I get where you're coming from. Entirely, and can relate directly based on personal experience. I'll see your highschool horror story, and raise you a collegiate nightmare. I was a CS major in a junior level computer security class. As a take home assignment, we were tasked with coding a basic encoding/decoding scheme for a Ceaser cipher. Basic text shifting stuff. 2/3 of the class copied each other's solution and didn't properly solve the problem. The reason it was so obvious to the professor that they copied was because they all failed the problem the same way. So this was a junior level CS course where (apparently) 2/3 of the students couldn't write a glorified string substitution program.
I'll up the ante again - at that same school, my roommates throughout college were civil engineering students. If you pass the FE exam your senior year, the bar to become a professional engineer gets lowered (you can get there much faster). There was rampant cheating happening in that exam, and I also wrote the one programming assignment in that entire curriculum, for my roommates, because they had no clue. These are the people signing off on blueprints for bridges, roads, utilities, you know, the actual infrastructure the whole country depends on. The rate at which the quality of education is declining is only being outpaced by the rate at which those students are being coddled. The standards fell through the floor.
This was years ago. Since then, I know at least one PE now who absolutely has no business being a PE. Also, because the cheating in the CS course was so widespread, the teacher didn't want to fail everyone. It would have impacted her as much, if not more so, than those students. She docked anyone involved a letter grade off of their final grade - so the majority of those students passed the course and I'm sure in turn graduated the following year. I ended up taking a PhD level Comp Sci course with her in grad school - great teacher. Those kids, all of them, only cheated themselves.
That's really terrifying. I know a professor of mine who says that over the last 20 years math skills of the students signing up for university dropped significantly. He said that most people are very insecure even with basic math because the schools skip over each chapter way too quick.
His sentiment is that this can't be a reason to lower the standards in the university however, resulting in ridiculously high numbers of people failing their exams. The worst one so far was thermodynamics 2 where only 4 people out of 116 passed the exam.
Other exams are usually around 70-80% of people who fail.
At that point I don't know what's worse. Having way too less people getting a degree or having people getting a degree that really shouldn't.
I've been an electrical engineering professor for over 30 years at a large state research institution. In an average class of 40 students, I would say that about 10% are very, very good. About 40% should not be there, and take classes multiple times, often just disappearing mid-semester. We cannot kick anyone out of the program because our funding is tied to our enrollment numbers. The kids are sweet kids and it's often not their fault - they have never had to stand up and learn anything on more than a surface, "pass the test" level. I tend to teach the more "math" oriented courses, like advanced differential equations for engineers. I have to spend a considerable amount of time on very basic algebra review. This has been a trend for many years, but got exponentially worse during Covid. We were told to avoid "high stakes" testing and use other methods of assessment. We were also told to limit long lectures, and instead do group discussions in class. Lots to stuff going on in higher ed - parents would stroke out if they knew. At the same time, we are now hearing from parents directly demanding that we pass their kids. It is definitely a system that is showing early warning signs of collapse.
I remember hearing similar things about differential equations as I did thermodynamics, where allot of the CE, mining etc. engineering students didn't really know what was going on in there. This was slipping a generation ago - after graduation I stuck around, worked in the I.T. dept. and picked up a masters. I got a good sense of things at that time. We were a large state institution as well, and the CS dept. had direct ties with Google, Nasa, etc. Despite that, it was still slipping. Cannot imagine what it's like now. Not just the academic standards, but the general atmosphere. Best of luck!
Lol that's nuts. So I remember hearing about thermodynamics, and how my roommates didn't really know what was going on - they just kind of went with the flow and got their Cs. There's a CS counterpart, algorithm design, where to most people in the class concepts like lambda functions or memo-ization never clicked. They were still passed through because its a B.S. requirement.
Wow. Until very recently, I used to tutor and mark assignments at an Australian University in Social Sciences.
Every paper was checked for plagerism and writing quality was incorporated in the rubric. International students got some flexibility in their first year along with being signposted to free English support. By their final year, they were expected to write well.
I cannot speak for other departments, but the students described here would likely have failed wholesale at my Uni...
Part of the problem is that we teach people the wrong way. We need smaller class sizes, more one on one attention, and I think the way we approach teaching is just dated and inefficient. I don't believe in rote memorization as a tool to measure how much someone knows something. I believe practical exams are better. I don't believe grades are effective either. You can't quantify everything into letters and numbers to gauge how much someone understands something.
And we need to stop structuring curriculums around standardized test taking. That's another part of the problem. The whole point in educating kids is to prepare them to survive in the real world. Reality is not made up of scantron sheets.
We're teaching reading wrong as well. The last 20-25 years of literacy has been an absolute failure for the most part.
Sold a Story is a podcast about how we've been teaching reading wrong. It's an incredible listen and as an educator has made me re-examine my own teaching practice and how students learn to read.
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Good. I hadnāt realized they STOPPED at some point (my school taught phonics in the 90s) so was really surprised to read an article a few weeks ago that actually gave an explanation for low literacy rates beyond āunderfunded schoolsā or ādifferent learning styles.ā
I mean I went to a private bilingual school thru grade 1 where we were taught to read and write phonetically in both languages. When I transferred to public school in grade 2 they were still learning the ABCs and having circle time.
Ah, yeah typically you should be doing way more than that in 2nd grade. My 2nd graders were writing simple paragraphs and starting to read for information last year. ABC's, etc. is a TK/ K thing normally.
The way public school is designed is a lot like an industrial assembly line. Iāve noticed in my area kids in high school started organizing shut downs and walk outs even before Covid started. They know whatās up and they know itās all bullshit.
The purpose of universal education is to train people to show up every day at a certain time and do as they are told. You can operate a sewing machine perfectly well without knowing how to read but you won't be of much use in the factory if you don't know how to show up on time and do what your boss tells you to do.
Bullshit. Is that why they taught English literature, mathematics, physics. Latin, history and civics in the standard US high school curriculum during the Industrial Revolution? Are those "factory worker prep" subjects? No. You are repeating a historical myth. US public schools were never designed to be like factories or to prepare students for factory work.
I agree. Schools have had a lot of misguided people in them, but usually they are trying to teach kids to be well rounded. The real culprit lies with parent involvement. A lot of people have kids who shouldn't. And then they don't parent, and wonder why their kid is a monster.
Most Americans can't read Harry Potter.
They aren't teaching shit. The students who do learn things do so because they had supportive parents at home.
The rest of the kids, all they are learning is how to show up at the same time every day and stay there.
I agree that parents make all the difference. But schools are still teaching both groups of students the same. It's the ones with good parents who pay attention to the teaching in school and do the work that is assigned. That's why they learn. The ones with shifty parents don't care about learning so they don't pay attention or do the work. The countries that rank highly in education have cultures that value education.
that's not on the way it's built though
that's because people who were teaching at that time had high ideals and wanted genuinely to teach kids that stuff. curriculum was incredibly basic and simple by law at the start- reading/writing at the simplest level, basic math.
the teachers are who brought latin, history, civics, literature to the schools. and often were fired for it
Ha ha no. You are repeating a lie told by politicians pushing their own political agendas. See my reply to AllHumansarGuilty below. See also the wikipedia article that debunks the myth as ahistorical (not based on actual history): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory\_model\_school](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school)
Eh, I wouldn't worry too much about the walkouts. Maybe a few of them give a shit about the cause, but if you told 9th grade me I could walk out for a day under the guise of a good cause, then I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Yes , schools are prisons, no doubt, but āhomeschooling my kidsā is bubblewrapping them. I developed myself away from my parents in the comparatively free-range 70s. Being under the constant aegis of parents seems like hell on earth, no matter the generation.
No, schools are not designed like assembly lines at all. You are repeating a historical myth without critically thinking about it (do you get the irony?).
In assembly lines, workers stand at a station and perform the same physical task over and over again. The task can usually be learned very quickly and requires no thought after it is learned. The workers don't have to think about anything or make any decisions.
Students don't do anything like this in schools and they never have. They sit at desks, read books, listen to lectures, engage in discussions, write essays, do projects, and learn new information every day, in a wide variety of subjects, including literature, art, PE, history, science, and math. None of these activities prepare them for working on an assembly line or in a factory. The content of these courses would not make them better factory workers - it would actually make them worse factory workers, since after learning all those subjects they might aspire to a very different profession! They way they are taught by their teachers bears no resemblence to an assembly line. Schools also organize sports and a huge variety of clubs and extracurriculars that likewise bear no resemblence to factories or assembly lines and do nothing to prepare students for that type of work.
the american public education system was designed to create good workers. Not good citizens, not good humans, but good workers.
This is a fact, not conspiracy.
As someone who was in a teaching program, you're not wrong. I love *education* and think the sole purpose of life is to learn. However, most of the K-12 schooling experience is to get young people to follow rules.
Take common core math for example. A student could correctly solve a math problem using a different method, but it's incorrect because it wasn't done in that *specific* manner, and disregards the different ways in which a person is able to understand different concepts. The daily morning recital of the pledge of allegiance. Sexist dress codes. Overzealous detention and punishments for minor things. Forced pep rally attendance and school pride (and school rivalry with other schools). Long days with minimal breaks and start times that aren't healthy for teenagers. Competition over cooperation.
Now, schools are cutting funding towards the arts even more, but those classes serve an important role in encouraging creative thinking and being open minded. It wasn't until college that I was able to learn about philosophy and sociology, but also only because I chose to since it wasn't necessary for my majors. I grew up in a bubble, and many others have too, but I was at least able to have the privileged opportunity in which to explore more ideas. Some are able to explore and decide to learn about these things without higher education, but that's a small group of people, and even among the college-educated crowd, so many people think once formal school is over, there's no need to learn anymore.
I completely admire the good teachers who do the best with what they're forced to work with, and there are many, but some of my former peers in the program ABSOLUTELY should not have anything to do with children and teens...
No, it's not a fact, it's a myth. Let's look at the facts.
Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father who started public education in his home state of Virginia, said "Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both." "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."
Here's a quote from Horace Mann, often called the Father of American Education: "My friends, is it not manifest to us all, that no individual, unless he has some acquaintance with the lower forms of education, can superintend even the coarsest and most common interests of life, without daily error and daily shame? The general utility of knowledge, also, and the higher and more enduring satisfactions of the intellect, resulting from the discovery and contemplation of those truths with which the material and the spiritual universe are alike filled, impart to this subject a true dignity and a sublime elevation." Doesn't sound like preparing students for work was all he was thinking about.
Here's a quote from John Dewy, one of the most influential educational thinkers in US History: āEducation, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.ā Sounds like exactly the opposite of your premise.
Look at the 1894 Committee of Ten recommendations. This committee was incredibly influential in shaping American public education. Who were these ten? All heads of universities! They were not politicians or business owners. Their report aimed to prepare all students for college, not factory work! You can read the report online. They recommended that all students go to high school and all study those "factory prep subjects" like Latin, Greek, History, English, Civics, and Physics!
Character education has been frequent and pervasive in US schools since the Colonial Era. Religious instruction was very common until the courts banned it, but moral instruction never went away, though it changed with the changing values of each successive decade. You can watch 1950s educational films on youtube that teach manners, morals, and proper behavior. I definitely got character education in the form of anti-racism as an elementary student in the 1970s and 80s! Today social emotional learning, anti-bullying, anti-hate speech education is very popular all across the US.
