Muck’s Minute #5 Educational Catastrophe

Thoughts on our educational system and where it’s going to end up!

 

We all know the educational system in this country is in deep shit. From pre-K through college, tech school to vocational schools, public and private schools where charter schools tend to get a pass but very narrowly and over the past 15 years they are all suffering from grade slippage..

I’ve thought about that a lot lately, considering that the future of humanity depends upon the successful education of those generations that follow our own. Yes, I know!! In the long run we are all dead and after that who cares? I do, for one. A lot of others could care less, trying their best to “get it while they can”, leaving future generations to whatever mess those currently alive leave behind. To me, that’s a very short and unproductive point of view. None the less, the Boomers and Millennials are embracing ‘ME’ism” more than any other previous generations that I can document.

In fact, that “gimme” attitude is embedded in human nature so deeply, we may not survive as a race long enough to root it out. It’s been there for 5,000 years, so how do we stop now?

But I digress..

I’ve thought of another possible reason why our school system is obviously in decline from top to bottom. The children (thence going into adolescence and further into young adulthood) are – shall we say – less intellectually or motivationally endowed than those of us currently in the latter part of our lives? This is one of those areas where a blanket statement falls on its’ ass and must be qualified by stating this is not true for individuals as there are some really sharp Boomers and Millennials and fresh new Artists being being born as I speak.

But looking at the overall intelligence of younger generations, are we not slowly loosing ground? I think so. The real problem is that we, as a country, do not want to contemplate the fact that our kids are getting dumber. (Whether from environmental or social forces I cannot say).

But as a mass of people, overall, those following the middle-year Boomers and the Millennial generation are suffering from some vital content or imprint that we enjoyed that they do not.

Of course they are! Those vital ingredients are values and discipline and may be even in general intelligence. What a kick in the ass.

In my humble opinion, a large fraction of the loss of general intelligence (I.Q.), discipline and proper value implantation is in direct proportion of the current, slow but sure, death of the traditional family structure. The father/mother structure of the family core is not something that just popped up accidentally as the human race slowly evolved from hunter/gatherer through agrarian civilization to industrial prominence.

The family as a structure, one mom, one dad and children raised by both (sometimes well, sometimes not so well), slowly developed over thousands of years to become the most efficient, effective and permanent way to insure that one’s offspring survived to carry on the genes and behavioral patterns of the parents into the future, thereby insuring Natures’ primary directives of passing your genes (i.e. pieces of yourself) down the track of time.

We are, sadly, in today’s world, slowly destroying this family organizational structure, for whatever reason, and civilization in whatever form that we enjoy at this time is suffering for it as I write this.

The advent of the “Welfare World”, where people are awarded funding from the public purse, not expected to produce jack shit, gaining more income with every bastard child a woman bears continues to encourage irresponsible behavior, dependency on those who work and pay taxes (or those who just print money to cover the difference) and is, in any point of view, on a downward spiral of poverty, despair and eventual collapse when the “fiat money” is no longer acceptable to that very same nation of producers and providers.

Is there any way out of this deadly spiral of lower I.Q., ever more substandard education, welfare and poverty assistance?

In Old Muck’s opinion, this spiral can only be aborted by a general failure of the “system” that now runs our sad ex-Republic of the USA. The ignorance of the general public has exceeded the fondest dreams of politicians, the ignorance of students and those in the educational system far exceeds the ambitions of TPTB and they are encroaching higher into the food chain by dumbing down even college students by requiring such courses as “black history”, ”black studies” and “political correctness’ (No shit – the latter is a course taught at our local Community College) and such social engineering studies that provide nothing but bull shit to confuse the minds of students.

Win and condition the minds of students today and tomorrow you bear the pain.

We all have the responsibility to try and correct the problem – one person at at time if need be – by spreading the truth, the ideas and the moral beliefs that must be adapted to lift our national course from both economic and social collapse, through the swamps of bare survival to the sunlight of rational behavior and a higher way of life.

The last paragraph, I shrug my shoulders and say “Lot’s of luck!”.

End

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes.

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BUCKHED
BUCKHED

Muck we’re graduating classes of High School Students who can’t read and classes of College students who get a 10th grade education. I spoke with a young man recently who graduated with a degree in business from a major university and had never heard of Henry Hazlitt,Murray Rothbard and others . I quizzed him on economic issues and he was as ignorant as a piss ant !

card802
card802

Good article Muck.

Walter E. Williams agrees as well, at least from the black perspective:

“Most of the problems faced by the black community have their roots in a black culture that differs significantly from the black culture of yesteryear. Today only 35 percent of black children are raised in two-parent households, but as far back as 1880, in Philadelphia, 75 percent of black children were raised in two-parent households — and it was as high as 85 percent in other places. Even during slavery, in which marriage was forbidden, most black children were raised with two biological parents. The black family managed to survive several centuries of slavery and generations of the harshest racism and Jim Crow, to ultimately become destroyed by the welfare state. The black family has fallen victim to the vision fostered by some intellectuals that, in the words of a sociology professor in the 1960s, “it has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes.”

