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The dumbing down is really quite pervasive - to the point that our public schools now educate less than half of the students to basic grade-level proficiency.
If schools spent more effort and money on education and less on sports the world would be a better place. IMHO. But still, you cannot have a strong educational system without the strong support of parents. But they are too busy watching "Lost" (or perhaps the superbowl) to help their children with their homework.
The dumbing down is really quite pervasive - to the point that our public schools now educate less than half of the students to basic grade-level proficiency.
Nationwide, public school student achievement is actually much, much lower than most people think. Each state's education officials establish their own state standards, commission/construct their own tests, and set their own 'passing' scores. This has resulted in manipulations that make it look like public schools are educating our country's children, when in reality the majority of students in many states are far below acceptable levels of proficiency. In some cases, there's as much as a 70 percentage point difference in proficiency levels between state achievement tests and the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) tests. Not one state listed in the chart below educates even half of their students to grade-level proficiency on the NAEP.
If anyone wants to see their (or any other) state's reported proficiency level vs. the NAEP proficiency level (to see if their public schools are being honest about providing an adequate education), check here: NAEP Researchcenter - NAEP and State Equivalent Percent Table
For each grade level, the first column lists the percentage of students scoring as proficient (meets or exceeds state standards) on the state test; the second column lists the percentage of students scoring as proficient on the NAEP (National Assessment).
I agree with your points, but I think a lot of people pull themselves up from their bootstraps and join the military, end up going back to school via community college, etc.
From a purely observational level, I agree with you about how as a society we have lost a collective view of education as a path to freedom. I don't necessarily see that as a dumbing down, but a culture shift where people are more valued for their labor rather than their smarts.
In a society where we outsource talent and and engineer pseudo economical growth in boom/bust cycles, I really wish we could engender integrity and ethics as the number one thing this country lacks. I don't see a lack of intelligence as much as I do a general lack of faith, manners (how provincial of me to think that) and general ethics. I think that these forces coupled with the demise of the nuclear family pose a bigger threat to the middle class.
Single moms want benefits. Blue collar people want a days work for a days pay. People still take pride in a job well done, but if those jobs aren't here due to our global stance on manufacturing and profits, what the hell good is it to promote the best and brightest anyway?
I think the test scores and proficiency levels are a reflection of disillusionment, not intelligence. I don't think we are on an evolutionary path to a society of idiots. It is also very true that at a fundamental level that our methods are broken in a good majority of the schools on how to educate and measure progress. I think the turn around on fixing this is easier than correcting the other problems out there. Hungry kids don't learn.
I still have faith in our upcoming generations and our education system. It's government in collusion with business I am more concerned about.
I think the test scores and proficiency levels are a reflection of disillusionment, not intelligence.
They are a reflection of the lack of an appropriately challenging education. The reasons why that happened are explained in The Atlantic article, linked earlier.
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I think the turn around on fixing this is easier than correcting the other problems out there. Hungry kids don't learn.
I'm going to have to disagree here. Those who would normally be considered the ones who would be likely to go hungry are the ones who have made slight gains over the years. The precipitous drops in achievement have occurred in the highest and mid quintiles. Hunger isn't the problem. The deliberate lack of access to an appropriately challenging education is.
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I still have faith in our upcoming generations and our education system. It's government in collusion with business I am more concerned about.
That's a disaster in and of itself, but you can't ignore the nearly 50 years in which the vast majority of several generations of students have been intentionally dumbed down to realize the social-engineering goal of forced egalitarianism - or, in other words, forced equal outcomes. Think about it - in order to be able to achieve equal outcomes, the target outcome level would have to be below average, the level at which most students would be able to achieve.
We have a generation of kids that can barely read coming out of HS with diplomas and cannot cut it in college. You see colleges don't play with NCLB. They still teach to the old standards.
There are more "developmental" classes in CC's these days than college level classes.
In case you don't know this..developmental classes are the high school subjects. They are now being taught in college to those that cannot pass assessment tests and are not qualified to take college level classes.
Warning! This tread is NOT posted ,nor intended, as a political discussion. Please don't make it one!
Ever wonder why no matter how hard you try you simply can't stay even let alone get ahead? This story will explain why you're not supposed to be able to do anything but keep your head down and your nose to grindstone.
Well, this IS a political discussion I must say. However, I will try to somehow comply with the OP request. I get the feeling that if I write something that the OP will not like may refute by saying I am making it a political discussion.
Middle class? What exactly is a middle class? The reason I state this is becuase research has shown me that people do define it based on their views. There is not clear consensus of what is the middle class. It seems people use it to try to prove their political/economic views.
Poverty? sometime ago I started a thread on what is poverty. You can get so many definitions to also suit your views. Do research on poverty in government websites and you will not see a consensus also. It also seems that it will be defined depending on who is in power and to suit their political views.
The elite rich? Do they have a war on the masses? To me this is political rethoric. No different than political figures when they define everything in terms of war. War against women, war on minorities, war on middle class, war on the poor, war on children, war on men, you name it something is defined in terms of war on some victim.
Do we have economic problems as a nation? I we believe we do. However, to me it is a combination of factors. The rich can be greedy but not more greedy than anyone else at his economic level. The problem is that we cannot clearly see the thousands of people that out of greed cheat the government on taxes. We are just as greedy than any store owner. In economics there is a reality that the seller does try to sell his commodity at the highest price possible and the buyer tries to buy it at the lowest level possible. Both have the same goal in mind, the bottom line in the wallet.
We have become spoiled to a very materialistic way of life and anything that affects it negatively we immediately raise our arms in discontent.
