And that’s why I’m stocking up on dehydrated food and ammo.
Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math.
The atrocious National Assessment of Educational Progress performance is only a fraction of the bad news. Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that these students can read and compute at a 12th-grade level, are conferred when 63 percent are not proficient in reading and 75 percent are not proficient in math.
For blacks, the news is worse. Roughly 75 percent of black students received high school diplomas attesting that they could read and compute at the 12th-grade level. However, 83 percent could not read at that level, and 93 percent could not do math at that level.
It’s racist to notice that kind of thing.
It is obviously time to have a serious conversation about doing away with white constructs such as math and reading.
I mean, how much more proof do you need!
..a very strong argument could be made…that the lowest common denominator…is dragging the rest of the country down
You are racist to even use a math term like lowest common denominator. That is a trigger and microaggression right there.
Think back. Think real hard. I graduated high school in 1969. A substantial majority of my classmates were also functionally illiterate. The exams were a joke and that substantial majority had been force-fed a very restricted set of memorized answers. Their final grades were fraudulent too. Nothing has changed.
We are a completely mad society in our insistence on higher education for people who don’t want it, don’t need it and can’t do it.
I hire a lot of those people in a small construction business. They are far from stupid. They are mostly just utterly disinterested in academic material which seems useless to them. All of my people have become proficient at using the internet to find information which interests them. They are more proficient that some of my lawyer friends who are the most technically incompetent people I know.
What my people want to know is: How to fix something, how a tool is used, maintained or repaired, how to use specific building materials, where to find materials or tools, building / electrical / plumbing code explanations. Physical things. Important things. Things in which most academic people have zero interest despite those things being what keeps them alive and fed.
“I graduated high school in 1969. A substantial majority of my classmates were also functionally illiterate. ”
Well, not in my high school. If you were illiterate, you took a 2-year “Occupations” program – or you dropped out because you got tired of failing.
Exactly. I graduated in 1971 although high school consisted of three separate schools as Dad moved for his job. People were flunked if they couldn’t muster passing grades. Parents were contacted during the semester if schoolwork wasn’t completed, for behavior, for hygiene and so on. Then, in California, Wilson Riles was made Superintendent of Schools and it was all downhill from there. My ex-stepson’s school books were a joke, more appropriate for grammar school. He was once truant 33 days before the district sent a postcard. P.S. He didn’t flunk a single grade even though unable to name the months of a year as a high school junior. How fragile our most important institutions proved.
I, unlike Hitler, got into art school. The big failing with that education is that we should have been FORCED to take a trade as well.
*
“fred says… A substantial majority of my classmates
were also functionally illiterate.”
how many of them were homicidal thugs?
“So far in 2018, there have been 378 shooting victims in Toronto.
What sort of new laws would have prevented this 16 year old
thug from murdering Rocco Scavetta?”
*
Not my 1976 Vancouver high school class. I was near the bottom of the pack and still knew algebra, trigs and so on. Proof in the pudding is a majority of my classmates become wealthy lawyers, pilots and doctors. Me, I became a low life IT trainer…
Public education is a good example where the outcomes directly meet the real objectives. Billions upon billions have been spent to create a entire class of people who will do their duty and vote for the required socialists party at every election.
Hey Frenchie, it appears that you have hit the nail directly on its head. Unionized teachers that have union goals above educating children goals. It appears to have created a block of Socialist voters who know zero about the millions of human beings killed by Socialism in the 20th Century.
Exactly. It is sad. I guess the great “experiment” will be repeated.
The difference between 1969 and now is that a third or more kids dropped out by grade 12 back then. In my sons graduating class was a special needs kid that we used to call retarded. Grade 12 is no longer a significant achievement.
but they need reparations…because it’s all so unfair and racist
Can they even read and do math at the 5th grade level? My bet is NO!
But then they’s got that Common Core that the Shrubs are so high on…
Fred – Frenchie.
Great comments. Both bang on the ever diminishing buck. I Graduated HS in 1970 – YVR. From the time of entering Grade 8 (first yr of High School), the Golden mantra was: “Thou Shalt Attend University”. And the whole Cirriculum was designed around that attitude. Those more interested in the varying Trades or “Shop” classes where considered “undesireables” or retards or whatever….but certainly not “shining stars” of the Education “SYSTEM”. Yet I would warrant, they fared much much better than their “betters”. As did I.
