And that’s why I’m fortifying my bug out shelter;
I then made it my business, when finding an older teacher, to ask if education had been “dumbed down.” To a person, I found that this question unleashed volatile diatribes on how dull children had become since the responders had begun as idealistic young men and women in the field. Algebra teachers informed me that every year they were forced to eliminate problem sets that previous years had mastered. English teachers who once taught Shakespeare and Dante were now reduced to leading seniors through Orwell’s Animal Farm or postmodern novels featuring teens in existential moral dilemmas. Moreover, the analysis of themes in book reports had been deconstructed into not what the author was attempting to portray, but what personal emotions were elicited in the reader.
h/t Marina
The money quote..since the absence of truth renders one construction of the world coequal with another.
Interesting read. We all know pubic school is a baby sitting and indotrinating system producing an ever increasing ignorant pubic. As cited in the article, probably the worst example of this junk learning is the revisionist history that shows up in school texts. But it goes futher to the repulsive rewritten history and fraudulent science we see propagated by the MSM and Hollywood.
For instance – I went to see Speilberg’s “Lincoln” and was shocked at not only how far it strayed from the historic record but from the book it was based upon. The so called history displayed in that film was the historic equivalent of the global warming hockey stick – yet I see rave reviews on twitter and the net. A prime example of how those indoctrinated with lies never know when they are being lied to by hollywood, the media and poiticians and so public ignorance grows.
That doesn’t really put it in perspective. Try this on for size:
Kids used to learn Latin in high school. Today they learn remedial English in university.
We have literally ‘self-esteemed’ ourselves into a full blown idiocracy.
And people ask why we home school.
It is not just what is no longer taught, it is also what is no longer expected.
Point form is not an essay. History has bastards and boneheads and our history is not the same as American or English or Chinese history. Geography, the basic shapes of land and their names, is all around us and kids should know those names without much class time. Things – from electric motors to Nerf guns – can be fixed and modified. Basic arithmetic is useful every day and can be done with fingers, pencils and, eventually, “in your head”. Lips do not move when you are reading silently. Spelling is something that, notwithstanding your father’s awful example, can be learned.
And so on.
The fun part about home schooling is that, after a few years, your kids become noticeably different from kids who are going to school. They are curious, willing to speak to adults, able to occupy themselves for hours at a time, able to look stuff up and, most of all, confident that they can solve the problems they are set. They also are largely indifferent to the peer group garbage which characterizes even the best schools.
Sam, my eldest, at 12 is looking at getting a trade before thinking about going to university. He likes working with tools and he likes money – ten years out the demand for plumbers, HVAC guys and carpenters is likely to be a bit higher than for womens’ studies majors. He likes that idea.
Right now my five year old has an old school teacher and not only has she taught her to read but the teacher also regularly sends homework home and expects it to be done.
Some of the other parents complained the teacher was too old school.
Gold. And some people don’t even know it.
(Btw for those of you who don’t have kids a five year old is in kindergarten)
In Ontario, if you graduate in your final year of high school with over 80% you are classified as an “Ontario Scholar”.
In the early years and into the early ’70s, the average school had somewhere around 3 or maybe 4 Ontario Scholars.
Today, so many kids graduate with over 80%, it’s almost meaningless.
It`s not what to think but how to think. We let the leftards turn that upside down…
This has been the plan for a few decades.
“…home schooling … your kids become noticeably different from kids who are going to school. …”
Posted by: Jay Currie
Yes. Yours will use and understand the phrase “different from”, while the ones who went to school will say “different than” and not understand that there is a difference, let alone that one way is correct and the other is not.
In the latest TIMSS ranking of students around the world in maths and science, Canadian students continue to fall.
The assessment is released every four years and of the three provinces benchmarked – Ontario, Quebec, Alberta – the decline has been steady.
My kids have alternated between Canadian and Singaporean schools the last several years. My oldest was top in his Singaporean math class with 94% for math and got 42 out of 45 on BC’s FSA test when he returned.
But from there it was a desert as the BC class taught next to nothing for a year while the teachers went on strike and complained about class sizes of 28 kids even though she had a full time assistant.
When we returned to Singapore again he wrote an assessment exam and failed it. He has since worked really hard and became top kid again.