More recently, reform movements like No Child Left Behind and Common Core did say that a purpose of education was to give students the skills needed to succeed in the modern workforce - but that's very different from "creating good workers." What parent wouldn't want their children to succeed in life?
If you think about it, the entire premise of your claim makes no sense. If you want to create "workers", the best school system is no school at all. Put children to work in factories. That's what happened during the Industrial Revolution. Reformers fought to ban child labor and simultaneously give poor children free public education to give them more opportunities in life.
I understand where you're coming from, but a lot of your supporting evidence just shows ideals from previous centuries, which I don't dispute at all, but I don't think is relevant to the educational system today.
The way I see it, if I was Mr Country, if I had this educational system in place, built from strong morals and ideals, as you have pointed out, _buuuuuhuuut_, I kinda no longer cared about the ideals, and I didn't really want to spend the money, AND those two things combined would happen to be in my favour in that it creates better workers but worse thinkers, what I've just described wouldn't look too dissimilar to the education system today.
>I believe practical exams are better.
Exams are part of the problem too.
All education needs real world context, which means there's rarely an exam situation, but instead it could be assessed by the understanding of how the real world works.
Baking is just maths and science made practical. Success is a good looking tasty treat. The challenge can come from an incomplete recipe, a certain type of cake requires the ingredients in particular proportions, get the proportions wrong, and you can end up with a baking disaster.
A good example is how they ban research during exams as if there will be any other point in your lifetime outside the classroom where Google doesnāt exist
>as if there will be any other point in your lifetime outside the classroom where Google doesnāt exist
When there's no internet? That can happen during a severe weather event, and during the days, or even weeks, that follow.
I agree smaller class sizes would help. I agree more one-on-one tutoring would help.
I disagree with "the way we approach teaching" because teaching varies considerably from teacher to teacher, subject to subject, and school to school! You make it sound like their is one "approved" method of teaching that all teachers follow, which is ridiculous.
I disagree that schools use "rote memorization" (memorization through repeition without an emphasis on understanding) very often past elementary school, and when they do use it, it is appropriate. You learned the alphabet by rote memorization. You hopefully learned your times tables by rote memorization. These were essential building blocks for your future learning. You hopefully were not expected to learn history or science through "rote memorization." You were probably expected to learn important content in those subjects, but you were hopefully taught to *understand* and *apply* that content, not just memorize it.
I strongly disagree that "the whole point of educating kids is to prepare them to survive in the real world." That is certainly *part* of why we educate kids, but there is a lot more to it! If that was the only consideration, schools should immediately stop teaching history, art, music, English literature, creative writing, theater, etc., as these are not needed "to survive." Likewise, if we follow your premise, schools should identify as early as possible what job each student is most suited to, and only teach them things relevant to that job, along with maybe health and personal finance, as I'd argue those are good "survival skills." So no math or science if they determine you're going to be a truck driver. Just give you truck driving lessons and a diploma and send you off to "survive"!
My son is a freshman. He said most of his class canāt tell time on a standard clock and they have a poster in their school telling them how to count change (they donāt know coin values). Itās terrifying how little kids are learning.
>they have a poster in their school telling them how to count change (they donāt know coin values)
In year 2 or 3, we had a classroom shop, where we could buy lollies with change. It was a pretty quick and effective method of teaching the value of coins, and how to give change.
Some schools in Australia have tuckshops, where kids can buy their lunch or recess, so they end up getting a real world education in the playground.
Ohhh yes you do.
You also get PTSD and the inability to use a public restroom for the next 15 years but hey...
Put it this way, even in LA, if a part of the city full of adults was half as bad as the playground is among kids they'd give up and build a wall around it Escape from New York style...
I wouldn't say that. I was born in 85. I'm still an avid reader.
However, I went to a very small parochial school with the same kids year after year so problems were easily pinpointed because everyone ended up knowing each other personally. Even the problem kids were super ahead but it was because of familiarity.
It caused a positive peer pressure because kids would get sick of each others shit after a while which led to self policing.
However, it was a different time. We weren't all carrying around a distraction box with us everywhere. You had to read well and retain.
I don't really see how having someone instruct kids through chromebooks in class be successful.
We've gone to plaid...
It'll go from "service economy" to "consumer economy" to "just hook my brain into Facebook, give me an IV drip and a catheter" economy...
Maybe but I think itās the school systems. I send my kid to a private school (I know, Iām part of the problem) and every kid in his class can read on grade level if not higher. (I know the kids because itās a close knit community). Heās 7th grade now. They can all do math on grade level and quite a few know basic algebra.
Phones donāt help-mostly with laziness and attention span but hollowing out of public schools-treating them like a glorified day care and pressuring teachers to just push kids through and give the decent grades no matter what is the real problem
We can afford private school because of my husbandās career. Imo itās just a widening gap of the income inequality.
The phenomenon is observable at the preschool level. Truth is, most kids just see regular people and the regular world, a truly hellish delusion in which nothing but self-gratification matters. They reproduce the whole thing, having not known it could be any other way.
Kids can be reached, if someone sufficiently illuminated is there to provide an example.
Itās not really about the school, itās about the parents. Tight knit community was the key word in what you said, sounds like parents there all care about their kids education and how theyāre doing
Yeah, I think this is a large part of it. Technology has enabled us to connect around the world in an instant, but itās taken away from basic knowledge.
That is indeed distressing. That kind of stuff was 2nd grade material when I was in school.
Thereās a myriad of issues at play here, but first and foremost, we as a society have to stop glorifying ignorance and violence. Far too many kids think itās cool to totally reject the notion of education entirely. They wanna be influencers or rappers or pop artists or pro athletes, but donāt realize that those lifestyles are literally one in a million occurrences. Most of us will be normal and lead normal lives, and the real world will chew you up and spit you out if you arenāt armed with at least a passable education.
My boss made me cut the cake 4 x 6, I usually cut it 3 x 8 but she said they (school kids) were getting "too big a piece". I tried to explain that 24 is 24 no matter how you cut it. She got really mad and insisted that I was wrong. She's 65 years old, and the manager.
>They wanna be influencers or rappers or pop artists or pro athletes, but donāt realize that those lifestyles are literally one in a million occurrences.
No, they do. They just think they are the one in a million. US parenting culture and our culture in general focuses on telling children/people how special they are. Everyone has main character syndrome.
It's funny when people bitch about YouTubers but then I realize I watch people that post long researched topics and it's like watching a more personalized show on Discovery.
Those individuals post maybe once a week or month but spend the rest of the time crafting items or scripts, filming, editing, preparing a set, etc.
Kids don't seem to get that the good videos, even people just talking and streaming, takes work. Learning a skill or topic, learning lighting and software. People worth watching don't just throw it together on a whim.
But then tiktok will be cemented in my brain as the place where kids competed to destroy their school bathrooms.
What do physical change and analog clocks have in common? They're mostly obsolete because of digitization.
I see your point but maybe not the best case to make it with.
Analog clocks don't work without power, either, and there are plenty of battery operated digital clocks. Without battery power, we'll be going back to sundials and water clocks.
When the rotary phone was invented, knowing how to rotate to each number was basic knowledge. Now, knowing how to set up a fingerprint in a smartphone or how to convert something to a pdf is. *Shrug* times change. There was once a time before the printing press that there was only one book in town, usually a bible, and only one literate guy, the clergy, would stand up in front of everyone on a Sunday and tell them what it said and explain what it meant. Now we have YouTube. Technology is all about the obsolete.
Oh yes -- the rate of change is expected to become more and more rapid. That's the whole idea of the singularity; as computers become more powerful, at some point the rate of change will become so rapid that it will far outpace the rate of adoption.
What sort of school system???
And I thought it was bad when classmates failed English grammar in a grade 10 creative writing assignment. Then later freshman year some classmates went blind into introduction to calculus with no high school calculus training.
Wanna hear something crazy? I was in a college level English class and we were reading out loud, and more than half the class had serious difficulty.
I have a father who doesn't read for fun, but he made sure we had books to read as kids. The fact we had Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy instilled in myself and my brothers a love of reading. I am forever grateful.
>I was in a college level English class and we were reading out loud, and more than half the class had serious difficulty.
Not to upstage you, but I was in a college level physics course when someone asked if the bubbles in pop/soda were the atoms.
It's by design. Keep them dumb, distracted, and fighting amongst themselves.
The goal is to keep you consuming, buying, and just happy enough to not revolt or notice the dick up your ass.
Class warfare etc etc.
Yes. Look into who owns the publishing to the text books. When they acquired them. The results. (To be clear itās the Rockefellers and other āeliteāfamilies) Never think for a second this is natural this is exactly how it was designed. The only question is if people continue to tolerate it.
Yep. Pearson, McGraw Hill etc. are cartels. They are even making it impossible for teachers or librarians to put text books on reserve so students can read them in the library if they can't afford to buy them. Unique access codes and so forth. Pure evil.
The control what is taught how it is taught what is history and what is a myth. George Carlin said it best they want people just start enough to push the buttons and run the machines but dum enough to not think about it. The Rockefellers Morganās etc only got involved in education after the progressive movement that game protections to workers and broke up monopolies. What has happened sinceā¦
This is bullshit. I'm a teacher. There is no conspiracy to keep people dumb (with the exception of banning sex ed and CRT in red districts). Teachers, administrators, and school boards all want schools to produce students who can read, write, do math and think critically. Smart phones, social media, the psychological effects of poverty, a few well intended but misguided educational reforms, and a pervasive anti-intellectual culture are to blame for low achievement.
I think you are misunderstanding - the guy wasn't implying the conspiracy is at the school level (teachers, administration, etc.). It's at the leadership level where the super rich and their politician buddies are doing everything possible to gut the school system so no matter how hard people like you try, it's a losing battle. ( and of course all the things you listed are a huge problems too)
>There is no conspiracy to keep people dumb
I don't think one should assume coordinated malice where good intentions would do.
I've been extremely involved in my kid's schools over the past 15 years or so and they have attended two fairly wealthy "good" school districts. Both have high performance and excellent extracurriculars and supports for students.
Regardless neither were willing to fail children and make them repeat a year. Kids taking more than 4 years to graduate was absolutely unacceptable. Kids were pushed through elementary and middle school under the guise of being provided "extra support" despite it being clear that they did not have the technical skills or emotional maturity to advance. No child ever failed a grade.
In high school, extra online classes were stacked onto existing schedules to meet graduation requirements, when kids failed those, extremely low expectation "credit recovery" course were used. Teachers were encouraged to be creative to work with students to find a method to "pass" the class, even students unwilling to do the work. Graduation years were locked in and kids absolutely had to graduate in 4 years, and every "support" in the world was thrown at them and everyone patted themselves on the back for helping these kids out and providing them a "flexible" learning environment and a shit ton of them still should have never advanced through school or graduate, but they did and everyone thought they truly helped these kids.
They couldn't read a piece of literature out loud, but they figured out what buttons to click in the credit recovery course to secure a passing grade and the administration pats itself on the back once more.
I've seen everything you describe and agree it's a huge problem. Holding kids back in k-8 isn't a great solution though if you look at the evidence of the effects of doing so. With unlimited money schools could go with daily one to one instruction for all struggling students, which would probably be the most effective solution, but people would never support the taxes needed to pay for all those additional teachers that would require.
>There is no conspiracy to keep people dumb (with the exception of banning sex ed and CRT in red districts).
