Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
How in the world is America supposed to remain “the greatest country on Earth” when other nations are absolutely running circles around us when it comes to education? As you will see below, one survey found that 15-year-old students in China are almost four full grade levels ahead of 15-year-old students in the United States in mathematics. This is one of the most damning indictments of our education system that I have ever come across, and it is yet another clear indication that what we are doing is simply not working. Our children are not being given the tools that they need to compete in our modern society, and we have only ourselves to blame.
Perhaps you are thinking that the survey must be flawed somehow.
Well, this wasn’t some fluky survey that was only given to a handful of students. Every three years, the Program for International Student Assessment evaluates 15-year-old students all over the world in a variety of subject areas, and in 2018 approximately 32 million students participated…
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a survey given to 15-year-old students around the world every three years, which tests the core subjects of reading, mathematics, and science. In 2018, 79 countries and economies participated, representing about 32 million 15-year-olds.
When your sample size is 32 million students, I think that it is safe to say that the results of the survey should be taken seriously.
And what the survey discovered is that U.S. students continue to fall behind in math. In particular, we have fallen way, way behind the Chinese. The following comes from Psychology Today…
There is no excuse for the US when students in Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang (B-S-J-Z) performed near four grade levels ahead of US students in mathematics.
In addition, the survey also discovered that the “most disadvantaged” students in China actually performed on par with the average U.S. student…
“The 10% most disadvantaged students in Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang (B-S-J-Z) or in Macao or Estonia… those students actually do as well or better than the average student in the US. So clearly some countries do better with their disadvantaged students, where you see less variability with students from the most privileged backgrounds,” said Andreas Schleicher.
What in the world has happened to us?
We used to have the best education system in the entire world, but now we have become a nation of drooling idiots that can’t even think straight.
Let me give you an example. According to Fox News, a police officer in Los Angeles was recently caught sexually fondling a dead woman by his own body-cam…
The veteran Los Angeles cop, who is assigned to downtown’s Central Division, was caught on his own body-cam footage allegedly fondling the dead woman, and his supervisors have reviewed the video, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The alleged incident took place when the LAPD officer and his partner responded to a call about a possible dead woman in a residential unit, the newspaper reported, citing sources.
That is dumb on so many levels, and now that police officer’s career is over.
Let me give you another example of how dumb we have become. South Dakota has decided to crack down on the meth epidemic in their state, but unfortunately not a lot of thought was put into the advertising slogan for the campaign…
The state of South Dakota has a new anti-drug campaign, but its slogan is raising eyebrows.
Because it is “Meth. We’re on it.”
Which could be taken the wrong way.
You think?
Of course it is much dumber to actually be on meth. Approximately 24 million Americans have taken an illegal drug within the last 30 days, and it is getting worse with each passing year.
I know that I am being very hard on the United States in this article, but there is no excuse for what has happened to us.
We were once a great light to the rest of the world, but today a large chunk of our population can barely read, write, speak or function in society. Just consider the following numbers…
#1 One recent survey found that 74 percent of Americans don’t even know how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights.
#2 An earlier survey discovered that 37 percent of Americans cannot name a single right protected by the First Amendment.
#3 Shockingly, only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government.
#4 During the 2016 election, more than 40 percent of Americans did not know who was running for vice-president from either of the major parties.
#5 North Carolina is considering passing a law which would “mean only scores lower than 39 percent would qualify for an F grade” in North Carolina public schools.
#6 30 years ago, the United States awarded more high school diplomas than anyone in the world. Today, we have fallen to 36th place.
#7 According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.
#8 For the very first time, Americans are more likely to die from an opioid overdose than they are in a car accident.
#9 One study discovered that one-third of all American teenagers haven’t read a single book in the past year.
#10 A recent survey found that 45 percent of U.S. teenagers are online “almost constantly”.
#11 Today, the average American spends 86 hours a month using a smartphone.
#12 Overall, the average U.S. adult “logs 6 hours, 43 minutes of total screen time daily”.
#13 In more than half of all U.S. states, the highest paid public employee in the state is a football coach.
#14 During one seven day period last summer, a total of 16,000 official complaints about human feces were submitted to the city of San Francisco. And apparently the problem is very real because one investigation found 300 piles of human feces on the streets of downtown San Francisco.
#15 Every 24 hours, more than a third of all Americans eat fast food.
#16Less than half of all Americans know which country used atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
#17 Even though we fought a war in Iraq for eight long years, 6 out of 10 young adults cannot find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. And that same survey found that 75 percent of our young adults cannot locate Israel.
#18 Today, the average college freshman in the United States reads at a 7th grade level.
Are you convinced yet?