There 40 kids in his class and one teacher.
In the latest TIMSS ranking of students around the world in maths and science, Canadian students continue to fall.
The assessment is released every four years and of the three provinces benchmarked – Ontario, Quebec, Alberta – the decline has been steady.
My kids have alternated between Canadian and Singaporean schools the last several years. My oldest was top in his Singaporean math class with 94% for math and got 42 out of 45 on BC’s FSA test when he returned.
But from there it was a desert as the BC class taught next to nothing for a year while the teachers went on strike and complained about class sizes of 28 kids even though she had a full time assistant.
When we returned to Singapore again he wrote an assessment exam and failed it. He has since worked really hard and became top kid again.
There 40 kids in his class and one teacher.
“In Ontario, if you graduate in your final year of high school with over 80% you are classified as an “Ontario Scholar”.
In the early years and into the early ’70s, the average school had somewhere around 3 or maybe 4 Ontario Scholars.
Today, so many kids graduate with over 80%, it’s almost meaningless.”
Posted by: Frank Q
Frank, the meaning of those statistics is that our modern “educationists” are doing a much better job than the old-fashioned teachers in those primitive schools of the 1970s. Not to you and me, but just ask those educationists.
Is anyone else here a Jeopardy fan? I am a regular viewer, and every season one of the features is the teachers tournament, where oddly enough the players are all teachers.
No offence to any teachers out there, but I swear they dumb down the questions during the teachers tournament. Is this my imagination or has anyone else noticed this?
“That doesn’t really put it in perspective. Try this on for size:
Kids used to learn Latin in high school. Today they learn remedial English in university.
We have literally ‘self-esteemed’ ourselves into a full blown idiocracy.
Posted by: Big Bad Jim at December 13, 2012 6:16 PM”
BINGO. The above cannot be said enough. As far back as 1991,I had to take my 23 year old step-daughter,set her down,and teach her the difference between to,too,and two. But what can you expect from a “profession” whose sole purpose is know to own 4 cars,6 vacations,and two yachts,while driving the rest of us into collectivism?(I only refer to any teacher under 40,and any prof under 41).
Oh I don’t know. My students now drink less and wash more than their parents of 30 years ago.
And one course which I have taught for 29 years certainly hasn’t gotten easier.
There have been some negative changes. I sometimes use “per ardua ad astra” as a course motto (apologies to the RAF, RCAF etc.).
Twenty years ago the question was, “what does that mean?” while now it might be, “is that French?”
In general culture there has been a falling off. Twenty years ago physics students would be curious about history (in the middle of a discussion on the electronic structure of helium a student once asked, “when did the Norse invade France?” “That’s not a physics question!” I said. “No, but it is important”, he replied, which was unanswerable.
Whoops…”is know to own”…lose the know. But at least I do the difference between know,no,and now.
The flip side is…do we really need to teach advanced Algebra to elementary school kids? Or Latin? Or have them fully understanding Dante?
I would be in favour of more rigorous education, but much of what is taught at schools is useless and only leads to the expectations of greatness that pushes kids into University to study political science in order to become the next Prime Minister….or journalism in order to “change the world”….or international development, because people need saving!
Also, it’s not the schools fault, they have to adjust to what they’re dealing with. When my Mother started teaching in the late 60’s she had massive classes of bright and eager kids from solid good homes.
Now when she substitutes in her retirement, she only finds joy amongst the littlest ones, while the rest are pretty blank.
The zombie smart phone sexting generation is different in a way that is beyond what has come before.
The death of meaningful curiosity – and everything else that matters will die with it.
Just a quick comment:
About ten years ago, there was another education battle in Ontario, and the public elementary teachers staged rotating strikes. Meanwhile, the Catholic elementary teachers stayed on the job.
This time around, the Catholic teachers signed a no-raise contract, and have continued to care for and teach their charges. Once again, the public school elementary teachers are staging strikes.
Faith does make a difference, both in how you approach life, and what you feel you need to take from it. There are many who decry the separate school system in Ontario; to me, this is the second time in a decade it’s proved its worth.
Yet, there is a flip-side. Reason Mag just had an article that reports that IQs are getting higher.
