AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN STRIKES AGAIN! WE NOW LEAD CROATIA AND ALBANIA!
Well it's been a while since I've ranted about the deplorable state of Amairikuhn edgykayshun, but now there's another study indicating that Amairkuhn childrun have slipped once again in over-all rankings, according to this report from Zero Hedge and shared by Mr. V.T.:
U.S. Kids Keep Getting Dumber; Ranked 31st Of 35 Developed Nations In Math, New Study Reveals
Frankly, I'm surprised... NOT!
The article even cites an article from the Washington Post, with which I rarely agree on anything, but even they in their intellectual mediocritude cannot miss this one (is mediocritude a word? I don't have one of those word-book thingies handy, you know, that kind of book where you look up words... it begins with a "D" I think) :
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss summed up the problems nicely:
There are many reasons children aren’t learning anything during the long hours they spend in government schools. Sometimes, their teachers don’t show up to work because they’re out on the teachers union picket line demanding taxpayers pick up the tab for their plastic surgery. Other times, students are forced to sit in classes led by totally unqualified teachers who will never leave because they’re protected by tenure.For every disgraceful teacher, though, there are tons of good ones who are doing their best. The problem often isn’t teachers’ incompetence, it’s that they’re forced to instruct kids using rubbish. Look at the Common Core State Standards, which were adopted initially by 46 states because their federal education funding depended on it. The math is backwards, confusing, and, as the National Review so suitably dubbed it, “dumb.” The reading standards fill students’ minds with filth in the form of raunchy books and with yawn-inducing “informational texts.”
Our schools no longer teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Rather than be taught how to think and problem-solve, children are thought what to think and how to feel. All these money-making and money-spending schemes tend to sound nice, of course, but they inevitably fall flat.
Of course, there's the usual "blame the teacher" meme going on here, in a subtle way. Don't get me wrong though: there are bad teachers, and they are far too numerous to count; they're the ones who, as the Zero Hedge article indicates, get their tenure, and then proceed to collect their paycheck and do only the minimum amount of work to pass their students through the Amairikuhn edgykayshun degree mill and satisfy government statisticians that the whole process is operating smoothly.
The result? According to the latest PISA study, US children and youth lag behind all significant advanced and industrialized countries(even tiny Israel), and are "ahead" of countries like Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Mexico, Albania... you get the idea. This is a nice euphemistic way of stating that our kids are just plain stupid, which might account for the hand-wringing, butt-hurt entitled snowflakes we see reacting to being "triggered" and demanding their "safe spaces" in Universities, which now insist on collective gnosticism with faddish experiments in "gender neutral language" and other such claptrap. Even our politicians don't know standard English, and are determined to call The Ukraine simply "Ukraine." Watch out, Great Britain and Holland, you're next in line for "definite article deletion" when "The United Kingdom" and "The Netherlands" become simply "United Kingdom" and "Netherlands"!
But there's something more in this article I want to rant about. Consider that last statement from the Washington Post once again:
Our schools no longer teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.Rather than be taught how to think and problem-solve, children are thought what to think and how to feel. All these money-making and money-spending schemes tend to sound nice, of course, but they inevitably fall flat.
(Italicized emphasis added.)
Our kids are not being taught "how to think and problem-solve" but rather "what to think and how to feel." Part of this problem lies in the fact that what used to be rigorous exposure in "the good old days" to literature, the arts, music, and so on, (i.e., to those disciplines requiring one analyze texts, compositions, and so on, and deal with subtlety and ambiguity and then to be able to argue and articulate both in original written and oral form) have been shunted aside by our stupidly technology-obsessed society into a catch-all pseudo-discipline called "humanities" or "social studies." And those "disciplines" are, of course, straight out of the suggestions contained in the progressivist playbooks and studies of the 1930s. When I went to school in thankfully behind-the-times South Dakota, I was required to take things like advanced English grammar, English Literature, American Literature, World Literature (oh how I remember those days in Mrs. Connor's World Lit class, slogging through Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment my freshman year in high school!), art, and even music theory in high school, again, slogging through the rules of two, three, and finally four voice counterpoint and figured bass from Mr. Arden Foss (the band leader) and Mr. Paul Fialkowski (the orchestra leader). But now, I would just have "humanities" and a boring course in "music appreciation" listening to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture for the umpteenth time("Can you hear the cannons? Can you hear the French national anthem, which is called the Marcy-something-or-other?" I can hear the equally bored teacher explaining now, as Napoleon marches into Russia to be defeated at Waterloo "by that Russian general whose last name began with a K but whose name I can't recall right now because I never learned it in my edgykayshun classes", nevermind that Waterloo is in Belgium and Russian generals were nowhere in sight. You get the general idea, and in Amairikuhn edgykayshun, that's really all you need to know, the "general idea." Details be damned).