Walter Williams: Black People Duped

Stephanie

Catastrophephy is not a word.

whatever
whatever

I remember being young and being absolutely intellectually hungry. I was starving for ‘truth’ and enlightenment and elders to teach me and things to find and see. I wanted to know anything and everything that I could possibly digest. I read hordes of books and magazines and newspapers, I wandered around, I talked to anybody anywhere.

I remember being once in the card catalog library at UC Berkeley thinking I died and gone to heaven just to be in a building with such a card catalog to dig through — not to mention the actual 10 floor library building.

I loved shipping ports and concert halls and museums and public transportation…..and library card catalogs.

I have wandered all over the world. I am still in a state of wonder and quest for enlightenment. I speak several languages badly and English as a native tongue.

I attended American public schools to the ninth grade when I gave up and drifted off, then went back to college time and time again until I was fifty.

The first three or four years of my schooling were crucial to my later life education, I was lost to the system by the fifth grade, but by then I already had such an intellectual head start the passion has never left me.

I was in fifth grade in 1963.

Who was it that said something about ‘give me a child until the age of seven and after that you may have him back’?

Our children are now intellectual prisoners at the very early beginning of the US education system, and completely lost by the third grade. That can never be recovered, not in a lifetime. Deflated children cannot be re-inflated at will some years later on.

The current American public school system is nothing less than an absolute tragedy for kids. A funeral dirge.

Gayle
Gayle

Wow Muck

Thanks for a post that doesn’t lay the diminishing intellectual capacity of our young people solely on the backs of teachers. That’s rather unusual around here.

bb

My aunt taught public school for 30+years and she told me a while back that the US department of education and the public unions are where the problems started .She said you will have to abolish both if there is going to be any improvement in education.She also said they are both controlled by socialist who are trying to impose their ideology on America by equalizing all subjects and children.(her veiw )I think she is right.

card802
card802

Gayle,

I went back and reread the entire post again, can’t find where Muck even mentions teachers.

Gayle
Gayle

Card-

That’s what I found so startling.

Thinker

Progressives actually believe that, for society to grow, they need to remove the influence of parents on their children. How many times have we heard someone slip up and suggest that kids need to be “taken away” from their parents and taught the “right” things by the system?

The same Progressives believe that a tribal approach to parenting is an improvement over the two-parent system that has existed for centuries. Not that tribalism hasn’t; it’s just been practiced in cultures that are very different from our own. And those cultures have not, traditionally, been successful ones.

Why they believe that this is where America needs to fundamentally change, I don’t know. It makes no logical sense, other than it just being “different” than what we have now. But even assuming that America is broken and needs to be fixed seems a flawed argument… unless you focus only on the results of the past generation or two. Prior to that, America was the envy of the world.

card802
card802

Thinker, as in “It takes a village to raise a child” It could be a Brave New World someday.

card802
card802

Gayle, shit, I had to go back and reread what you wrote. Hand to forehead; Doh!

Stucky

Most kids can’t do it on their own. They need their parents. How many of you would be where you are were it not for mom and / or dad?

My mom went to PTA’s even when she didn’t speak hardly a word of English. It’s called “being involved”. Other examples? Look at Jewish and Asian parents. Case closed.

Don’t give a shit about your kid’s academics … don’t be surprised by the fucked up results.

Gayle
Gayle

The teacher problem can be quickly resolved by abandoning tenure.

llpoh
llpoh

Children/young people are not being educated for a number of reasons – Much has touched on many.
These include:

Teachers coming from the bottom of education barrel – if you cannot get into any other college, you can always get into a teacher’s college.

Vast amounts of money is being wasted on schools – approx. $10,000 per student is spent. If the average class size is 25, just where the hell does the $250,000 dollars go?

The focus has shifted from the 3 Rs. Do kids really need to be studying black history when they cannot add and subtract and read?

Parents are not talking to their children, or reading to them, or taking an interest in their education. The belief is that it is the state’s responsibility to educate their children. That is disgraceful – parents have handed over their parental responsibilities to their kids.

High achievement is no longer recognized and pursued – the lowest common denominator is catered to. Everyone is a winner. Competition is wrong!

There is constantly more to learn. With IQs dropping, for whatever reason, and tech increasing, fewer and fewer students are capable of acquiring the education that the modern commercial world requires. Not everyone can do calculus, and not everyone can program a computer.

Families are disintegrating, as Muck so appropriately points out. The result is catastrophic re educating the young.

Commercially viable educations are being abandoned for women’s, black, art history studies, when what is needed is science, math, engineering.

When added together, these, and many other factors, are severely affecting the education American children are receiving.

Two major issues will result, and have resulted:

First, the US will struggle to compete economically in a global marketplace. It is too late to change that fact. The US economy will trend toward the world norm, and the the trend line will become increasingly steep. Real wages will continue to fall. Living standards will continue to fall.