“However, as New Zealand political scientist James Flynn points out in his new book, Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the 21st Century, average IQs have been going up at the rate of about 3 points per decade over the past century. Flynn identified this ubiquitous trend (now named the Flynn Effect) back in the 1980s when he realized that the regular renorming of IQ tests suggested that an American with an average IQ of 100 today would score 115 on a 1950s IQ test. ”
http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/13/american-iqs-in-1900-averaged-67-points
As a parent, I don’t rely on the education system since you are at the mercy of the teacher and classroom your child is placed in. Some teachers are great, many are mediocre and far too many are terrible. A couple of years of the latter can really mess up their education. Be proactive, I guess.
Don’t you get it? Stupid people are easier to fool, and to control.
Reread the Declaration of Independence. Look at how they worded things, how succinct, how much they said in just a words. ” . . . all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed . . .” No one even thinks, much less writes, like that today. No more revolutions against the powers. In their eyes, a poorly educated populace is a feature, not a bug. It’s worked already. No one had the right words and the logic handy (or understood the right words when they were spoken by a few) to dismember and counteract Obama’s emotionally-manipulative, shallow sound bites.
I found out how dumbed down education had become when I assessed a 17 year old with a concussion sustained in a hockey game. I was told by his mother that he was a top student (should have accounted for the parental bias factor in my assessment). Did a mental status exam on the kid and he was totally unable to perform serial 7’s (starting with 100 take away 7 and then keep subtracting 7 from the result).
Based on the mothers concerns I referred the kid to a neurologist as post concussion acalculia seemed fairly significant. The neurologist informed me that kids that age are totally unable to perform a serial 7’s exam – a task that I’ve seen 90 year olds with Alzheimer’s still able to do if they’ve retained their math skills.
Mental calculation seems to be one of the things that has disappeared in the dumbing down of education. In the kids I see there is an incredible state of delusion where they believe that they can all become artists once they finish school and make a living at it. Now these are kids with psych and other problems so I probably don’t see the sane ones, but one just has to look at a 1930’s mathematical text to see how much devolution has occurred during the last 80 years.
Kill curiosity and control the child.
A NZ Political Scientist eh? So politics is a science now?
Kind of fits in with the theme.
Children reflect their parents drives and values, reading was important 40 yrs ago, now TV is the baby-sitter.
And soft times make soft people and allow the lazy and inept to survive pushing stupid ideas.
Wealth provides the luxury to indulge in magical thinking.
When the wealth is gone, see the govt debts, idiocy gets its true reward.
Save the old text books and reference material cause with out reliable electricity the new systems are inert junk.
A friend of mine is a OLDER high school teacher. He is adamant that grade 12 today was not even grade eight back in the late sixties. He stated what I already knew. They graduate with the inability to read, write or spell properly and are lost in math when the battery on their calculator goes dead. He is very frustrated that he has to stick to the programs set out for him and is just looking forward to retiring next year.
Just look at some of the crap in the system today.
http://library.catie.ca/PDF/ATI-20000s/23212.pdf
peterj, my sister-in-law would agree with your OLDER friend.
KevinB, now, there really is no difference between Catholic school kids and public school kids. It’s not just that curricula (routinely rattled off by heavily unionised and apathetic teachers) are dumbed down to such an extent that you think the kids are retarded; it’s that many parents don’t care. They sit the kids in front of a screen (TV, computer, i-Pad, cellphone) and expect the teachers to do the parenting. One test rubric (I swear to God) stated that the exams written by grade twelve students didn’t have to have proper spelling, grammar, prose or rhythm; they just had to have a vague idea of what was being said. That’s the benchmark for someone who cannot speak a syllable of English or a two-year old. Not only that, the teachers cannot fail a student nor can they leave half a percentage point (they must round off).
There’s blame for failure all around.
“Posted by: minuteman at December 13, 2012 8:17 PM ”
Funny, I thought regular Jeopardy questions were already dumbed down, with clues hidden in the questions wording.
Maybe it’s just me, I don’t have a degree.
The problem is not self-esteem. Self-esteem is necessary for us to want to move forward. Why should anyone want to feel incompetent and miserable?
The problem is that the schools are wrecking self-esteem while pretending to improve it. That’s by failing to give students a proper challenge and by protecting them from failure and its usual attendant emotions.