So why are our kids being taught what to think and how to feel, and not to problem solve? Well, I've said it before and I'll say it again: the blame lies with the requirement for teacher certification, which requires future teachers to sit through mind-numbingly banal courses in educational psychology, pedagogy and methodology where they are - you guessed it - "taught" by a variety of perfected passive aggressive techniques in "what to think" and "how to feel," and of course, most of those things are of the progressivist variety. If your child doesn't know how to think, to reason, to argue, and to articulate, it's probably because his teacher, by and large, doesn't either. The shift in Amairikuhn edgykayshun has over the past century or more, been deliberately away from content to methodological claptrap, and that move began with the teachers' colleges, and certification. The two are inextricably intertwined, and one cannot expect a return to "content" without getting rid of what has been driving the move away from it: teacher certification.
So, to echo John Taylor Gatto once again, fixing this or that aspect of the "system" won't work. The whole thing, not just Common Core, needs to be scrapped, and that includes the certification system and process itself. Sounds extreme, doesn't it, until one remembers that no teacher, prior to the American "invention" of this hideous system, had to have any special certification from an "education department" at a university, but rather, a real degree in a real discipline, you know, in those old fashioned things like Mathematics, Philosophy, Literature, Art History, and so on. As my co-auther Gary Lawrence and I put it in our book Rotten to the (Common)Core, people like Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand, Gottfried Leibniz, Fanny Mendelssohn, and so on, never attended an American school being taught by someone "certified" in the latest methodological nonsense by an Amairikuhn university "department of edgykayshun", or ever took a computerized standardized test. And that's the most damning thing that can be said about it all.
And sadly, our system, and its ideological preoccupations, are now being wholly adopted in Europe and elsewhere, as if those nations were experiencing a "lunacy and stupidity gap" and are in a race with us to the bottom.
See you on the flip side...
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Funny but your neighbours to the north (aka Canada) seem to be doing much better. Hmmm I wonder why? Oh yea there is no “Common Bore” up there (at least yet). Provincial exams standardized and given every 3 grades but none of that “Common Bore” nonsense.
if I may chime-in once more:
as a former NE Ohioan living in Germany since ’78, I remember my junior year high school English teacher Mrs. Joy (yes you read the name correctly 🙂 ) was trying to teach us how to THINK LOGICALLY, CRITICALLY instead of blindlessly believing everything we’re told; sadly, these days/teachers are long gone-
it’s not much different here in Germany but in a slightly different way (it’s a beginning): anyone applying for German citizenship from a non-EU country is required to pass a German language course before being granted German citizenship-
I’ve been entitled to German citizenship since ’83 and actually applied for it 2 yrs. ago but withdrew my application because the US gov’t raised the price for forfeighting US citizenship from 450 to 2500 dollars (!)- (still cost me 80 Euros for just applying)-
as I come from an Austro/Hungarian/German family I’ve always been ‘accused’ of speaking fluent, accent free German; but yet I’d have to pay for the German test (100 Euros) as a non EU member-
but, as an example, a Croation (newest EU member) even if he/she couldn’t speak one word of German could attain German citizenship without being subjected to the German language test- you go figure-
Larry in Germany
Who is invested in real education? Not academia, not the corporations, not the government. Only the concerned parents who try home-schooling their children and there are not many who have the resources and ability to do that. Education has been outsourced like everything else. Let other countries do it. The graduate programs in American universities are filled with international students who look forward to being assimilated into the professions, corporate management and academia in the United States.
My thought is that the dumbing-down of American youth is being done for strategic purposes. The Sixties Generation (Flower Power kids) comes to mind. These kids were raised smart, from well educated parents. They could tell when they were being conned by The System. So, they rebelled…
In my mind, the PTB learned from this experience. They decided that MTV would be pushed, rather than reasoning skills. They decided that drug use was more important than family building. Etc. (In related areas, they also decided to demonize the paranormal and the spiritual…)
In what was obviously related, they also wiped-out the tax base for schools. This was done by offshoring the manufacturing and then the service jobs, and by reducing the tax rates for the wealthy and the corporations. This all ‘trickled-down’ to education. (Has the ‘rising tide’ lifted all the boats yet?)