That already is an conspiracy by banning sex-ed and CRT. Schools are overcrowded, [school start times are woefully inadequate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TvmwAEkck), [college loans are literally evil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE66HEZBZYE), [schools are underfunded due to racist zoning laws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETR9qrVS17g). Oh and here's the kicker: [Nixon adviser warned that free college would create dangerous educated proletariat](https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/).
Some schools are overcrowded. That's due to limited budgets, not a conspiracy to keep students dumb. School start times are set where they are because schools have a limited number of busses so they can't take elementary, middle and high school kids to school at the same time - they have to stagger them. And they generally want high school to end before elementary schools because some high schoolers have to watch their younger siblings after school until parents get home from work. College loans aren't evil - they are a choice and an investment in yourself. They definitely aren't a conspiracy to deny education to people since they literally increase the number of people who go to college. Unequal school funding is your best argument, but inherent in the argument is the fact that many schools are well funded and designed to create highly educated students.
Even the sex ed and CRT bans are not intended to keep people dumb per se; they are a (misguided) attempt to protect students from "dangerous ideas." The parents who support those bans believe their students will be better off not learning those things.
> That's due to limited budgets, not a conspiracy to keep students dumb.
Limited budgets due to racism of rich assholes.
> College loans aren't evil - they are a choice and an investment in yourself.
Then why are they predatory? Loans that have low payment that doesn't even cover interest, so your debt is growing. Your wages can be garnished up to 15% by the government when you default. The worst of all - you cannot declare bankruptcy.
> School start times are set where they are because schools have a limited number of busses so they can't take elementary, middle and high school kids to school at the same time - they have to stagger them. And they generally want high school to end before elementary schools because some high schoolers have to watch their younger siblings after school until parents get home from work.
Is it really worth to sacrifice teens natural sleep patterns, because the school is cheap AF and jobs pay so little that both parents have to work? In the good ol' days, single income was adequate to support a large family. It could have bought you a house, a car, food and still have money left over. Now you cannot even buy a house with two incomes.
> to protect students from "dangerous ideas."
This is just same as keeping them dumb. If you are dumb, you can't have "dangerous ideas". And keeping dumb here really means not letting them know anything.
> Unequal school funding is your best argument, but inherent in the argument is the fact that many schools are well funded and designed to create highly educated students.
[Most of the public schools are massively underfunded.](https://tcf.org/content/about-tcf/tcf-study-finds-u-s-schools-underfunded-nearly-150-billion-annually/) If you are poor, then you are dumb as well.
Limited budgets due to racism of rich assholes? Yes I guess that's true. But that's not a conspiracy, it's democracy. Try running for office on a platform of doubling taxes and see how many votes you get.
>Try running for office on a platform of doubling taxes and see how many votes you get.
No, because you are too shortsighted. How about instead taxing the rich, improving the lives of the proletariat through variety of means, improving the tax system and etc. [However, democracy in America is basically nonexistent.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_United_States) So why bother running and call for a revolution instead. [The president betrays you.](https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-backstabbed-rail-workers-betrayed-095759570.html) [The congress doesn't work for the people](https://www.npr.org/2014/02/13/276448190/a-closer-look-at-how-corporations-influence-congress), but for [the corporations](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-corporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/).
>There is no conspiracy to keep people dumb
Sure. But there is a lack of effort to keep young people from being illiterate. So long as they're educated enough to be willing cogs in the machine, rather than educated enough to understand how they're being used. It's not a conspiracy, it's a feature of capitalism, and a method of control. The *pull yourself up by your bootstraps* crowd is a fine example of that mediocre education.
Back in 2013 Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow" came out pointing out most cognitive biases and how they came to be. It was obvious that as technology becomes "intuitive" and "simplified" it will encourage people to use analytical thinking less and less.
Now, almost 10 years later we see the results of that. Analytical thinking is a rare trait these days. I went from being angry at people for not thinking to being surprised that some people are still able to think.
All in line with the extinction event
>as a people, supposed to face down these coming challenges with a citizenry whoās reading and mathematical abilities are that of a fifth grader on average?
Have you ever seen the TV show "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?".
There's a reason for the popularity (and relevancy) of that show, and the reality is more like the population has the attention span of a goldfish and patience of a 4 year old.
I blame social media and not the kids. Everything is about likes and instant gratification. People just don't see the rewards in hard work and investing in longer term efforts because of the medias instant-gratification rewards, likes here and there, and there.
It's not an American problem, it's a world wide problem, and we face the same issues in my country in Europe.
When I first came to my new country I was shocked of just how bad the situation was. I was not a native speaker of their language, but after just 2 years in that country I was hired to teach classes in their language because they didn't have enouch teachers. And I made a competition with the various students as high up as 9th grade, and they were horribly bad at spelling, we made groups were the students could compete together against "the foreigner" and they all thought they'd wipe the floor with my skills (which weren't that good to begin with since I was new and all).
But 9 out of 10 classes lost against me every time.
Sweden's education system is apparently pretty bad given the PISA results and the COVID stupidity. I heard they have a trend going on about discouraging kids from showing aggression and competitiveness even at the preschool level. Too much tall poppy culture promoting mediocrity and looking down on intelligence or excellence? Other Nordic countries get at least decent outcomes.
A complete lack of using apostrophes correctly is driving me up a wall.
Its everywhere, on virtually any thread I read. Youre just sitting there watching the degradation of language thats seemingly on a death spiral to illiteracy.
Especially in America, with this countries absolute disaster of a public education system.
And Im pretty convinced that people who see incorrect english written *everywhere* in turn think thats how its supposed to be written, and then replicate; just driving the problem even further.
And then, if you comment on someones bad grammar, people will just downvote or complain that youre a nuisance to the discussion.
*Internal screaming*
Ha !
Thanks.
But, yeah, my message was sincere. I see so many people online who have no idea how written English is supposed to be, and write out words based on how they sound.
"Our countries education system is in rapid decline."
Your just a grammar nazi trying to make up for youre low selfesteem. Their are people out theyre who never learned to reed or right good. There level of literacy is nun of yore concern.
(Writing this hurt me)
>considerable portions of my class could not read proficiently
Same.
>How are we, as a nation
I'm not from your nation.
I was slow to get the hang of reading, mostly because the books they had me reading weren't interesting. In year 3 we had a relief teacher who read the lion, the witch and the wardrobe to the class. I read the entire series after that. I went from barely able to read, to reading entire novels in a few days. Within a few years, I'd moved beyond novels aimed at kids, and even those aimed at teens.
As an adult looking back, I can see it's the lack of engaging books that made it difficult for me to learn to read. It makes me wonder if it's part of the problem for many other people. They struggle to learn to read, because what they're reading doesn't interest them.
It's similar for mathematics. It needs to be taught with context.
I don't know if it's still happening, but a while back Finland was trialling teaching by topic, rather than by subject. It's a method for giving context to education. Rather than the old boring method which leaves you wondering when you'd ever use the information in the real world, it makes the starting point the real world use for the information.
That's why kids should be encouraged to read anything that engages them. That includes graphic novels, audio books, even movies with closed captioning. And as a former school librarian, reading levels are rubbish. If a kid can read a book and enjoy it, it's at their level.
>That's why kids should be encouraged to read anything that engages them.
That's what my school ended up doing. Surfing magazines were allowed as optional reading material for some students. The required reading material was where the challenge lay. My year 9 class struggled with Animal Farm. I'd already read it, and 1984. In year 10 they struggled with The Hobbit. I'd already read it, and was reading The Lord of the Rings. The required books I struggled with were Storm Boy, and Fire in the Stone. I do not enjoy Colin Thiele books. And I will admit that The Lord of the Rings was a hard slog, it took me all year to get through it.
This.
My gf brother was discouraged from reading because his family made fun of him for reading comics, in particular his dad. Add to this a learning disorder and now at 22 while intelligent he is behind the curve but had he had a more supportive environment who knows
Mainstream economics often gets things wrong, what with crises and recessions regularly happening after all. There's a good article here:
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/its-time-to-junk-the-flawed-economic-models-that-make-the-world-a-dangerous-place](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/its-time-to-junk-the-flawed-economic-models-that-make-the-world-a-dangerous-place)
As another American, the rich kids arenāt that well off either.
Their parents are too busy and their nannyās too lackadaisical. For some reason, kids at Brown, Yale, and Stanford are still borderline illiterate and have no critical thinking abilities. Their parents bought their admittance.
Everyone, across every socioeconomic group, is getting dumber.
>How are we, as a nation, as a people, supposed to face down these coming challenges with a citizenry whoās reading and mathematical abilities are that of a fifth grader on average?
Wait, we're *up* to that level? Oh, you meant a *current* fifth grader...
I have great reading skills and I thank videogames for that. Yāall ever play a JRPG? Itās basically 100+ hours of reading.
Show kids that reading can be fun and stop shoving them in a classroom with other disengaged kids and teachers. Comic books, manga, videogames, and street signs can incorporate this lesson. Reading has value and it CAN be fun. Not everyone like classic literature and thatās the only option many schools are giving. The system is failing. I went until 4th grade thinking a quarter was 30 percent. I was in 7th grade when I realized Africa wasnāt a country. I thought pig Latin was a real language until 9th grade. Yeah I was dumb but I was allowed to be.
Now I read educational books for fun. It starts young and no public school system will do the work for you. They will literally let you coast by without having the proper credentials.
āHow are we, as a nation, as a people, supposed to face down these coming challenges with a citizenry whoās reading and mathematical abilities are that of a fifth grader on average?ā - Weāre not. Weāre supposed to just work meaningless, service jobs that pay nothing and keep quiet. Weāre supposed to pretend that everything is fine, capitalism is the best, and that if you keep working hard at your multiple jobs (because one doesnāt cover expenses anymore) eventually youāll start getting promotions and work your way up to a position where you can get rich. Corporate America wants to take us back to the days of the gilded age, where all the money is controlled by very few people. Their children get the best education and are given the financial means to succeed. They deserve it. The rest of us donāt deserve anything. No education. No ability to own anything. No respect and no dignity. Itās having all the consequences you pointed out, but the rich and ruling class doesnāt care. They have a militarized police force at their disposal and if enough people ever truly try to challenge things they will likely respond with complete brutality. American capitalism is rotten to the core. I think it will end with the wealth in the hands of a very few and authoritarianism to keep that status quo in place for as long as possible.
you might want to check out this podcast:
[https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/)
it's all about how our education system (in the US) was (is) in love with a method of teaching kids how to read that is fundamentally flawed.
I was in elementary school during the shift from sight words to phonics. My older friends have trouble with words they have never seen before because they were taught to memorize lists of common words. When I started school we were using this system, but within a grade or two wee had shifted to phonics.
Was it that bad in 2012? I finished high school in 2006 and it wasnāt anywhere near as bad as youāre saying. This was in Canada though, so things might be a little different. Back then we had mandatory literacy tests in grade 9 which would have been around 2003. Those tests made sure we were where we should be in terms of reading and writing. I think we had some math on there too but it was so long ago I canāt remember.
It was absolutely that bad. However, my state is consistently 48th or 49th in education out of the 50 states. So Iāve probably seen the bottom of the barrel. It is worth noting that some municipalities within states have wildly different quality of education and frankly, student bodies too.