Meanwhile they exacerbate the kids’ narcissism by making them think they’re all special. Recall that the impetus for many terrorists is “narcissistic rage”. Add the anger of low achievement to the narcissism and there you are. It’s almost like the schools were intending to turn kids into potential terrorists. The better to help overthrow capitalism, presumably. And students without self-esteem won’t care if they live or die.
I exaggerate. But not by that much.
Self-respect is a better gauge. Respect is earned.
Self-esteem is empty of a need to do anything other than ‘feel’ good about yourself.
Obiwan Kenobe:
You missed my point. For the second time in a decade, Catholic teachers have shown conclusively that their mission to educate children is more important than their pocketbooks, at least compared to the secular system. That is a moral difference, and to me, it is at least as important as the other lessons they learn.
I was lucky; both my daughters were quickly streamed into the gifted program, where they were surrounded by engaged students and equally engaged teachers. Elder daughter happily doing year 1 at U of T in math/physics/chem, younger one chomping away at grade 11 and severely disappointed that her many extra-curricular programs have disappeared, now that she’s in the public system.
I see a lot of complaining, but very little in the way of thought on WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.
The issue, as I see it, is that parents have abdicated their role, instead letting the progressives have their way with their kids’ minds. How many parents are eager to take their kids to hockey or ballet early in the morning on a weekend, yet cannot find the time to teach their kids properly to correct what the schools leave undone?
Consider the dumbing down of the schools as an opportunity instead of a problem- yes, you will have to trade your TV and leisure time for greater involvement in your child’s life- but building your child’s mind is more valuable by far. They have shown you what knowledge they fear by what they have removed from the curriculum. They have provided you with a summer vacation each year to set the kids to studying your alternatives. They have reduced homework so that you can have the opportunity to work with the kids in the evening.
What if their apparent strength in the system is actually their greatest weakness?
The system is full of incompetent teachers? GOOD. That means the transmission of the Left’s message is in the hands of incompetents– this is a good thing. Surely you can be a better messenger and teacher for the right lessons that need to be taught.
I’ll try not to repeat myself too much because I have commented on these issues before.
When a Gr. 12 diploma meant something, not everyone earned one. Then it was noticed that before a person could proceed to university, they had to pass Gr. 12. Not fair! We were blighting the chances of the young to obtain those high earning degrees. That encouraged all sorts of tinkering to improve graduation rates. I say “tinkering” because most efforts were aimed at giving the illusion of achievement by dumbing the requirements down.
Self-esteem was a biggie too. We put the cart before the horse, assuming that if a student had “self-esteem” he/she would have the confidence, desire and the work ethic necessary to succeed. It escaped most educators that self-esteem was the RESULT of achievement (not the other way around). Many kids never experienced the satisfaction of authentic accomplishment and became addicted to empty praise and ever diminishing expectations.
Now young people to experience life through their phones and the teachings of those who themselves are becoming less and less educated.
@ rita (formerly known as rita) at December 14, 2012 10:52 AM
“iving the illusion of achievement by dumbing the requirements down.”
All good points but the dumbing down is a real tragedy as it never picks up at any given point and carries through to all other applications. Police, armed forces, civil service, judicial and as you noted, education. We are already in the shadow when it comes to many countries that chose to strive for excellence rather than political correctness and the worst part is that the social engineers still can’t see a problem. Unless action is taken very soon to get these fools out of the system the future looks very dark indeed. It may already be too late as the political will to reverse this course seems to be non-existent.
KevinB, you will get no argument out of me that Catholic institutions (at least at one stage) work magnificently. I’m just not seeing any evidence of it now. I know of Catholic teachers who not only don’t practise their Faith, they don’t even care about teaching. Many Catholic institutions have abandoned their mandates and, by doing so, have made themselves base and useless. It’s time to return to the basics.
BC Monkey @ 10:18 a.m.: “The issue, as I see it, is that parents have abdicated their role, instead letting the progressives have their way with their kids’ minds.”
Part of the reason that parents have abdicated their role is that the “progressives” have depredated the economy to the point where parents have to work more and/or are stressed out to the extent that they become worse parents.
If the welfare statists and regulation advocates hadn’t got their way, we’d be long past the time when both parents had to work.