So, unfortunately, the Sixties Generation ‘refuse-niks’ spelled the doom – educationally – of the following generations. We are now seeing the PTB plans come to fruition, a few generations down the line…
They needed us to become smarter in the past so they allowed us to become smarter to achieve certain objectives. Now that those objectives have been realized most of us have become obsolete and our intelligence and knowledge a potential liability. Rulers always come to feel they are a different and superior species and their subjects as more expendable and worthless than their dogs. They view their manipulation and control of us as an art. Everything is about their personal glory, power and achieving their personal goals for the future and not about the destiny or well being of the Earth or the rest of the human race. They are very short sighted and blind to the truth. Like it or not different races have different IQ averages. By mixing us up they hope to lower the IQ of the smartest of us while they increase their attributes by inter marrying with the brightest and fittest. This is a hundred year old plan and the breakaways see themselves as the new and improved super royal class. No doubt chemicals are being used to control us. There is a reason falconry is considered a noble sport. Controlling a falcon is a fine art. If it is too well fed while training it you will lose control of it in the field and it will have the strength to get away from you. If it is not fed enough it will become sick and die and your time and efforts on it will have been wasted. Same is done with human subjects and is considered an art. Only now the rulers have many more tools to control and manipulate our minds, bodies, and very numbers. The more things change the more of the same.
if my read sources are correct the best, most thorough educational system in the west is by far in Finland…
due to my profession (opera singer- no, folks, no joke- it’s/I’m for real) I also work with many asians; when we’ve talked about various subjects besides music/singing I can’t believe how well informed they are; they (Koreans) even mentioned the name “Golden Lily” about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria before I was able to-
Larry in Germany
Imagine what might happen if students were taught and were required to write an essay on the definition of Fascism expressed by Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, in which he outlined three principles of fascist philosophy.
1.”Everything in the state”. The Government is supreme. The country is all-encompassing, and all within it must conform to the ruling body.
2.”Nothing outside the state”. The implied goal of any fascist nation is to rule the world, and have every human submit to the government.
3.”Nothing against the state”. Questioning the government is not to be tolerated.
Hi Nidster,
if my read sources are correct Mussolini rose to power preventing a communist coup of Italy- what his adm. did after that is certainly up for debate but what one must remember is: history is written by the victors and the victors always present themselves as the heros and the vanquished were always EXCLUSIVELY “the bad guys”-
one needs to read between the lines in my humble estimation-
Larry in Germany
Thanks for the words of wisdom, Larry. You are correct and in the end Italian Communists caught up to and executed Mussolini.
if my read sources are correct the Italians hanged Mussolini’s double- the real Mussolini was helped to escape
Trump just chosen Carl Icahn to head up overhauling federal regulations[translation: slash laws limiting the sale of U.S. public properties]. He’s a hyper-vulture capitalist that destroys valuable properties for Big Buck$. He liquidates them. He’s legendary. Perfect for the liquidation of the USA.
No Putin to the recue here.
Unless… ?
The State is consumed by the corporate dogs of war. Because these corporate dogs represent Private Power and they are having Public Power, the USA, for Lunch. Talk about a power lunch. Since the USA is such a heavy meal for one sitting they are also have it for Breakfast & Dinner.
The nation state Greece; simply greeced the skillet for the main course – US!
An up-to-date dystopian version of Twilight Zone’s:
To Serve Man
Unless… ?
This is a version of Ralph Nader’s Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us.
The latest Max Keiser Report had Paul Craig Roberts hoping that Trump walks the talk. He believes he’s being targeted so he will not be able to make America Great Again.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=L7xY7NQl5j0
Mission Accomplished!
The Third-Worldiaztion of the United States of Amerika.
Of course, the oligarchs, whom adore labor, are courageous in targeting unions, whom they always shower with loads of cash and give more press coverage than stock markets – are beside themselves with grief at having to admit that robots would be better at it. Despite the profits & control they would achieve, at the expense of labor, these brave oligarchs will push for the necessary legislation and expense to dig the teachers graves & unions in general[these oligarchs are, after all, highly principled[or is it principal, and leveraged to the hilt in privatized education?]