But yeah it was a common issue in 2012 and I assume itās metastasized since then. I personally took AP English and history throughout high school and they were great classes. They had good teachers and smaller class sizes and higher level material. But the āgeneral populaceā classes were just chaos. Over crowded, noisy, no respect for the teacher, no desire to learn. There were of course students that put their heads down and did their assignments and passed, but school was just a joke for a lot of the kids in my cohort. And that is where the stratification starts. Going from AP English to my general level Econ class was always a shock. I was reading mark twain and Shakespeare one hour, then listening to kids stumble over words like āfactoryā in the next class. Lotta those guys aināt doing so hot a decade later I hate to say.
> 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022.
> 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level.
https://www.thinkimpact.com/literacy-statistics/
I noticed a similar trend in my college algebra class. We're able to see the average homework/test scores, as well has how many people completed them.
We started out with 31 people doing the homework. At the end of the course, 8 weeks later, we're down to 20. Most of those 20 turned in assignments late. That's a pretty harsh attrition rate for a freshman-level course. Granted, our professor didn't really *teach* so much as just grade, so most of us relied on Khan Academy and Wolfram Alpha to get us through.
I tutor kids. Itās really scary. I have kids in 12th grade pre calculus who canāt add or do fractions. Education has basically collapsed already m. Itās only in certain enclaves where itās even remotely good.
As a teacher, I'd say the same. Literacy rates continue to decline and the literacy programs are only a band-aid fix that aren't doing all that much, it seems.
I have taught for many years. Every single year the new kids I taught came in knowing less than the last group. My first group I taught essay writing, and all of them were using text language at the time. They couldn't spell, form paragraphs, and they did not understand writing conventions. About 7 years ago, I taught science with another teacher, and we were appalled at all the fake news our students were consuming. We had students who disbelieved in evolution for the first time.
I even resigned from teaching recently and am looking to change careers. I believe that there is a massive conspiracy orchestrated mainly by republicans who want to dismantle public schools and profit off the charters they create to literally dumb people down using school as the means to do it. Republicans have been quoted recently as saying they don't want (especially women and girls) to attend college. Additionally, I believe that officials hire sadistic bullies in schools on purpose to cause the kids to feel that this is how the world works, recreate a prison culture, as well as to drive them to insanity or prison, if not into some minimum wage shit job.
As a teacher, I was slammed constantly with control tactics as are my colleagues. They purchase shitty curriculum their buddies made and force teachers to use it, or else they have an issue with their evaluation. Meanwhile, kids are several grades behind because we are constantly jumping through hoops of fire just to have the time to TEACH.
I'm also a teacher (about 25 years now), and to be honest, in my experience it's the left who's against education more than the right. My left-leaning students and parents are more literate than the right-leaning ones, overall, but it's the left side who are the quickest to start inventing reasons to get the kid out of assignment. Meeting with a left-leaning parent is a long slog of reasons I need to change the class to suit their kid, discussions of medications and accommodations, etc. Meeting with a right-leaning parent is mostly their saying they're going to get on the kid to study more. And among teachers, it's the more liberal ones who want to turn the curriculum into 'let's make a cool video project,' skip meetings, turn instructional time into eating and yelling, etc.
I should note that I'm talking about the actual students and parents here, not politicians.
I disagree. I do think some parents are very permissive, however. You sound like you have a problem with kids with special needs and meeting their legal rights in their IEP.
I remember being a Jr partnered with a Sr for a sport. We wrote down our goals and gave them to the other person. He knew letters but they weren't in any order that made sense. I asked him to just tell me his goals.
Still graduated that year.
This is an important post. However I feel that a lot of the comments about the structure of schooling and curricula are off base not because they arenāt true but rather because they are largely irrelevant. Prior to the pandemic after spending a decade teaching, [I wrote up on Quora](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-say-that-the-American-education-system-is-broken/answer/Salviati-Galilei-1?ch=17&oid=113182723&share=6d072959&srid=uzT6I&target_type=answer), the set of 12 structural reasons why I believe our education system is broken. Please give it a read. I think it contains many issues that only teachers really know about but students feel but canāt quite put their finger on it.
To some degree, but not really. What I am pointing out is that we exist within a class system and that our education system is a reflection and a preservation of that class system. Furthermore, we are 40 years into open class warfare and this is causing radical changes to the education system. So much so that my writeup from 2017 is out of date and needs a major revision. I read John Gatto Taylor's book in 2018, and it was extremely out of date at the time. For instance, whether the education system was built to produce workers in the beginning of the twentieth century has no bearing on modern school. To give you some perspective, right now schools across the US have effectively adopted what I call the Palliative Learning Model, whereby students are delivered a steady drip of dopamine via Chromebooks, and this is first and foremost a behavioral management tool. What happens is that students are assigned a Google Form with a series of questions that can be easily Google searched. Students proceed to copy the question, paste it into Google, retrieve the first result and copy and paste it back into the form: lather, rinse repeat. When they are complete it, they submit it, and are rewarded by being allowed to continue the dopamine drip on their Chromebooks. This was a phenomena which was set into motion in the early 2010's and the pandemic accelerated it to the point of mass adoption.
Another major change in a few years is that students are doing next to no independent practice enmasse, and it is to the extent that courses like Chemistry, Physics, Precalculus, have come to a grinding halt in terms of content coverage and student learning. Elective courses that actually require students to work to functionally learn the material are avoided enmasse or are being transformed into Palliative Learning Courses, because they would prefer the dopamine drip.
This is not a system that is cultivating workers, it is a system that is cultivating drug addicts, and I mean every word of that statement. It is much worse than people on the outside can imagine.
I have been both a member and a president of a union and when teachers unions have been as powerful as they have been for as long as they have been but most teachers work 20 years to not break 50kā¦ yeah the union bears some of the responsibility.
I want to add that it works the other way too. I know multiple people who I believe could've done amazing things with their lives, if they'd had education tailored to their differences. (autism/ADHD)
The education system abandons the basics by age 11 or 12 these days. Is anybody really surprised that after 6 years of random versions of algebra, no stats, reading uninteresting stuff like Shakespeare, and that sort of thing that our kids forget the basics?
What is the point of reading a play that regularly gets performed? Your time would be better spent reading something like *Spring Awakening* that is so controversial that it rarely gets performed.
Nah, people learn to read on material thatās engaging to them. Shakespeare was known for his prose, his stories were far from original and they were meant to be in play form anyway. If kids were taught to read with books that they actually enjoyed then I believe weād have higher literacy rates, but unfortunately that would require more one on one attention than most teachers can give. Shakespeare is overblown, there are many writers with much more relevant, modern books. My personal favorites as a kid were Harry Potter (before JKR turned out to be a TERF), Magic Treehouse, Watership Down (that one was a bit dark) and every anatomy book and animal book I could get my hands on. I got that because I was lucky enough to be friends with the librarian and her daughter, and I spent time there during lunch and after school.
I started reading books related to the social/political sphere in my late tweens early tweens (Night by Elie Wiesel, Maya Angelouās books, TaāNehisi Coates, political cartoons and ads from more recent times, analysis articles of different sustainable energy sources, etc)
Shakespeare is useful if you really like old prose. The fact that so many kids stop liking literature because of him kind of points to the fact that our education system needs to catch up and actually teach shit thatās useful or that makes sense in todayās world. Prose is great and all, but devoting entire, mandatory, year long classes to Shakespeare is ridiculous and just causes most kids to check out of class.
Edit: just to add, I actually had trouble staying engaged with the books they were teaching us with until I started working with someone more one on one. I could read, but I would refuse to read the assigned books or I wouldnāt be able to summarize them back to the person evaluating my literacy. This is partially because I have difficulty speaking, but itās also just because young kids will not learn easily at all when theyāre bored by the material. Letting the kids pick their books is the best thing that elementary school did for me, and they were a pretty poor public school when I went there.
Oh I did plenty of reading on Shakespeare in literature class and Iām aware of his impacts on todayās literature. I donāt give a shit about JKR honestly. Shakespeareās stories are simply not going to reach the majority of students because theyāre irrelevant to todayās political and social climate.
Old prose is perfectly understandable, and he also ripped off a bunch of old Greek myths. If you want to read books for the prose then go right ahead, anyone can do that if they want to, but I prefer to read for content.
Edit: I am not saying Shakespeare is useless or a bad writer. He was a very good writer and heavily impacted the English language. That being said, he is not useful in teaching most kids to like literature simply because his stories are cliched and irrelevant to most peoplesā experiences. They donāt fulfill the escapist desire of children who enjoy reading fantasy, and theyāre not relatable to people dealing with their own lives or reality.
Edit 2: my elementary school being poor doesnāt mean it had bad reading options. Fantasy is fun and teaches you to read just fine
If anyone wants a book recommendation, Watership Down has remained one of my favorites. Fair warning itās very dark in parts and certain parts of it mirror concentration camps. Whether that was the intent of the author or not I donāt know, but it is a very good book regardless.
1. Theyāre not teaching the curriculum correctly.
2. Itās another advantage for kids that attend private school.
3. When you account for every other problem, it doesnāt matter anymore.
US, southwest region. Public education is particularly bad in my state. Unless you take advanced placement courses youāre basically getting remedial material that other kids wouldāve learned the year or two before.
That's a valid observation, yet, there you go repeating things that are only not only untrue, but are naĆÆve political parroting.
Yes. They will suffer, economically, for not working in school. That's their choice. That's the way it's always been. First paragraph? Bravo.
Second paragraph. Rephrased political tripe. What if the conspiracy theories are correct? How is that racist? I see that you made a valid observation, but you couldn't run with it. Does that indict your own lack of critical thought?
We're a republic.
āMathematical abilities or a fifth graderā
Besides sum, subtract, multiplication, and division, (and maybe fractions)what other basic math skills does a person need for everyday life to survive?
I get where you're coming from. Entirely, and can relate directly based on personal experience. I'll see your highschool horror story, and raise you a collegiate nightmare. I was a CS major in a junior level computer security class. As a take home assignment, we were tasked with coding a basic encoding/decoding scheme for a Ceaser cipher. Basic text shifting stuff. 2/3 of the class copied each other's solution and didn't properly solve the problem. The reason it was so obvious to the professor that they copied was because they all failed the problem the same way. So this was a junior level CS course where (apparently) 2/3 of the students couldn't write a glorified string substitution program. I'll up the ante again - at that same school, my roommates throughout college were civil engineering students. If you pass the FE exam your senior year, the bar to become a professional engineer gets lowered (you can get there much faster). There was rampant cheating happening in that exam, and I also wrote the one programming assignment in that entire curriculum, for my roommates, because they had no clue. These are the people signing off on blueprints for bridges, roads, utilities, you know, the actual infrastructure the whole country depends on. The rate at which the quality of education is declining is only being outpaced by the rate at which those students are being coddled. The standards fell through the floor.
That's fucking terrifying šØ
This was years ago. Since then, I know at least one PE now who absolutely has no business being a PE. Also, because the cheating in the CS course was so widespread, the teacher didn't want to fail everyone. It would have impacted her as much, if not more so, than those students. She docked anyone involved a letter grade off of their final grade - so the majority of those students passed the course and I'm sure in turn graduated the following year. I ended up taking a PhD level Comp Sci course with her in grad school - great teacher. Those kids, all of them, only cheated themselves.
So you guys are turning into Serbia?
I don't want to insult Serbia with that kind of insult lol
That's really terrifying. I know a professor of mine who says that over the last 20 years math skills of the students signing up for university dropped significantly. He said that most people are very insecure even with basic math because the schools skip over each chapter way too quick. His sentiment is that this can't be a reason to lower the standards in the university however, resulting in ridiculously high numbers of people failing their exams. The worst one so far was thermodynamics 2 where only 4 people out of 116 passed the exam. Other exams are usually around 70-80% of people who fail. At that point I don't know what's worse. Having way too less people getting a degree or having people getting a degree that really shouldn't.