Even then The Socialists running said systems (then for about 6-8 yrs since they’d gained bargaining status as Public Servants), they had already started the degradation of public education. Starting with going away from Phonetics and into whole word learning & using coloured sticks to do math and other such Vapid BS. It’s no wonder I was completely baffled by the time my two girls got to Grade 1-2…
In the US I believe its called common core. AKA dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. Here in Canada we now have “no Zero’s allowed” All must pass because gosh, we can’t hurt their “feelings”.
Mandated, Institutionalized forced STUPIDITY… such as to make good little Socialist Soldiers
Yea Stocking up on Ammo and Dehydrated food, not such a bad idea…Unreal.
My teacher-wife is NOT allowed to use RED pen when correcting her children’s work … because the connotation of RED as being WRONG … “hurts the children’s self-esteem”. So she uses a purple pen.
During my time in industry, I often checked prints made of the drawings that a draftsman prepared. Any corrections that had to be made were marked in red. The details that were correct were green. That was one reason why, while I was teaching, I always used a red pen.
Often, the work that the students submitted would be covered with my comments, all in red, of course. Many of my students were aghast that I should deface their “masterpieces” in such a shameless manner, yet there were those who appreciated that I did that because it meant that I actually paid attention to what they did. Some of them even took note of those comments.
Frequently, I was asked how many pens I used when I graded their work. I jokingly replied that I have the red ink shipped in by ocean tanker from the factory on some South Pacific island. I think some of my students actually believed me.
My sister and I just saw “Crazy Rich Asians” yesterday (Hollywood has put out so much socialist crap, that we haven’t gone to the movies for a long time). Really good movie, but one of my “take-aways” from the story was that all of the Asians were very motivated and well-educated. In the 1970’s, Germaine Greer wrote a book about Countries and Self-esteem. She highlighted the fact that small, geographically challenged countries such as Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, Singapore (a city) had overcome their difficulties (including losing WWII in Japan’s case) and become economic successes because their people had self-esteem and were interested in education. She then contrasted this with most of the countries in Africa and South America (lots of political and economic instability). As a nation, you all MUST believe in education, or the future will most assuredly, NOT belong to you. You also have to “show up” (as Mark Steyn says in his book America Alone) as in having babies.
I started my university studies in 1973, having graduated from high school a few months earlier.
Some of my classmates went to institutions such as tech schools where they could finish with a diploma in, say, two years. A few of us went to university, though not everyone finished their degrees. The remainder started working, mostly in the local area.
At the time I was a freshman, I thought that one had to be quite smart and ambitious in order to get into university. I was astonished to find that most of my fellow undergrads weren’t much different than the people I knew in high school.
When I returned for grad studies a few years later, I was surprised to see how the entry standard had become lower. For example, I was a graduate teaching assistant in one course where, it turned out, I had a student who, apparently, never had trigonometry in high school. (I didn’t have statistics in high school, either, but I didn’t need it until my junior undergrad year when we all took a course in it.)
Worse was the fact that he didn’t seem particularly concerned about doing anything to resolve that deficiency. I recall starting a sophomore calculus course and, in the first lecture, the prof started talking about partial differentials, something I never took in my previous year. After a discussion with my department’s advisor, I spent a weekend with a Schaum’s Outline on the subject and learned enough to get me through that course. But I was the one who took the initiative to fix the problem. The kid I referred earlier didn’t seem to give a hoot.
Less than 10 years later, I started my teaching position at a certain post-secondary institution. What I saw earlier had become worse and it didn’t improve at all during the time that I had that job.
The educational system is concerned only about filling seats and bragging about graduation rates. It doesn’t care about giving people a proper education.
…I work with post grads in the field….they have absolutely no clue what their field of study involves
What is perverse and even cruel is that this system of bums in seats regardless of academic ability disproportionately harms minorities, first generation in university students and struggling students. These kids take out student loans and then drop out in frustration leaving them with debt, without a degree and without any marketable skills.
The UofC ran an ad back in oh, 1995 I think with that exact words – bums on seats. I saw it on a bus panel and thought what a stupid ad, cheapens the university. Little did I know it was exactly what the agenda was.
The problem with public education – Students=$$. Period. Nothing else.