This is criminal, of course, but highly profitable in terms of private profits and private power[controlling young minds]. So, yes, this system of private corporate fascism is being transferred to the European conglomerates that are part & parcel to worldwide corporate fascism. Because, as any corporate fascists will tell you:
Crime that Pays; IS Crime that Stays[- Worldwide, I might add].
BRICS beware the corporate fascists.
They’re infection is fatal to deep thought and analyses.
And, more importantly – your humanity.
You live in South Dakota Joseph just ask your indigenous neighbors about the reeducation camps they were sent to. You would hear of the prototype for Common Core and this is just the newest name for this garbage. I was born in NYC and had access to school-public libraries and any store big or small had magazine book comicbook stalls and racks. So if you were getting a bad education in school you had the ability through these outlets to educate yourself. Especially if you had been put in a program to improve your reading skills in the public school system.
Well, many EU schools are in the same boat and resulting in poor education.
Since the elite is so bent on starting a world war I just hope they still got Napoleonic bayonets lying around. The ones able to use and understand the technical army hardware are more my age 60++ and long gone as pensioners.
In this day and age, just cannon fodder is not enough. Maby the elite can put it game wise. An addon for Pokemon hunting real flesh instead of fantasies that surely would be understood and make you “feel good” doing it as a bonus.
One has to wonder just how that piece in the Washington Post actually made it past the corporate editors into actual print.
It’s hard to take the Jeff Bezos perspective on education seriously–he owns the Washington Post. Also Ms Strausse quotes appovingly the use of “quality” as an adjective, so much for caring about the use of language by her.
Then the modern post-Soviet country is called Ukraine, the Soviet state was called The Ukraine. Don’t know what the name was before Soviet times.
I think the dropping of the “The” is to make clear that Ukraine is not a region of anywhere, as in not “The Pacific Northwest” in the USA.
Whether true or not as a point of politics, my point is about the English LANGUAGE, and in the English language, it is THE Ukraine, just as it is THE Netherlands, and THE United Kingdom, and THE United States of America. Tinkering with standard language rules in the name of politics is always hazardous in my opinion.
To understand what’s going on study Pan European Union Kalergi movement funded and adopted by the usual suspects. He preaches mixing up all the races and cultures into one so they can be controlled. But the elite white families, nobility, and those who can’t be criticized are to remain separate and become the new nobility. They think diluting white genes will make us weaker. It’s all very racist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Coudenhove-Kalergi
Of course this would also accelerate our movement into the engineered and prophesized Messiahanic Era which is the real hidden goal no doubt by the funders of this movement. Only got a little over a hundred years left to fulfill the ancient racist mandate, thus the desperate acceleration to revive this movement today.
In a roundabout way, the poor quality of American education at the university level, and possibly at the high school level could be used strategically as a weapon against our Chinese rivals. Many Chinese are clamoring to send their children to the US to get them “educated” to the point where they are being restricted by quotas. Why not remove these restrictions and allow as many Chinese young people into the country as possible? Why not turn their brains into mush so they can return back to their homeland and then run it into the ground with lots of incompetence and whining. This strategy is working well on us here in the west by our handlers, why not export it to Asia? Let’s eliminate this gap between well educated people and poorly educated people and forge a new world where everybody is an idiot. Sure, there are many dangers, I will probably never ride on a ferris wheel again because I won’t put my life in the hands of the poorly educated morons who are tasked with maintaining it, and basic services and merchandise purchasing will become even more difficult to the point where we may return to the stone age, but everybody on the whole planet will now be in the same boat and we won’t have to worry about sneaky but better educated Asians taking advantage of our stupidity because they will be stupid too.
A relish the thought of millions of Chinese youth returning to their country as snowflakes. Demanding their safe spaces in a country which has very little space to spare. And imagine the damage the western indoctrinated Chinese progressive cult members could have on their society when they return? It would be a second cultural revolution with progressive terror squads persecuting capitalists all the while demanding special protected status for Chinese muslims and transgenders. The whole Chinese system will break down. Maybe China could even become a haven for all of Asia’s clandestine LGBT community? There must be millions in just the Philippines alone. And while they are at it, why not open China’s borders to even cheaper labor under the guise of human rights for downtrodden foreigners like Indonesians? If there is an oppressed minority anywhere in Asia, let China be their new Mecca.
I ask you: what bomb could match the festering progressive cult in its destructive power?