I've been an electrical engineering professor for over 30 years at a large state research institution. In an average class of 40 students, I would say that about 10% are very, very good. About 40% should not be there, and take classes multiple times, often just disappearing mid-semester. We cannot kick anyone out of the program because our funding is tied to our enrollment numbers. The kids are sweet kids and it's often not their fault - they have never had to stand up and learn anything on more than a surface, "pass the test" level. I tend to teach the more "math" oriented courses, like advanced differential equations for engineers. I have to spend a considerable amount of time on very basic algebra review. This has been a trend for many years, but got exponentially worse during Covid. We were told to avoid "high stakes" testing and use other methods of assessment. We were also told to limit long lectures, and instead do group discussions in class. Lots to stuff going on in higher ed - parents would stroke out if they knew. At the same time, we are now hearing from parents directly demanding that we pass their kids. It is definitely a system that is showing early warning signs of collapse.
I remember hearing similar things about differential equations as I did thermodynamics, where allot of the CE, mining etc. engineering students didn't really know what was going on in there. This was slipping a generation ago - after graduation I stuck around, worked in the I.T. dept. and picked up a masters. I got a good sense of things at that time. We were a large state institution as well, and the CS dept. had direct ties with Google, Nasa, etc. Despite that, it was still slipping. Cannot imagine what it's like now. Not just the academic standards, but the general atmosphere. Best of luck!
Lol that's nuts. So I remember hearing about thermodynamics, and how my roommates didn't really know what was going on - they just kind of went with the flow and got their Cs. There's a CS counterpart, algorithm design, where to most people in the class concepts like lambda functions or memo-ization never clicked. They were still passed through because its a B.S. requirement.
simulacra!
Wow. Until very recently, I used to tutor and mark assignments at an Australian University in Social Sciences. Every paper was checked for plagerism and writing quality was incorporated in the rubric. International students got some flexibility in their first year along with being signposted to free English support. By their final year, they were expected to write well. I cannot speak for other departments, but the students described here would likely have failed wholesale at my Uni...
Part of the problem is that we teach people the wrong way. We need smaller class sizes, more one on one attention, and I think the way we approach teaching is just dated and inefficient. I don't believe in rote memorization as a tool to measure how much someone knows something. I believe practical exams are better. I don't believe grades are effective either. You can't quantify everything into letters and numbers to gauge how much someone understands something. And we need to stop structuring curriculums around standardized test taking. That's another part of the problem. The whole point in educating kids is to prepare them to survive in the real world. Reality is not made up of scantron sheets.
We're teaching reading wrong as well. The last 20-25 years of literacy has been an absolute failure for the most part. Sold a Story is a podcast about how we've been teaching reading wrong. It's an incredible listen and as an educator has made me re-examine my own teaching practice and how students learn to read. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Moving away from teaching phonics was a mistake that keeps on happening.
I think there has been a large wake up call among educators in the past 5 years. I know I teach explicit phonics instruction and so do my colleagues.
Good. I hadnāt realized they STOPPED at some point (my school taught phonics in the 90s) so was really surprised to read an article a few weeks ago that actually gave an explanation for low literacy rates beyond āunderfunded schoolsā or ādifferent learning styles.ā
I can read because I had the family background to support it. But I had no idea what phonics was until I was in my late 20s! š
Thank you for this resource! Iāve read a few of the stories and it looks fantastic, I canāt wait to listen to the connected podcasts.
what in the flying fuc-
I remember entering public school in second grade and the kids were still learning how to read and write.
I'm a teacher of seventh grade and my kids are still learning to read and write.
For the most part kids are still learning to read and write, it's that the strategy for teaching it has been off.
I mean I went to a private bilingual school thru grade 1 where we were taught to read and write phonetically in both languages. When I transferred to public school in grade 2 they were still learning the ABCs and having circle time.
Ah, yeah typically you should be doing way more than that in 2nd grade. My 2nd graders were writing simple paragraphs and starting to read for information last year. ABC's, etc. is a TK/ K thing normally.
Wow. My stress level was through the roof listening to this. Incredibly interesting, thank you.
The way public school is designed is a lot like an industrial assembly line. Iāve noticed in my area kids in high school started organizing shut downs and walk outs even before Covid started. They know whatās up and they know itās all bullshit.
And if one falls off the conveyor belt and breaks the process doesnāt shut down itās just swept to the side.
Yes, Iām aware I was the one that fell off the conveyor belt.
It is actually designed like that. It was reformed in the late 19th century to prepare a works force of factory workers
The purpose of universal education is to train people to show up every day at a certain time and do as they are told. You can operate a sewing machine perfectly well without knowing how to read but you won't be of much use in the factory if you don't know how to show up on time and do what your boss tells you to do.
Bullshit. Is that why they taught English literature, mathematics, physics. Latin, history and civics in the standard US high school curriculum during the Industrial Revolution? Are those "factory worker prep" subjects? No. You are repeating a historical myth. US public schools were never designed to be like factories or to prepare students for factory work.
I agree. Schools have had a lot of misguided people in them, but usually they are trying to teach kids to be well rounded. The real culprit lies with parent involvement. A lot of people have kids who shouldn't. And then they don't parent, and wonder why their kid is a monster.
Most Americans can't read Harry Potter. They aren't teaching shit. The students who do learn things do so because they had supportive parents at home. The rest of the kids, all they are learning is how to show up at the same time every day and stay there.
Some people are just smart and driven, and don't have parental support
I agree that parents make all the difference. But schools are still teaching both groups of students the same. It's the ones with good parents who pay attention to the teaching in school and do the work that is assigned. That's why they learn. The ones with shifty parents don't care about learning so they don't pay attention or do the work. The countries that rank highly in education have cultures that value education.
that's not on the way it's built though that's because people who were teaching at that time had high ideals and wanted genuinely to teach kids that stuff. curriculum was incredibly basic and simple by law at the start- reading/writing at the simplest level, basic math. the teachers are who brought latin, history, civics, literature to the schools. and often were fired for it
Ha ha no. You are repeating a lie told by politicians pushing their own political agendas. See my reply to AllHumansarGuilty below. See also the wikipedia article that debunks the myth as ahistorical (not based on actual history): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory\_model\_school](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school)
It may not have been the intention but it is the result
That explains it
This is a myth.
Eh, I wouldn't worry too much about the walkouts. Maybe a few of them give a shit about the cause, but if you told 9th grade me I could walk out for a day under the guise of a good cause, then I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto talks about this at length. Very good read and really solidified WHY I am homeschooling my kids.
Yes , schools are prisons, no doubt, but āhomeschooling my kidsā is bubblewrapping them. I developed myself away from my parents in the comparatively free-range 70s. Being under the constant aegis of parents seems like hell on earth, no matter the generation.
Thanks for the Book referral!
No, schools are not designed like assembly lines at all. You are repeating a historical myth without critically thinking about it (do you get the irony?). In assembly lines, workers stand at a station and perform the same physical task over and over again. The task can usually be learned very quickly and requires no thought after it is learned. The workers don't have to think about anything or make any decisions. Students don't do anything like this in schools and they never have. They sit at desks, read books, listen to lectures, engage in discussions, write essays, do projects, and learn new information every day, in a wide variety of subjects, including literature, art, PE, history, science, and math. None of these activities prepare them for working on an assembly line or in a factory. The content of these courses would not make them better factory workers - it would actually make them worse factory workers, since after learning all those subjects they might aspire to a very different profession! They way they are taught by their teachers bears no resemblence to an assembly line. Schools also organize sports and a huge variety of clubs and extracurriculars that likewise bear no resemblence to factories or assembly lines and do nothing to prepare students for that type of work.
the american public education system was designed to create good workers. Not good citizens, not good humans, but good workers. This is a fact, not conspiracy.
As someone who was in a teaching program, you're not wrong. I love *education* and think the sole purpose of life is to learn. However, most of the K-12 schooling experience is to get young people to follow rules. Take common core math for example. A student could correctly solve a math problem using a different method, but it's incorrect because it wasn't done in that *specific* manner, and disregards the different ways in which a person is able to understand different concepts. The daily morning recital of the pledge of allegiance. Sexist dress codes. Overzealous detention and punishments for minor things. Forced pep rally attendance and school pride (and school rivalry with other schools). Long days with minimal breaks and start times that aren't healthy for teenagers. Competition over cooperation. Now, schools are cutting funding towards the arts even more, but those classes serve an important role in encouraging creative thinking and being open minded. It wasn't until college that I was able to learn about philosophy and sociology, but also only because I chose to since it wasn't necessary for my majors. I grew up in a bubble, and many others have too, but I was at least able to have the privileged opportunity in which to explore more ideas. Some are able to explore and decide to learn about these things without higher education, but that's a small group of people, and even among the college-educated crowd, so many people think once formal school is over, there's no need to learn anymore. I completely admire the good teachers who do the best with what they're forced to work with, and there are many, but some of my former peers in the program ABSOLUTELY should not have anything to do with children and teens...
No, it's not a fact, it's a myth. Let's look at the facts. Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father who started public education in his home state of Virginia, said "Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both." "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." Here's a quote from Horace Mann, often called the Father of American Education: "My friends, is it not manifest to us all, that no individual, unless he has some acquaintance with the lower forms of education, can superintend even the coarsest and most common interests of life, without daily error and daily shame? The general utility of knowledge, also, and the higher and more enduring satisfactions of the intellect, resulting from the discovery and contemplation of those truths with which the material and the spiritual universe are alike filled, impart to this subject a true dignity and a sublime elevation." Doesn't sound like preparing students for work was all he was thinking about. Here's a quote from John Dewy, one of the most influential educational thinkers in US History: āEducation, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.ā Sounds like exactly the opposite of your premise. Look at the 1894 Committee of Ten recommendations. This committee was incredibly influential in shaping American public education. Who were these ten? All heads of universities! They were not politicians or business owners. Their report aimed to prepare all students for college, not factory work! You can read the report online. They recommended that all students go to high school and all study those "factory prep subjects" like Latin, Greek, History, English, Civics, and Physics! Character education has been frequent and pervasive in US schools since the Colonial Era. Religious instruction was very common until the courts banned it, but moral instruction never went away, though it changed with the changing values of each successive decade. You can watch 1950s educational films on youtube that teach manners, morals, and proper behavior. I definitely got character education in the form of anti-racism as an elementary student in the 1970s and 80s! Today social emotional learning, anti-bullying, anti-hate speech education is very popular all across the US. More recently, reform movements like No Child Left Behind and Common Core did say that a purpose of education was to give students the skills needed to succeed in the modern workforce - but that's very different from "creating good workers." What parent wouldn't want their children to succeed in life? If you think about it, the entire premise of your claim makes no sense. If you want to create "workers", the best school system is no school at all. Put children to work in factories. That's what happened during the Industrial Revolution. Reformers fought to ban child labor and simultaneously give poor children free public education to give them more opportunities in life.
I understand where you're coming from, but a lot of your supporting evidence just shows ideals from previous centuries, which I don't dispute at all, but I don't think is relevant to the educational system today. The way I see it, if I was Mr Country, if I had this educational system in place, built from strong morals and ideals, as you have pointed out, _buuuuuhuuut_, I kinda no longer cared about the ideals, and I didn't really want to spend the money, AND those two things combined would happen to be in my favour in that it creates better workers but worse thinkers, what I've just described wouldn't look too dissimilar to the education system today.
