has also gone down — that is, when the scoring isn’t changed to show better results.

Before casting blame on who’s responsible, it’s important to understand what these numbers actually mean. All of these tests attempt to measure higher-order thinking skills as they relate to abstract scenarios, nothing more or less. They do not measure the level of practical skills people might have, their emotional intelligence, or even their actual knowledge of things.

Rather, they assess students’ critical thinking (the ability to analyze), problem solving, and knowledge application. People who have these higher-order thinking skills are generally more adaptable to any kind of learning, particularly the kind of learning that happens in higher education.

Higher-order thinking is also important in a time most activities are computerized and information comes in abstract forms such as images and text. American students who lack these skills will struggle much more when most jobs and other domains in life (communication, management, choosing a lifestyle, etc.) demand this of them.