The night closes in. Read the surveys of what children know, what students in universities know.
Approximately nothing. We have become wanton morons. As the intellectual shadows fall again, as literacy declines and minds grow dim in the new twilight, who will copy the parchments this time?
No longer are we a schooled people. Brash new peasants grin and peck at their iPods. Unknowing, incurious, they gaze at their screens and twiddle, twiddle. They will not preserve the works of five millennia. They cannot. They do not even know why.
Twilight really does come. Sales of books fall. Attention spans shorten. Music gives way to angry urban grunting. The young count on their fingers when they do not have a calculator, know less by the year. We have already seen the first American generations less educated than their parents. College graduates do not know when World War One happened, or what the Raj was. They have read nothing except the nothing that they read, and little of that. Democracy was an interesting thought.
Ours will be a stranger Dark Age than the old one. Our peasants brush their teeth and wash, imagine themselves of the middle class, but their heads are empty.
And they rule. We have achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hod-carriers in designer jeans, they do not quite burn books but simply ignore them. Their college degrees amount to high-school diplomas, if that, but they neither know nor care.
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This country's education system has gone to hell. I've been out of high school for ten years, and in that decade, the way math was taught has changed extremely. I had "old school" teachers and don't think I was even aloud to use a calculator in class until I was a senior and even then it was limited. If you go into a middle school pre-algebra class now, the kids are already using scientific calculators. The best part is that the teachers are teaching them how to push a button, there's no such thing as the formulas that I was taught when I was a child. And the excuse is that they're trying to teach the kids a different method that is relatively easier and they get the answers faster. WHATEVER!! Life is hard, and you can't expect the answer to a problem to come in two seconds. That is half the point of school to begin with; to teach a child how to think and solve problems. If we continue to have kids growing up wanting something right then and now, you will have a very spoiled, impatient, and lost generation. And I remind you that this all started because of state tests and No Child Left Behind. You can teach a monkey to repeat processes, doesn't prove they learned anything.
ReplyDeleteI dropped out of school in the seventh grade I was able to test a couple years later to skip the seventh and eighth and land in ninth I dropped out of ninth as well twenty years later I decided I wanted to go to college went in took the GED test with no prep class's and not only passed but scored in the 95th percentile of graduating seniors. I mean that sounds good but I think it illustrates how low the expectations have dropped, I was able to graduate what would have been in the top of a graduating class with basically a sixth grade education. I think I'm a smart person but come on I'm not that smart.
ReplyDeletethe saddest fact being there are no longer and will never again be living wage jobs for unexceptional people without highly specialized skills and credentials
ReplyDeletethat is why we have a welfare and disability class and a stagnated working class with no hope of upward mobility
These unexceptional people choose to live that life and might like it. The key to moving people out of the ranks of the poor is by making it uncomfortable to be there.
ReplyDelete>>>The key to moving people out of the ranks of the poor is by making it uncomfortable to be there.<<<
ReplyDeleteDamn 6:15, that quote is pure gold. Well said.
Dumbing down is the goal of our society. Quality doesn't count.
ReplyDelete