Second, the American people will lose, and have largely already lost, the ability to reason. Ultimately, there will be a socio-economic collapse/crisis. I fear that the people will not be able to reason well enough to reach an understanding as to what an appropriate system should look like and be. The people will know things are in crisis, and will uprise. But they will not have a model to turn to as a replacement for the broken system that they are rebelling against. And so there will likely be a very long crisis indeed, as they country – if it survives in a form known as a country – lurches from crisis to crisis, and from one despot/corrupt leadership to another.

Without solid education, there is no foundation to the nation. I expect it is far too late to fix. Hundreds of millions of Americans are too poorly educated to make a significant difference in the looming crisis.

llpoh
llpoh

Gayle – that in and of itself is not nearly sufficient. Teachers are coming from the bottom of the barrel. They are generally from the bottom half of the student cohort, and frequently from the bottom quartile.

Simply eliminating tenure will have no major effect. Those folks will not suddenly grow 30 IQ points simply because tenure is eliminated.

llpoh
llpoh

BTW – thanks Muck!

TeresaE
TeresaE

Great thoughts Muck.

Now add the fact that through medications, fluoride, chlorine, bromides, not to mention millions of other toxins and chemicals now in our foods, medicines, land, air and homes, the kids are being chemically lobotomized before they ever draw their first breaths.

People ask why the “progressives” would want to abolish family?

I wonder why anyone here would still have that question as it has been pretty obvious to me for a long time.

We, the involved, the self-educated, the critical thinkers, are a threat to their Utopia and Agenda 21 fantasies.

The only way to smash us, is to guarantee those ideals of liberty, knowledge, truth and freedom, die with us. Taking our kids from us, or keeping them sedated, medicated and indoctrinated, will usher in this new era of greatness.

Love your stuff Muck, and all I know is that my parents, while demanding, were not very involved. And yet I received all As for most of my school career.

And, like @whatever, I left school after 9th grade not returning until I obtained my GED and entered college (at 18).

With so much information being beamed 24/7 at our youth, it is easy to see why they have no desire to go forth and learn/figure things out for themselves.

They, like most adult Americans, believe by reading the Yahoo home page, or watching Headline News or the Today Show, that they know all they need to and there it lies.

Best part of this clusterfuck? Things are getting ready to get really interesting. Worrying about schools and education is worthless, and really, there is no way in our current paradigm to even think we could “fix” it.

It won’t be long and the schools won’t be used for anything past propaganda and brainwashing. The New World Order has wanted to change American minds, and our future, for a long, long time.

The crash of our economy, or a world war with Putin, or both, are going to dramatically change our country. Probably much faster than any of us would believe possible.

Thanks again Muckster.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Llpoh

You are right, eliminating tenure is too simplistic an answer to the “teacher problem.” However, if tenure was eliminated, then the crappy teachers couldn’t survive very long. As it is now, they can go for 40 years. Teachers face increasing levels of accountability these days. It won’t be long before test scores will be formally used as a key component of evaluation; currently they are not.

In the old days when I was a young teacher, we were handed the teacher’s manuals and sent off to make the best of it. Annual achievement tests were no big deal; as I recall, we weren’t even shown our students’ scores, much less asked to analyze them.

By the time I retired, teachers were asked to collaborately schedule the relevant standards, design activities to teach them, write classroom and site questions for frequent assessments, analyze the results of those assessments, and make revisions to all as appropriate.

The standard, the learning goals implicit in it, and the agenda for the day to address that standard were required to appear prominently in the classroom every day. If an administrator walked in and the teacher was straying from the topic at hand, there would be some counsel applied. Everybody’s test scores at the site, district, and state levels were shared publicly within the faculty. Poor teachers quickly become obvious with this process and scrutiny.

These changes came about largely as a result of No Child Left Behind. In spite of the lopsided emphasis on test scores, the changes outlined above have led to improved teaching. The “teachable moment” has been sacrificed though.

Gayle
Gayle

My iPad is giving me grief by changing me to Anonymous lately. I contributed the above entry.

Pirate Jo
Pirate Jo

“In the long run we are all dead and after that who cares? I do, for one. A lot of others could care less, trying their best to “get it while they can”, leaving future generations to whatever mess those currently alive leave behind.”

I don’t care what happens to humanity anymore. Because it doesn’t matter what I do or whether I care – humanity is screwed anyway. I am not reproducing, so I’m not adding to the ranks of the FSA and I’m also not adding to the ranks of those who will be fodder for it.

I take care of myself and will exit this life before I become a burden to anyone, so I am Going Galt without leaving a mess for future generations. Compared to previous generations, that makes me look like a freaking saint, because they certainly left a big mess!

llpoh
llpoh

Muck – I disagree re your comments re medical practitioners.

A good friend of mine’s father was head of surgery at a major medical school. He said that the biggest issue in medicine was that medical schools take only the folks with straight As. He said that medicine was basically no more difficult than being a car mechanic – that any B student can do it, so long as they are hard working. He said that A students were doing more harm than good as so many lacked the personal/communication skills necessary for being a good or great doctor.

He was not talking about surgeons or specialists – just run of the mill GPs.

Any B student can learn medicine. It is the exit qualifications that are important, not the entry ones.

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