When I do community service with people that are classified as poor, many of them simply do not know how to manage their money and others simply want to live well above their means. Those that have good jobs also find themselves in debt because they want to keep raising their living standard without living within their means.
There are bonifed poor amongst us. I know that but the numbers I do not think are as staggering as many people claim. Also, those classified as poor often it is a temporary situation. Many people when they are young tend to be in the poverty bracket when they are starting their life in the work force. The older you get the higher you tend to climb in the economic brackets, generally.
It is interesting that we are in such dire economic situation and yet people from the less capitalistic countries tend to emmigrate in hordes to the more oppressive capitalistic countries. People are not dumb. We are no different than animals. We move to where the food is. That is simple survival so we go where the jobs are even if they are do not make us rich.
Life is a constant struggle. We can either keep blaming everybody around us, specially those that have more or simply roll up our sleeves and do something about own economic success in life and the way we want to live life.
Well, this IS a political discussion I must say. However, I will try to somehow comply with the OP request. I get the feeling that if I write something that the OP will not like may refute by saying I am making it a political discussion.
I agree that this topic walks right on the razors edge of politics but all ,including you, have done a wonderful job of discussing the issue that is outside the politics ,that could have become the focal point, instead of how it affects our lives.
I wouldn't consider the article fair and balanced but I do find value in the the employment and productivity assertions.
However, it's our own fault. The movie Idiocracy sums it up pretty well.
The American people need to wake up and snap out of their ignorance. The Constitution set up the framework to provide balance. Opportunity still exists in America. Education is the key and is simply not highly valued by many of its recipients and/or their caregivers. Unfortunately this has led to the disinterested and ignorant giving their voice to the more knowledgeable and self-interested who have learned how to make it work best for them.
Let me see...should I go to the town meeting and voice my concern about a new proposal that will adversely affect the future of my community or should I watch American Idol?
I am very dubious about conspiracy theories. I think that debt = slavery, and people have enslaved themselves by taking on debt in order to have a lifestyle they can't really afford. We've chosen, over and over again, to sacrifice time and quality of life to have more gadgets, or a bigger house that we're forced to leave empty all the time in order to make the payments on it.
I am very dubious about conspiracy theories. I think that debt = slavery, and people have enslaved themselves by taking on debt in order to have a lifestyle they can't really afford. We've chosen, over and over again, to sacrifice time and quality of life to have more gadgets, or a bigger house that we're forced to leave empty all the time in order to make the payments on it.
I think we've reached the end of the line with this 30-40 year trend. We started to see a reduction in real wages back in the 1970s. It fed on itself, because we responded by working harder, thereby increasing the supply of labor (which in turn brought down real wages further).
At the same time, we drove up the prices of the things we wanted, most particularly housing. Switching from predominantly one-income families to predominantly two-income families created a lot more disposable income to pay for housing, and all the extra income, and then some, was eaten up with significantly higher prices.
We developed a greater and greater entitlement mentality about the things we 'needed' and 'deserved' to have. In order to feed these desires, as income was insufficient to do it, we took on more and more debt. Our individual debt levels, relative to income, have been rising steadily for 30 years, and our savings levels have been falling.
We are now working harder than at any point in the postwar period, surely, with less and less to show for it. The number of hours worked by each family has nearly doubled due to the entry of women into the labor force in large numbers. As I explained earlier, this has not ultimately improved the average family's financial condition. It has been a bonanza for employers and the government, but that's about it.
We've reached the point where we're at the end of the line. We can't work harder, there's nobody additional to send into the labor force, and we can't really take on more debt. The whole thing has to crack. And fairly soon.
It's easy to romanticize the Good Old Days because we tend to have such an incomplete and sentimental viewpoint about them. The whole wisdom of the grandparents thing? There was apparently some pretty awful stuff that went on with my parental grandparents back in the day, and my Dad only would talk briefly about just what happened not too long after grandma died.
Speaking of grandma- he father forced her to drop out of school when she was 14 and go work in the factory when she was 14 in order to bring much needed money into her family because 'education was wasted on a woman'. (Grandma went back and finished high school and got a nursing degree once her own kids hit high school, and was fluent in five languages at the time of her death) Even my Mom was probably born five or ten years too early because, when her parents scraped together the money to send her to college, the only really professional career paths open to her were teacher, nurse, or secretary. Which is a real shame because just a few years later, and she would have been a trailblazer and most excellent lawyer or CPA. But again it would have been a waste of a law school seat if they'd let a woman have it back in that era
Part of the reason why schools are now seen as better back then is because so many kids ended up dropping out long before grade 12 to enter the blue collar or farming workforce. When you're only educating the kids who are the best of the best to begin with, of course it's going to be easier to do the job right than if you've responsible for getting the kid with an 80 IQ (who would have been able to support himself with a blue collar job in another era) to pass high school algebra.
As for health care, it's pretty amazing what we can do now given the right financial resources. Look at survival rates of moderately premature or visibly disabled infants in the modern era compared to back inthe alleged Golden Days. When grandma was working as a labor and delivery nurse back in the 60s, there were so many babies that they didn't even try to save because the odds for a good outcome were so low. A lot of those same sorts of babies have a 60-75% survival rate today.
I do think that what's killing is is the inability for the masses to see the opportunities and threats in a long term time frame. I'm not only talking about the low savings rate but also actions such as the insane pressure on publicly held companies to wring every last penny out of the system every quarter in the name of propping up stock prices for the company in the next week and a half. Yes, Wall Street will love it when a company cuts 20K positions, and the stock prices will spike for a short while, but no one talks about how it may not be a good idea over the long run to cut 75% of your research and development budget. Not every future category killer is going to be as cheap to develop as the post-it note.
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