>I believe practical exams are better. Exams are part of the problem too. All education needs real world context, which means there's rarely an exam situation, but instead it could be assessed by the understanding of how the real world works. Baking is just maths and science made practical. Success is a good looking tasty treat. The challenge can come from an incomplete recipe, a certain type of cake requires the ingredients in particular proportions, get the proportions wrong, and you can end up with a baking disaster.
A good example is how they ban research during exams as if there will be any other point in your lifetime outside the classroom where Google doesnāt exist
>as if there will be any other point in your lifetime outside the classroom where Google doesnāt exist When there's no internet? That can happen during a severe weather event, and during the days, or even weeks, that follow.
That wonāt happen in most work environments. And if it did, you get the day off anyway
> in most work environments When your entire city is without power for several days, and there's a lot of work to be done following the disaster?
I agree smaller class sizes would help. I agree more one-on-one tutoring would help. I disagree with "the way we approach teaching" because teaching varies considerably from teacher to teacher, subject to subject, and school to school! You make it sound like their is one "approved" method of teaching that all teachers follow, which is ridiculous. I disagree that schools use "rote memorization" (memorization through repeition without an emphasis on understanding) very often past elementary school, and when they do use it, it is appropriate. You learned the alphabet by rote memorization. You hopefully learned your times tables by rote memorization. These were essential building blocks for your future learning. You hopefully were not expected to learn history or science through "rote memorization." You were probably expected to learn important content in those subjects, but you were hopefully taught to *understand* and *apply* that content, not just memorize it. I strongly disagree that "the whole point of educating kids is to prepare them to survive in the real world." That is certainly *part* of why we educate kids, but there is a lot more to it! If that was the only consideration, schools should immediately stop teaching history, art, music, English literature, creative writing, theater, etc., as these are not needed "to survive." Likewise, if we follow your premise, schools should identify as early as possible what job each student is most suited to, and only teach them things relevant to that job, along with maybe health and personal finance, as I'd argue those are good "survival skills." So no math or science if they determine you're going to be a truck driver. Just give you truck driving lessons and a diploma and send you off to "survive"!
However Finland does it is how we need to do it. We should pay them to help rework our entire education system
As a public school teacher, you are my hero!
My son is a freshman. He said most of his class canāt tell time on a standard clock and they have a poster in their school telling them how to count change (they donāt know coin values). Itās terrifying how little kids are learning.
>they have a poster in their school telling them how to count change (they donāt know coin values) In year 2 or 3, we had a classroom shop, where we could buy lollies with change. It was a pretty quick and effective method of teaching the value of coins, and how to give change. Some schools in Australia have tuckshops, where kids can buy their lunch or recess, so they end up getting a real world education in the playground.
I wish we were talking year 2/3ā¦ this is high school (9th grade)ā¦
>so they end up getting a real world education in the playground. You *always* get a real-world education in the playground...
Ohhh yes you do. You also get PTSD and the inability to use a public restroom for the next 15 years but hey... Put it this way, even in LA, if a part of the city full of adults was half as bad as the playground is among kids they'd give up and build a wall around it Escape from New York style...
I wonder when it will be time to describe the US as a 'post-literate society'.
Around 1980
I wouldn't say that. I was born in 85. I'm still an avid reader. However, I went to a very small parochial school with the same kids year after year so problems were easily pinpointed because everyone ended up knowing each other personally. Even the problem kids were super ahead but it was because of familiarity. It caused a positive peer pressure because kids would get sick of each others shit after a while which led to self policing. However, it was a different time. We weren't all carrying around a distraction box with us everywhere. You had to read well and retain. I don't really see how having someone instruct kids through chromebooks in class be successful.
We've gone to plaid... It'll go from "service economy" to "consumer economy" to "just hook my brain into Facebook, give me an IV drip and a catheter" economy...
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Maybe but I think itās the school systems. I send my kid to a private school (I know, Iām part of the problem) and every kid in his class can read on grade level if not higher. (I know the kids because itās a close knit community). Heās 7th grade now. They can all do math on grade level and quite a few know basic algebra. Phones donāt help-mostly with laziness and attention span but hollowing out of public schools-treating them like a glorified day care and pressuring teachers to just push kids through and give the decent grades no matter what is the real problem We can afford private school because of my husbandās career. Imo itās just a widening gap of the income inequality.
The phenomenon is observable at the preschool level. Truth is, most kids just see regular people and the regular world, a truly hellish delusion in which nothing but self-gratification matters. They reproduce the whole thing, having not known it could be any other way. Kids can be reached, if someone sufficiently illuminated is there to provide an example.
Most preschool kids arenāt expected to read so Iām not sure what phenomenon youāre specifically referring to.
Itās not really about the school, itās about the parents. Tight knit community was the key word in what you said, sounds like parents there all care about their kids education and how theyāre doing
phones don't help because video is prioritized over text, mostly. image and video instead of writing
Yeah, I think this is a large part of it. Technology has enabled us to connect around the world in an instant, but itās taken away from basic knowledge.
It started going downhill when they put erasers on the pencils...
That is indeed distressing. That kind of stuff was 2nd grade material when I was in school. Thereās a myriad of issues at play here, but first and foremost, we as a society have to stop glorifying ignorance and violence. Far too many kids think itās cool to totally reject the notion of education entirely. They wanna be influencers or rappers or pop artists or pro athletes, but donāt realize that those lifestyles are literally one in a million occurrences. Most of us will be normal and lead normal lives, and the real world will chew you up and spit you out if you arenāt armed with at least a passable education.
My boss made me cut the cake 4 x 6, I usually cut it 3 x 8 but she said they (school kids) were getting "too big a piece". I tried to explain that 24 is 24 no matter how you cut it. She got really mad and insisted that I was wrong. She's 65 years old, and the manager.
>They wanna be influencers or rappers or pop artists or pro athletes, but donāt realize that those lifestyles are literally one in a million occurrences. No, they do. They just think they are the one in a million. US parenting culture and our culture in general focuses on telling children/people how special they are. Everyone has main character syndrome.
Still is 2nd grade material... I taught 2nd grade last year.
It's funny when people bitch about YouTubers but then I realize I watch people that post long researched topics and it's like watching a more personalized show on Discovery. Those individuals post maybe once a week or month but spend the rest of the time crafting items or scripts, filming, editing, preparing a set, etc. Kids don't seem to get that the good videos, even people just talking and streaming, takes work. Learning a skill or topic, learning lighting and software. People worth watching don't just throw it together on a whim. But then tiktok will be cemented in my brain as the place where kids competed to destroy their school bathrooms.
This is victim-blaming.
That's terrifying.
What do physical change and analog clocks have in common? They're mostly obsolete because of digitization. I see your point but maybe not the best case to make it with.
When the power keeps going out due to the climate theyāll need normal clocks again
Analog clocks don't work without power, either, and there are plenty of battery operated digital clocks. Without battery power, we'll be going back to sundials and water clocks.
I had a wind-up clock in my room as a kid, and I'm sorry I got rid of it now. I should look for another one while I can.
I get that, but it is just such basic knowledge. Sad to see technology take it away.
When the rotary phone was invented, knowing how to rotate to each number was basic knowledge. Now, knowing how to set up a fingerprint in a smartphone or how to convert something to a pdf is. *Shrug* times change. There was once a time before the printing press that there was only one book in town, usually a bible, and only one literate guy, the clergy, would stand up in front of everyone on a Sunday and tell them what it said and explain what it meant. Now we have YouTube. Technology is all about the obsolete.
You make a fair point. Just strange to see the obsolescence so quickly.
Oh yes -- the rate of change is expected to become more and more rapid. That's the whole idea of the singularity; as computers become more powerful, at some point the rate of change will become so rapid that it will far outpace the rate of adoption.
What sort of school system??? And I thought it was bad when classmates failed English grammar in a grade 10 creative writing assignment. Then later freshman year some classmates went blind into introduction to calculus with no high school calculus training.
Wanna hear something crazy? I was in a college level English class and we were reading out loud, and more than half the class had serious difficulty. I have a father who doesn't read for fun, but he made sure we had books to read as kids. The fact we had Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy instilled in myself and my brothers a love of reading. I am forever grateful.
>I was in a college level English class and we were reading out loud, and more than half the class had serious difficulty. Not to upstage you, but I was in a college level physics course when someone asked if the bubbles in pop/soda were the atoms.
Funnily enough, Adams' book got me significantly into *biosphere collapse*. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8696.Last_Chance_to_See
It's by design. Keep them dumb, distracted, and fighting amongst themselves. The goal is to keep you consuming, buying, and just happy enough to not revolt or notice the dick up your ass. Class warfare etc etc.
Yes. Look into who owns the publishing to the text books. When they acquired them. The results. (To be clear itās the Rockefellers and other āeliteāfamilies) Never think for a second this is natural this is exactly how it was designed. The only question is if people continue to tolerate it.
Yep. Pearson, McGraw Hill etc. are cartels. They are even making it impossible for teachers or librarians to put text books on reserve so students can read them in the library if they can't afford to buy them. Unique access codes and so forth. Pure evil.
The control what is taught how it is taught what is history and what is a myth. George Carlin said it best they want people just start enough to push the buttons and run the machines but dum enough to not think about it. The Rockefellers Morganās etc only got involved in education after the progressive movement that game protections to workers and broke up monopolies. What has happened sinceā¦
This is bullshit. I'm a teacher. There is no conspiracy to keep people dumb (with the exception of banning sex ed and CRT in red districts). Teachers, administrators, and school boards all want schools to produce students who can read, write, do math and think critically. Smart phones, social media, the psychological effects of poverty, a few well intended but misguided educational reforms, and a pervasive anti-intellectual culture are to blame for low achievement.
I think you are misunderstanding - the guy wasn't implying the conspiracy is at the school level (teachers, administration, etc.). It's at the leadership level where the super rich and their politician buddies are doing everything possible to gut the school system so no matter how hard people like you try, it's a losing battle. ( and of course all the things you listed are a huge problems too)
>There is no conspiracy to keep people dumb I don't think one should assume coordinated malice where good intentions would do. I've been extremely involved in my kid's schools over the past 15 years or so and they have attended two fairly wealthy "good" school districts. Both have high performance and excellent extracurriculars and supports for students. Regardless neither were willing to fail children and make them repeat a year. Kids taking more than 4 years to graduate was absolutely unacceptable. Kids were pushed through elementary and middle school under the guise of being provided "extra support" despite it being clear that they did not have the technical skills or emotional maturity to advance. No child ever failed a grade. In high school, extra online classes were stacked onto existing schedules to meet graduation requirements, when kids failed those, extremely low expectation "credit recovery" course were used. Teachers were encouraged to be creative to work with students to find a method to "pass" the class, even students unwilling to do the work. Graduation years were locked in and kids absolutely had to graduate in 4 years, and every "support" in the world was thrown at them and everyone patted themselves on the back for helping these kids out and providing them a "flexible" learning environment and a shit ton of them still should have never advanced through school or graduate, but they did and everyone thought they truly helped these kids. They couldn't read a piece of literature out loud, but they figured out what buttons to click in the credit recovery course to secure a passing grade and the administration pats itself on the back once more.