As a society, we have become exceedingly “dumbed down”, and we can even see this at the highest levels of our government. Just take a look at some of the people we have representing us in Congress. If George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were alive today, what do you think that they would make of our current crop of politicians?
When our founders spoke, their language was so elegant. But of course we couldn’t have politicians speak to us that way today because nobody would be able to understand what they were saying.
Our society is literally in a death spiral, but nobody seems to have a way to stop it.
Educating our children properly is one of the most basic things that needs to be addressed, but unfortunately the left has total control of our public schools now, and that means that there is no hope of a major turnaround any time soon.
via zerohedge
I’m glad I graduated high school in 1968 when they had no classes in social justice or how to be a faggot.
Amen.
Not only have our kids been dummied down but they are labeled and drugged. The biggest issue facing our children is reading and comprehend what they read when they read silently on there own. When they can not read and comprehend what they are doing in school (90% of school subjects revolve around reading comprehension) how can they focus and pay attention. They start to lose confidence and self-esteem, get angry and frustrated, they are bullied, and the list could go on and on. Teachers want these kids to behave and learn but they can not comprehend what they read so they are now a behavior issue in the classroom Let’s address the REAL ISSUE instead of trying to find some other medical issue or Learning Disabled, ADD, ADHD, or some other label that they stick on a kid and drug (excuse me - medicate or treat) them. Show me the statistics of kids that have some sort of label AND if they are working below grade level with reading and comprehension. I would say 99% do not understand what they read. Our schools want to label kids so they get more government money and they will not fix the problem. Millions of kids graduate with a 2nd-grade reading level and they are not the ones that go to college and read at a 7th-grade level. What kind of citizens will they be. Many will just feed off the liberal government free wagon and the rest of us pay. WAKE UP and teach your kids how to read and comprehend. The school is not going to do it!
This comes as no surprise. The liberal biased educational system in America is about INDOCTRINATION, not education. That’s been their priority for decades. Reading, writing, and arithmetic don’t even make a blip on their radar. It’s ALL about INDOCTRINATION to the left, not education.
I am not surprised since I was educated in Europe so many years ago and also got two university degrees in the USA and could compare the two systems. The noun “student” originates from the verb “to study”, but in the USA the word “student” is a joke because the curricula is fundamentally idiotic, the examination and tests are based on the ridiculous “multiple choice answers” instead of asking the students to show their work towards the solution (so the teachers can see how the students are thinking and where they need improvement). When I had to go to university in Europe, I had to go through a 3 days (3 hours per day) admission exam (two days math and one day physics) where the candidate name is sealed and the papers are graded by 3 professors. In the end, only an established top number of people were admitted and the rest had to go to another place to have another exam where there were open positions. That way you have a competitive and fair process which has nothing to do with the stupid affirmative action or diversity(racial & social): only the best win or how they say, survival of the fittest. In the USA everybody can go to college without an admission exam specific to the subject of study. On top of that, I was surprised to hear at an university that after the first 2 years, 60% of the students change their major. That is completely ridiculous, but the universities don’t care as long as they make money while the students build-up their loan burden. How many high-schools in the USA are specialized in science (like math&physics, bio-chemistry, etc.)? But all schools spend a lots of time on sport & music band. What about an baccalaureate exam at the end of the high-school with 3 days written exam and 3 days oral exam? Not in the USA. It seems to me that the focus is not on competition & meritocracy, but rather the focus is on social justice and mediocrity which is worse that socialism (look at the math Olympiad results on the global scale and see many third world countries doing much better than USA.
You got it, Michael. Well said, sir.
We got this way by letting the Liberal Educators call the shots, letting American History leave the curriculum, injecting Modern Math, watering down the testing procedures, on and on and on. Letting George “the idiot” Bush invent No Child Left Behind” is a real killer for challenging students. The best evaluation of our Education (not) System nowdays is: “WTF”?
Not surprising since all they are teaching is SJW crap, & how to hate the president and his supporters.
Time to get back to the 3 R’s : reading , (w)riting, (a)rithmetic.
And as much as enjoyed girls sports in high school in the early 1970s, education is more important.
AGREE……………
Perhaps this is the result of so many of the courses in our schools having been labeled “racist”. This definitely includes math, but it is also racist to discuss our founders (old white men, establishing a government to enrich themselves) so it is unreasonable to expect the students to know much about the documents they forged. And, it is likely true that future children will know even less than today’s students, because the left is terrorizing the country-tearing down all reminders of our past. It don’t help that the makeup of the current student body is over fifty percent foreign born and they just don’t give a damn to know a thing about the country they’ve invaded
I am not certain but some of our educational problems could be the people we have teaching our children are not proficient in the subjects they are teaching. It’s a progressive thing the longer it goes on the less the children learn because the less the teachers know.