Gettin dumber be da goode ol’e UsA
Posted on 15. Jun, 2009 by Nathaniel Bacon in Education, Nathaniel Bacon
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international comparison of 15-year-olds conducted by The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that measures applied learning and problem-solving ability. In 2006, U.S. students ranked 25th of 30 advanced nations in math and 24th in science.
McKinsey & Company, in releasing its report “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America Schools” (April 2009) said, “Several other facts paint a worrisome picture. First, the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent cross-country comparisons of forth grade reading, math, and science, US students scored in the top quarter or top half of advanced nations. By age 15 these rankings drop to the bottom half.”
“In other words, American students are furthest behind just as they are about to enter higher education or the workforce. That’s a sobering thought. The longer kids are in school and the more money we spend on them, the further behind they get.”
While the academic performance of white students is grossly inferior, that of black and Latino students is a national disgrace.
The McKinsey report says, “On average, black and Latino students are roughly two to three years of learning behind white students of the same age. This racial gap exists regardless of how it is measured, including both achievement (e.g. , test score) and attainment (e.g. , graduation rate) measures.”
{snip} . . The teaching establishment and politicians have hoodwinked taxpayers into believing that more money is needed to improve education. ARTICLE
The only teacher who ever made sense to be was Miss Hayes ( Economics ).
Beavis and Butthead got to the core when they said, “This is school, everything has to be ass backward.”
Particularly damaging to our cause is the so-called teacher who deliberately makes writing and communication a terrifying red-pencilled experience with such things as “Incomplete Sentence”, “Run-on Sentence” or “Improperly parsed participle of a predicatory clause.”
Like who gives a f–k?
If one is a professional writer, it matters.
I’m not.
In chat rooms if one becomes a “grammar bitch” one is ejected.
The internet is an antidote for government school.
I forgot to mention the teacher who intones:
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!”
Yeah? To who? The establishment, that’s who!
I don’t have to have a degree in political science to send a letter or a few bucks here and there.
We have a contributor here whose school warned against a certain kind of music. Later on the demon-liberating T R E N C H C O A T – of all things – was banned in any number of schools. This makes as much sense as the medieval practice of trying animals for criminal offenses. Have sex with a sheep and they hang you and the sheep.
I kid you not. It happened.
I broke out. Years afterward I remain bitter about my so called “government education”.
I want to be the person that my teachers tried desperately to prevent.
“run-on sentences” always made me laugh. I’m french canadian, and in french, the longer your sentence is, the better it is. In english it’s the opposite. A good french sentence can have up to 50 words, with a lot of details, commas, etc. But beware! Every time I entered the advanced english class in college, I needed to deliberatly “dumb down” my sentences, split them into pieces to not lose a disgusting quantity of points. “This is english, stop being smart, make it simple”. sigh…
Oh yeah. Once you’ve made a “student” terrified of communication you have neutralized him politically.
I don’t bother with grammar.
Just get the mesage across.
I only ever did enough in school to pass, not because I’m dumb, but because I could never take the classes seriously. Is it possible that some of these scores are low because other students can’t take their classes seriously either?
I remember doing a CAT test while I was in high school and my school had one of the lowest national scores. It wasn’t because we were dumb, it was because we saw no reason to try on this test. The test was all multiple choice and didn’t affect our school grades in anyway so some of us just randomly circled answers and didn’t even bother looking at the test paper. Not all of us were obedient robots.
Just pointing out there might be other reasons for these low results.
Love the picture by the way.
I blame the movement of the 50′s and 60′s. Since our schools were over run with rodents, coons and roaches, they began grading on a curve. The whites would place higher on all tests, and the animals that found themselves to stupid to learn began bitching the tests were biased. So in order to make the inferior, feel superior they dumb down the intelligent. In doing so they ruin the nation, could have been part of their plan. or it could have been an accidental coincedence, that they ran with.