What Went So Wrong in U.S. Education?

By the time young people in Europe leave high school, they are fluent in 3+ languages, have read Plato, and play at least one musical instrument fairly well.

Southeast Asians, as we all know, are more inclined towards math and science, which is why we see their surnames all over our hospital placards.

Americans are lucky if they can find Poland on a map of the world.

So, why this cataclysmic failure?  I suspect that it’s a combination of factors, mostly rooted in U.S. politics.  Americans have very little patience for solutions to problems that take years or even decades to play themselves out.  If a certain politician advocates for something that doesn’t show immediate benefits, he’s a failure, and that now becomes ammunition for his opponent in the next election.

This is all coupled by the fact, that, at a certain level, we simply don’t care.  If you disbelieve that, ask yourself why we pay our teachers so poorly, and why we allow charter schools to siphon the cream off the top of the student population.

 

Tagged with: ,
One comment on “What Went So Wrong in U.S. Education?
  1. Scott McKie says:

    Can I offer a different pespective:
    It’s three things:
    1.) “Parents” more than just a couple of “generations” back — simply stopped “parenting”, i.e., being responsible for what their kids saw , did, played, learned in school, etc.
    They let their kids “develop on their own.

    2.) the advent of the electronic Ipad / cell-phone / “just plop the kid in front of the TV and then “you can go ‘do your thing’ ” — and off-shoot of #1.

    3.) Evangelical Chistianism (a true oxymoron) reared it’s ugly head — in the less educated area of parents – as they hid from reality.

    And you end up with generations of kids in the US we have now – who have not “experienced” the natural type of;
    — fall down, get hurt,get back up” experience;
    — learn to interact with the opposite sex, with all of the high and lows associated with it;
    growing up that a couple of thousand of centuries of human history has shown “teaches” us what to do and what not to do.

    Today – we have young people that have no foundation learned from experience.
    That’s because they have never experienced “life” – and have become so afraid of their own shadow, self-centered , myopic and simply useless (because of that lack of human interaction experience) which breeds “inquisitiveness” (your point): that they are not interested in learning much more that what comes off a screen somewhere – totally ignorant of and to the fact that they are slaves to the damned things.

    Meanwhile – the Zuckerburgs and others that brought on this situation – because the earlier generations of parents were too self-absorbed to stop it when it could have been stopped: — just keep making more money — because that has been their aim – from the get-go.