Imagine you owned a machine shop that manufactured gears for automobile transmissions. You received the detailed specifications and a healthy contract $$ for each gear. And imagine that yours was the ONLY machine shop allowed to fabricate these parts (because you have really, really, strong UNION representation). As a result, your client could not enforce any quality control whatsoever, because your machine shop was the only one allowed to fabricate these parts. So you hired the cheapest, most unqualified, low wage, drill press operators who “felt” that the center of the gear wasn’t the only place to drill the main bearing hole. That it was OK for the hole to be drilled off center. As a result, transmissions were failing all over the country. And your client needed to import European and Asian gears for their transmissions.
But, because of the underlying (UNION) contract … your company just kept receiving $$ for each and every defective gear … same as the few good ones. And your machine shop just kept making defective gears … over and over and over … and you kept receiving $$ every day of the week.
THAT perfectly summarizes our education system. A system that churns out defective parts in huge numbers while simultaneously demanding more $$ per each part. And I say that as a spouse of a public school teacher. A teacher who is an EXPERT, diligent gear-maker whose gears almost always exceed the minimum specifications required. And when one of her gears doesn’t meet specifications … she requests the opportunity to re-mill the part again, and make it right. Sometimes she is allowed to rework the defective gear, but mostly, the shop steward just tosses the bad gear into the next stage of production. Because, the shop needs to meet the production goals, and keep the $$$ flowing.
….that was a damn good analogy …excellent
I second Latitude – excellent.
As a parent, it’s essential that you monitor your kid’s education. In our SD, they did away with traditional grading 10+ years ago for K-9. Now it’s a 1-5 matrix based on the teacher’s expectations (a weird, subjective grading system). The report cards are 12 pages, double sided but completely meaningless. At home, I focus on math and science checks because you can’t fix everything and public school teachers and the provincial curriculum are particularly weak in math and science. I think subjective grading and weak curriculum/teaching is partly to blame for the problems in international ranking, dumbing down university courses and poor high school results.
My kids were deathly afraid of MY grading system … the Truth. I’d ask them what they were reading for their English class, for example. I would ask for their book, ask what chapter they had gotten to, and would open the book, quickly read a page or two … and quiz them. Not about detail, but about themes and essential facts. I would rapidly discover whether they had just turned the pages and retained nothing of the book … or whether they had actually read the book and retained the information. After a few of these exercises … my kids would be honest if they hadn’t really read the book … which would be less humiliating than revealing they hadn’t after saying they had.
Some may consider this cruel … but I always taught my children that I was less interested in what “grade” they received in school as opposed to what they actually “learned” in school. Knowledge is EVERYTHING … grades? Not nearly as important to me. I taught my children to NEVER cheat themselves out of knowledge which would be essential to their futures.
Luckily, my kids ( to varying degrees) enjoy math, science and problem solving as much as I do. New concepts can be challenging, require more work and therefore induce stubborness, of course. Now they ask for assistance and advice from us as often as we check up on their school work.
Science and tech (R&D and applied) are the future, IMO. Fixing and maintaining this technology will be as important as developing the tech….and the hands-on aspect of applied science is much more difficult to offshore and automate. There’s big money in overtime so those who can fix high tech 24/7 may be do as well financially as plumbers and other on-call trades.
I got one math ‘genius’ out of 3 kids. From me most likely, although he is far better than I am … I wasn’t much help to him toward the end of HS. But he’s also our most organized, disciplined child. Kinda goes along with the math-wiring in his brain.
BTW … he was HIRED instantly, after his one and only job interview. My advice, isn’t “plastics” … it’s STEM.
“as opposed to what they actually “learned” in school”….
Schools should teach kids “how” to learn….they don’t do that
Totally agreed … however … I am not now, nor have I ever been “test averse”. Ya gotta measure their recall and knowledge somehow.
Regarding university, I have a kid in grade 12 and the pressure to attend university is immense. We’ve spent a great deal of time explaining the cost/benefit of a university degree vs. technology diploma. In money, in time, in job prospects. As it currently stands, I think explaining that getting an in-demand, 2 year applied science technology diploma gives a solid foundation for being employed in a well-paying job was convincing. As was explaining that he’ll graduate without debt from polytech at 20 so there’s no reason he can’t go to a university then, if he still feel the need. IMO a non-STEM degree has become an ridiculously expensive and increasingly useless piece of paper that has merely become a status symbol. Polytechs give you a STEM education without the mandatory SJ indoctrination and time/money cost of the required social science and humanities credits.
well I graduated grade school Ie grade 8 in 1964.
the principal announced it was the 1st time the whole grade 8 passed.
I still remember thinking, how could that happen?
fast forward to 2018, theyre still ALL graduating.