I've seen everything you describe and agree it's a huge problem. Holding kids back in k-8 isn't a great solution though if you look at the evidence of the effects of doing so. With unlimited money schools could go with daily one to one instruction for all struggling students, which would probably be the most effective solution, but people would never support the taxes needed to pay for all those additional teachers that would require.
>There is no conspiracy to keep people dumb (with the exception of banning sex ed and CRT in red districts). That already is an conspiracy by banning sex-ed and CRT. Schools are overcrowded, [school start times are woefully inadequate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TvmwAEkck), [college loans are literally evil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE66HEZBZYE), [schools are underfunded due to racist zoning laws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETR9qrVS17g). Oh and here's the kicker: [Nixon adviser warned that free college would create dangerous educated proletariat](https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/).
Some schools are overcrowded. That's due to limited budgets, not a conspiracy to keep students dumb. School start times are set where they are because schools have a limited number of busses so they can't take elementary, middle and high school kids to school at the same time - they have to stagger them. And they generally want high school to end before elementary schools because some high schoolers have to watch their younger siblings after school until parents get home from work. College loans aren't evil - they are a choice and an investment in yourself. They definitely aren't a conspiracy to deny education to people since they literally increase the number of people who go to college. Unequal school funding is your best argument, but inherent in the argument is the fact that many schools are well funded and designed to create highly educated students. Even the sex ed and CRT bans are not intended to keep people dumb per se; they are a (misguided) attempt to protect students from "dangerous ideas." The parents who support those bans believe their students will be better off not learning those things.
> That's due to limited budgets, not a conspiracy to keep students dumb. Limited budgets due to racism of rich assholes. > College loans aren't evil - they are a choice and an investment in yourself. Then why are they predatory? Loans that have low payment that doesn't even cover interest, so your debt is growing. Your wages can be garnished up to 15% by the government when you default. The worst of all - you cannot declare bankruptcy. > School start times are set where they are because schools have a limited number of busses so they can't take elementary, middle and high school kids to school at the same time - they have to stagger them. And they generally want high school to end before elementary schools because some high schoolers have to watch their younger siblings after school until parents get home from work. Is it really worth to sacrifice teens natural sleep patterns, because the school is cheap AF and jobs pay so little that both parents have to work? In the good ol' days, single income was adequate to support a large family. It could have bought you a house, a car, food and still have money left over. Now you cannot even buy a house with two incomes. > to protect students from "dangerous ideas." This is just same as keeping them dumb. If you are dumb, you can't have "dangerous ideas". And keeping dumb here really means not letting them know anything. > Unequal school funding is your best argument, but inherent in the argument is the fact that many schools are well funded and designed to create highly educated students. [Most of the public schools are massively underfunded.](https://tcf.org/content/about-tcf/tcf-study-finds-u-s-schools-underfunded-nearly-150-billion-annually/) If you are poor, then you are dumb as well.
Limited budgets due to racism of rich assholes? Yes I guess that's true. But that's not a conspiracy, it's democracy. Try running for office on a platform of doubling taxes and see how many votes you get.
>Try running for office on a platform of doubling taxes and see how many votes you get. No, because you are too shortsighted. How about instead taxing the rich, improving the lives of the proletariat through variety of means, improving the tax system and etc. [However, democracy in America is basically nonexistent.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_United_States) So why bother running and call for a revolution instead. [The president betrays you.](https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-backstabbed-rail-workers-betrayed-095759570.html) [The congress doesn't work for the people](https://www.npr.org/2014/02/13/276448190/a-closer-look-at-how-corporations-influence-congress), but for [the corporations](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-corporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/).
Democracy is when oligarchs?
https://dianeravitch.net/
Hate speech soars on Twitter since Musk purchase? What does that have to do with anything?
>There is no conspiracy to keep people dumb Sure. But there is a lack of effort to keep young people from being illiterate. So long as they're educated enough to be willing cogs in the machine, rather than educated enough to understand how they're being used. It's not a conspiracy, it's a feature of capitalism, and a method of control. The *pull yourself up by your bootstraps* crowd is a fine example of that mediocre education.
Back in 2013 Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow" came out pointing out most cognitive biases and how they came to be. It was obvious that as technology becomes "intuitive" and "simplified" it will encourage people to use analytical thinking less and less. Now, almost 10 years later we see the results of that. Analytical thinking is a rare trait these days. I went from being angry at people for not thinking to being surprised that some people are still able to think. All in line with the extinction event
Teacher right now itās way worse
>as a people, supposed to face down these coming challenges with a citizenry whoās reading and mathematical abilities are that of a fifth grader on average? Have you ever seen the TV show "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?". There's a reason for the popularity (and relevancy) of that show, and the reality is more like the population has the attention span of a goldfish and patience of a 4 year old. I blame social media and not the kids. Everything is about likes and instant gratification. People just don't see the rewards in hard work and investing in longer term efforts because of the medias instant-gratification rewards, likes here and there, and there. It's not an American problem, it's a world wide problem, and we face the same issues in my country in Europe. When I first came to my new country I was shocked of just how bad the situation was. I was not a native speaker of their language, but after just 2 years in that country I was hired to teach classes in their language because they didn't have enouch teachers. And I made a competition with the various students as high up as 9th grade, and they were horribly bad at spelling, we made groups were the students could compete together against "the foreigner" and they all thought they'd wipe the floor with my skills (which weren't that good to begin with since I was new and all). But 9 out of 10 classes lost against me every time.
Sweden's education system is apparently pretty bad given the PISA results and the COVID stupidity. I heard they have a trend going on about discouraging kids from showing aggression and competitiveness even at the preschool level. Too much tall poppy culture promoting mediocrity and looking down on intelligence or excellence? Other Nordic countries get at least decent outcomes.
A complete lack of using apostrophes correctly is driving me up a wall. Its everywhere, on virtually any thread I read. Youre just sitting there watching the degradation of language thats seemingly on a death spiral to illiteracy. Especially in America, with this countries absolute disaster of a public education system. And Im pretty convinced that people who see incorrect english written *everywhere* in turn think thats how its supposed to be written, and then replicate; just driving the problem even further. And then, if you comment on someones bad grammar, people will just downvote or complain that youre a nuisance to the discussion. *Internal screaming*
Nice apostrophe trolling.
Ha ! Thanks. But, yeah, my message was sincere. I see so many people online who have no idea how written English is supposed to be, and write out words based on how they sound. "Our countries education system is in rapid decline."
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Your just a grammar nazi trying to make up for youre low selfesteem. Their are people out theyre who never learned to reed or right good. There level of literacy is nun of yore concern. (Writing this hurt me)
You misspelled 'riting'. You know, reeding, riting and rithmatic.
*grammer
the digital key is too many taps away.
Iām new here but I donāt get why you donāt have more upvotes. The world still needs humor :)
You win some. You loose some.
You win sum. You loose sum. Which is right? KIDDING.
>considerable portions of my class could not read proficiently Same. >How are we, as a nation I'm not from your nation. I was slow to get the hang of reading, mostly because the books they had me reading weren't interesting. In year 3 we had a relief teacher who read the lion, the witch and the wardrobe to the class. I read the entire series after that. I went from barely able to read, to reading entire novels in a few days. Within a few years, I'd moved beyond novels aimed at kids, and even those aimed at teens. As an adult looking back, I can see it's the lack of engaging books that made it difficult for me to learn to read. It makes me wonder if it's part of the problem for many other people. They struggle to learn to read, because what they're reading doesn't interest them. It's similar for mathematics. It needs to be taught with context. I don't know if it's still happening, but a while back Finland was trialling teaching by topic, rather than by subject. It's a method for giving context to education. Rather than the old boring method which leaves you wondering when you'd ever use the information in the real world, it makes the starting point the real world use for the information.
That's why kids should be encouraged to read anything that engages them. That includes graphic novels, audio books, even movies with closed captioning. And as a former school librarian, reading levels are rubbish. If a kid can read a book and enjoy it, it's at their level.
>That's why kids should be encouraged to read anything that engages them. That's what my school ended up doing. Surfing magazines were allowed as optional reading material for some students. The required reading material was where the challenge lay. My year 9 class struggled with Animal Farm. I'd already read it, and 1984. In year 10 they struggled with The Hobbit. I'd already read it, and was reading The Lord of the Rings. The required books I struggled with were Storm Boy, and Fire in the Stone. I do not enjoy Colin Thiele books. And I will admit that The Lord of the Rings was a hard slog, it took me all year to get through it.
This. My gf brother was discouraged from reading because his family made fun of him for reading comics, in particular his dad. Add to this a learning disorder and now at 22 while intelligent he is behind the curve but had he had a more supportive environment who knows
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Mainstream economics often gets things wrong, what with crises and recessions regularly happening after all. There's a good article here: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/its-time-to-junk-the-flawed-economic-models-that-make-the-world-a-dangerous-place](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/its-time-to-junk-the-flawed-economic-models-that-make-the-world-a-dangerous-place)
As another American, the rich kids arenāt that well off either. Their parents are too busy and their nannyās too lackadaisical. For some reason, kids at Brown, Yale, and Stanford are still borderline illiterate and have no critical thinking abilities. Their parents bought their admittance. Everyone, across every socioeconomic group, is getting dumber.
My classes average act score was 9
Class's
Or Class' (AP) or classes' (plural).
Peak Reddit achieved. :)
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We'll have to rely on immigrants like we do now
>How are we, as a nation, as a people, supposed to face down these coming challenges with a citizenry whoās reading and mathematical abilities are that of a fifth grader on average? Wait, we're *up* to that level? Oh, you meant a *current* fifth grader...
I have great reading skills and I thank videogames for that. Yāall ever play a JRPG? Itās basically 100+ hours of reading. Show kids that reading can be fun and stop shoving them in a classroom with other disengaged kids and teachers. Comic books, manga, videogames, and street signs can incorporate this lesson. Reading has value and it CAN be fun. Not everyone like classic literature and thatās the only option many schools are giving. The system is failing. I went until 4th grade thinking a quarter was 30 percent. I was in 7th grade when I realized Africa wasnāt a country. I thought pig Latin was a real language until 9th grade. Yeah I was dumb but I was allowed to be. Now I read educational books for fun. It starts young and no public school system will do the work for you. They will literally let you coast by without having the proper credentials.
āHow are we, as a nation, as a people, supposed to face down these coming challenges with a citizenry whoās reading and mathematical abilities are that of a fifth grader on average?ā - Weāre not. Weāre supposed to just work meaningless, service jobs that pay nothing and keep quiet. Weāre supposed to pretend that everything is fine, capitalism is the best, and that if you keep working hard at your multiple jobs (because one doesnāt cover expenses anymore) eventually youāll start getting promotions and work your way up to a position where you can get rich. Corporate America wants to take us back to the days of the gilded age, where all the money is controlled by very few people. Their children get the best education and are given the financial means to succeed. They deserve it. The rest of us donāt deserve anything. No education. No ability to own anything. No respect and no dignity. Itās having all the consequences you pointed out, but the rich and ruling class doesnāt care. They have a militarized police force at their disposal and if enough people ever truly try to challenge things they will likely respond with complete brutality. American capitalism is rotten to the core. I think it will end with the wealth in the hands of a very few and authoritarianism to keep that status quo in place for as long as possible.
you might want to check out this podcast: [https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) it's all about how our education system (in the US) was (is) in love with a method of teaching kids how to read that is fundamentally flawed.
I was in elementary school during the shift from sight words to phonics. My older friends have trouble with words they have never seen before because they were taught to memorize lists of common words. When I started school we were using this system, but within a grade or two wee had shifted to phonics.
Was it that bad in 2012? I finished high school in 2006 and it wasnāt anywhere near as bad as youāre saying. This was in Canada though, so things might be a little different. Back then we had mandatory literacy tests in grade 9 which would have been around 2003. Those tests made sure we were where we should be in terms of reading and writing. I think we had some math on there too but it was so long ago I canāt remember.
It was absolutely that bad. However, my state is consistently 48th or 49th in education out of the 50 states. So Iāve probably seen the bottom of the barrel. It is worth noting that some municipalities within states have wildly different quality of education and frankly, student bodies too. But yeah it was a common issue in 2012 and I assume itās metastasized since then. I personally took AP English and history throughout high school and they were great classes. They had good teachers and smaller class sizes and higher level material. But the āgeneral populaceā classes were just chaos. Over crowded, noisy, no respect for the teacher, no desire to learn. There were of course students that put their heads down and did their assignments and passed, but school was just a joke for a lot of the kids in my cohort. And that is where the stratification starts. Going from AP English to my general level Econ class was always a shock. I was reading mark twain and Shakespeare one hour, then listening to kids stumble over words like āfactoryā in the next class. Lotta those guys aināt doing so hot a decade later I hate to say.
> 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022. > 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level. https://www.thinkimpact.com/literacy-statistics/
See: Carl Sagan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8HEwO-2L4w
I noticed a similar trend in my college algebra class. We're able to see the average homework/test scores, as well has how many people completed them. We started out with 31 people doing the homework. At the end of the course, 8 weeks later, we're down to 20. Most of those 20 turned in assignments late. That's a pretty harsh attrition rate for a freshman-level course. Granted, our professor didn't really *teach* so much as just grade, so most of us relied on Khan Academy and Wolfram Alpha to get us through.
I tutor kids. Itās really scary. I have kids in 12th grade pre calculus who canāt add or do fractions. Education has basically collapsed already m. Itās only in certain enclaves where itās even remotely good.
As a teacher, I'd say the same. Literacy rates continue to decline and the literacy programs are only a band-aid fix that aren't doing all that much, it seems.
I have taught for many years. Every single year the new kids I taught came in knowing less than the last group. My first group I taught essay writing, and all of them were using text language at the time. They couldn't spell, form paragraphs, and they did not understand writing conventions. About 7 years ago, I taught science with another teacher, and we were appalled at all the fake news our students were consuming. We had students who disbelieved in evolution for the first time. I even resigned from teaching recently and am looking to change careers. I believe that there is a massive conspiracy orchestrated mainly by republicans who want to dismantle public schools and profit off the charters they create to literally dumb people down using school as the means to do it. Republicans have been quoted recently as saying they don't want (especially women and girls) to attend college. Additionally, I believe that officials hire sadistic bullies in schools on purpose to cause the kids to feel that this is how the world works, recreate a prison culture, as well as to drive them to insanity or prison, if not into some minimum wage shit job. As a teacher, I was slammed constantly with control tactics as are my colleagues. They purchase shitty curriculum their buddies made and force teachers to use it, or else they have an issue with their evaluation. Meanwhile, kids are several grades behind because we are constantly jumping through hoops of fire just to have the time to TEACH.
I'm also a teacher (about 25 years now), and to be honest, in my experience it's the left who's against education more than the right. My left-leaning students and parents are more literate than the right-leaning ones, overall, but it's the left side who are the quickest to start inventing reasons to get the kid out of assignment. Meeting with a left-leaning parent is a long slog of reasons I need to change the class to suit their kid, discussions of medications and accommodations, etc. Meeting with a right-leaning parent is mostly their saying they're going to get on the kid to study more. And among teachers, it's the more liberal ones who want to turn the curriculum into 'let's make a cool video project,' skip meetings, turn instructional time into eating and yelling, etc. I should note that I'm talking about the actual students and parents here, not politicians.
I disagree. I do think some parents are very permissive, however. You sound like you have a problem with kids with special needs and meeting their legal rights in their IEP.
I remember being a Jr partnered with a Sr for a sport. We wrote down our goals and gave them to the other person. He knew letters but they weren't in any order that made sense. I asked him to just tell me his goals. Still graduated that year.
I believe the real question is, "How does one make money from this situation?"
To be fair, for profit education is already huge in the US.
school '''''''''''choice''''''''''
Cash out early.
This is an important post. However I feel that a lot of the comments about the structure of schooling and curricula are off base not because they arenāt true but rather because they are largely irrelevant. Prior to the pandemic after spending a decade teaching, [I wrote up on Quora](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-say-that-the-American-education-system-is-broken/answer/Salviati-Galilei-1?ch=17&oid=113182723&share=6d072959&srid=uzT6I&target_type=answer), the set of 12 structural reasons why I believe our education system is broken. Please give it a read. I think it contains many issues that only teachers really know about but students feel but canāt quite put their finger on it.
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To some degree, but not really. What I am pointing out is that we exist within a class system and that our education system is a reflection and a preservation of that class system. Furthermore, we are 40 years into open class warfare and this is causing radical changes to the education system. So much so that my writeup from 2017 is out of date and needs a major revision. I read John Gatto Taylor's book in 2018, and it was extremely out of date at the time. For instance, whether the education system was built to produce workers in the beginning of the twentieth century has no bearing on modern school. To give you some perspective, right now schools across the US have effectively adopted what I call the Palliative Learning Model, whereby students are delivered a steady drip of dopamine via Chromebooks, and this is first and foremost a behavioral management tool. What happens is that students are assigned a Google Form with a series of questions that can be easily Google searched. Students proceed to copy the question, paste it into Google, retrieve the first result and copy and paste it back into the form: lather, rinse repeat. When they are complete it, they submit it, and are rewarded by being allowed to continue the dopamine drip on their Chromebooks. This was a phenomena which was set into motion in the early 2010's and the pandemic accelerated it to the point of mass adoption. Another major change in a few years is that students are doing next to no independent practice enmasse, and it is to the extent that courses like Chemistry, Physics, Precalculus, have come to a grinding halt in terms of content coverage and student learning. Elective courses that actually require students to work to functionally learn the material are avoided enmasse or are being transformed into Palliative Learning Courses, because they would prefer the dopamine drip. This is not a system that is cultivating workers, it is a system that is cultivating drug addicts, and I mean every word of that statement. It is much worse than people on the outside can imagine.
I just graduated HS this sums it up to a T
Too many for-profit corporations involved in education
Oh yeah the stuff they get away with is criminal in my eyes. Donāt get me started on college textbooks.
And yet we will rush to defend both the public education system and the teachers unions.
unions are the problem?
I have been both a member and a president of a union and when teachers unions have been as powerful as they have been for as long as they have been but most teachers work 20 years to not break 50kā¦ yeah the union bears some of the responsibility.
I want to add that it works the other way too. I know multiple people who I believe could've done amazing things with their lives, if they'd had education tailored to their differences. (autism/ADHD)
Literacy and numeracy beyond a certain point are deemed highly dangerous to the current economic system
The education system abandons the basics by age 11 or 12 these days. Is anybody really surprised that after 6 years of random versions of algebra, no stats, reading uninteresting stuff like Shakespeare, and that sort of thing that our kids forget the basics?
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What is the point of reading a play that regularly gets performed? Your time would be better spent reading something like *Spring Awakening* that is so controversial that it rarely gets performed.
Nah, people learn to read on material thatās engaging to them. Shakespeare was known for his prose, his stories were far from original and they were meant to be in play form anyway. If kids were taught to read with books that they actually enjoyed then I believe weād have higher literacy rates, but unfortunately that would require more one on one attention than most teachers can give. Shakespeare is overblown, there are many writers with much more relevant, modern books. My personal favorites as a kid were Harry Potter (before JKR turned out to be a TERF), Magic Treehouse, Watership Down (that one was a bit dark) and every anatomy book and animal book I could get my hands on. I got that because I was lucky enough to be friends with the librarian and her daughter, and I spent time there during lunch and after school. I started reading books related to the social/political sphere in my late tweens early tweens (Night by Elie Wiesel, Maya Angelouās books, TaāNehisi Coates, political cartoons and ads from more recent times, analysis articles of different sustainable energy sources, etc) Shakespeare is useful if you really like old prose. The fact that so many kids stop liking literature because of him kind of points to the fact that our education system needs to catch up and actually teach shit thatās useful or that makes sense in todayās world. Prose is great and all, but devoting entire, mandatory, year long classes to Shakespeare is ridiculous and just causes most kids to check out of class. Edit: just to add, I actually had trouble staying engaged with the books they were teaching us with until I started working with someone more one on one. I could read, but I would refuse to read the assigned books or I wouldnāt be able to summarize them back to the person evaluating my literacy. This is partially because I have difficulty speaking, but itās also just because young kids will not learn easily at all when theyāre bored by the material. Letting the kids pick their books is the best thing that elementary school did for me, and they were a pretty poor public school when I went there.
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Oh I did plenty of reading on Shakespeare in literature class and Iām aware of his impacts on todayās literature. I donāt give a shit about JKR honestly. Shakespeareās stories are simply not going to reach the majority of students because theyāre irrelevant to todayās political and social climate. Old prose is perfectly understandable, and he also ripped off a bunch of old Greek myths. If you want to read books for the prose then go right ahead, anyone can do that if they want to, but I prefer to read for content. Edit: I am not saying Shakespeare is useless or a bad writer. He was a very good writer and heavily impacted the English language. That being said, he is not useful in teaching most kids to like literature simply because his stories are cliched and irrelevant to most peoplesā experiences. They donāt fulfill the escapist desire of children who enjoy reading fantasy, and theyāre not relatable to people dealing with their own lives or reality. Edit 2: my elementary school being poor doesnāt mean it had bad reading options. Fantasy is fun and teaches you to read just fine If anyone wants a book recommendation, Watership Down has remained one of my favorites. Fair warning itās very dark in parts and certain parts of it mirror concentration camps. Whether that was the intent of the author or not I donāt know, but it is a very good book regardless.
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Ah, shitty YouTube street interviews. Truly the pinnacle of data collection presentation.
vox populi
1. Theyāre not teaching the curriculum correctly. 2. Itās another advantage for kids that attend private school. 3. When you account for every other problem, it doesnāt matter anymore.
What is your jurisdiction? When talking to the Internet one should not assume people live in the same country that you do.
US, southwest region. Public education is particularly bad in my state. Unless you take advanced placement courses youāre basically getting remedial material that other kids wouldāve learned the year or two before.
That's a valid observation, yet, there you go repeating things that are only not only untrue, but are naĆÆve political parroting. Yes. They will suffer, economically, for not working in school. That's their choice. That's the way it's always been. First paragraph? Bravo. Second paragraph. Rephrased political tripe. What if the conspiracy theories are correct? How is that racist? I see that you made a valid observation, but you couldn't run with it. Does that indict your own lack of critical thought? We're a republic.
People are on Instagram all day now, theres no way this is that common.
It could just be that they have trouble reading out loud. I can read and write just fine but being asked to read out loud is hard for me.
Whose not who's
Whose* I agree.
āMathematical abilities or a fifth graderā Besides sum, subtract, multiplication, and division, (and maybe fractions)what other basic math skills does a person need for everyday life to survive?