https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/04/dysfunctional-education/
The only way for Americans to avoid being pulled down in a vortex of the self-indulgent ignorance that characterizes our education establishment is to cut loose from that establishment: to stop funding it, and to create another, honest one.
The 2020 elections will afford us the chance to pass judgment on the immediate threat to our democracy posed by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic party, and the media in their grab for power through a bastardized impeachment process. But no such opportunity exists for us to deal with the most serious, most fundamental threat to our way of life, namely our thoroughly rotten educational establishment.
The problem has been festering for decades, and keeps getting worse.
During Word War II, only 4 percent of some 18 million draftees were illiterate. Despite (or because?) of massive expenditures on education over the subsequent two decades, 27 percent of the Vietnam war’s draftees were judged functionally illiterate. Between 1955 and 1991, the inflation-adjusted average K-12 per-pupil expenditure in America rose 350 percent. In 1972, 2,817 students scored 750 or better on each half of the SAT. By 1994, only 1,438 made this score though the test had been made easier. Today, U.S. 15 year olds rank 24th out of 71 countries in science, and 38th in math. In 2018, college students spent less than a third of the time their grandparents did studying for their classes.
But as the bell-curve of intellectual achievement continues to shift leftward, the bell curve of school grades continues to shift rightward. Increasingly, the default grade in America is “A.” Among all classes and races, some seventy percent of U.S students report having cheated on exams or papers. No one should be surprised at the American people’s increasing incompetence and inability to follow directions—never mind arguments.
This past week, the noise from Washington drowned out three items of news that remind us of how corrupt and dumbed down American education has become, how far into society the rot has spread and how much it would take to remedy it.