‘cept now I know the how and why.
Is there anything further that needs to be said?
The number of Ontario Scholars has steadily increased since the 1960s. During those years, only around 5% of Ontario students were Ontario Scholars, with an average of 80% over seven of their grade 13 courses. By the 1980s, that number had risen to 40%, and currently sits at over 60% of graduates being Ontario Scholars with an 80% average or greater over their best six grade 12 courses.[4][5] This is seen by some as evidence of the harmful effects of grade inflation, which results in higher standards to enter university, but more importantly, it represents a mismatch of performance and evaluation. The increase in the number of Ontario Scholars is connected with the removal of the standardized provincial exams, known as “departmentals”.[
People need to disabuse themselves of the notion that our education system has anything to do with actual education. Once upon a time, it was about education: today, it has become a life-support system for teachers’ unions.
I was talking to a guidance person who told me that the first term in her University is for new students out of high school who cannot read, write, do math and have no clue about sentence structure. After that they go on in their chosen field of learning. Meanwhile their friends who took heating and a/c are making a fortune and have no school debt. Steve O
The parents of some deserve blame as well…Many years ago, at a fun (coed) touch football league, the 6 yr old child of one of the players asked me what the “rope with a ball tied to either end” was for. I replied that it was a gauge used to measure how far back the rushers had to stand before the ball was snapped. When he asked what a gauge was, I started to explain it when his father came over and said “don’t bother telling him about that, he will never understand it”. I felt sorry for the kid, parents who have no faith in his abilities, and say so in front of him.
On economics, our schools for decades have been teaching math as if there is only one side to an equation.
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. Winston Churchill
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/winston_churchill_164131
every problem we have, at least 100 people have seen it coming for a thousand years.
And the majority always vote to keep the problem, or make it worse.
Universal public education might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the way it’s being done now it looks like it’s a waste of time and money. The government should give the school boards ten years to get results that indicate the entire system is not a waste of time, and if they can’t do it , shit-can the entire system. Parents who care about their kids will make sure they are educated, and parents who don’t won’t, just like now.
In university I took an English course to prove I wasn’t just a math-wiz (which I wasn’t). Prior to our first essay on The Odyssey (by Homer), our teacher gave us a primer on correct punctuation. He spent quite a bit of time detailing how we should treat direct quotes from the book, including adding dots to indicate a partial sentence. I took this to heart and very studiously dotted my quotations.
When I received my paper back it was all marked up in red pen, especially over the dots around the quotations. At the top was a sentence “…looks like your paper has the measles…”. Last English course I ever took.
I feel sorry for black people because I think they are being screwed out of a good education. The problem with treating people as being disadvantaged is they begin to behave as such. We see this with some many First Nations people who are so convinced they are victims they don’t even try to be successful.
And today I read …
http://www.statepress.com/article/2018/09/spscience-google-apple-ibm-drop-college-degree-requirements-leaving-weight-of-college-degree-in-question
I suspect that the college graduate job applicants haven’t been working out too well. A testimony to the CRAP colleges are stuffing into the heads of their students. Useless SJW crap. Perhaps we should simply let the Free Market put an end to our institutions of higher learning … because it’s already started.
“A generation so much dumber than its parents came crashing through the window”
Tragically Hip – At the Hundredth Meridian
The hundredth meridian splits the US and Canada almost right down the middle (cutting Manitoba into 2 and nicely dividing Texas). North of Texas is where the great plains begin, in the central USA. I’m not sure what great America myth the Hip were trying to debunk. Maybe that it wasn’t so great?
The 100th meridian doesn’t exactly cut Manitoba in two; it’s about sixty or so miles east of the Saskatchewan border, across the western edge of Brandon. The road at the last Brandon exit on the westbound Trans-Canada Highway runs along it. If you’re driving west across the prairies, things seem pretty civilized until you get to this point, at which you quickly start to wonder just what you’re getting yourself into. Especially if you’ve never been west before and you get there at sundown in winter as it’s starting to snow. This will generate a mood that the song by Tragically Hip captures very well.
The Great Plains actually begin east of Brandon but you won’t really notice them until you cross the 100th meridian. I always just assumed that Hip had been paying attention on an early tour and wrote what they saw. Of course they might have done it by accident.
“The children are our future.” At least the future won’t last as long for us as for them. Pity them, they are their own doom.
Great comments on this thread!!
But what I want to know is this: Where on earth can I get some of that dehydrated ammo???
[Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself]