Los-Angeles-Shooter Loc: Los Angeles

Onward into the Night
Or Uganda, Anyway

March 14, 2014
Despite much wringing of teeth and gnashing of hands about the decline in schooling in the United States, I have seen very little concrete comparison between then and now, whatever one means by “then.” In my small way, as a mere anecdote in a sea of troubles, I hereby offer an actual comparison. Permit me to preview the result: Much of the United States has sunk to the level of the lower ranks of the Third World.

As an example of documented current practice in urban schools—I have seen similar from Detroit, Chicago, and Mississippi—here are a few emails sent to the New York Post by students of Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers. These have been posted by various horrified writers, but I repeat them here in case the reader hasn’t seen them. They concern the students’ support for something called “Blended Learning,” in which one watches a video, answers a few questions, and gets credit. The Post had written a piece critical of same, putting the students into an uproar.

A junior wrote: “What do you get of giving false accusations im one of the students that has blended learning I had a course of English and I passed and and it helped a lot you’re a reported your support to get truth information other than starting rumors . . .”

Right out of Milton, that.

Another wrote: “To deeply criticize a program that has helped many students especially seniors to graduate I should not see no complaints.”

One student said the online system beats the classroom because “you can digest in the information at your own paste.”

Now, I have no information on what things they do not know other than English. Approximately everything, I suspect. I do know that growing up long ago in average white schools from kindergarten onwards, I learned to speak better English by the second grade than these high-school students—“students”—will likely ever speak. I could write much better English. I think it reasonable to suspect that kids who want to digest in information at their own paste probably do not know a lot of algebra or chemistry. We are producing illiterate, unemployable barbarians inassimilable to a First World country.

By way of comparison, there follows a list of things I could do in my primary and secondary schools, at what age I could do them, and where the schools were. The list is accurate. In instances in which I am not sure whether I knew a thing in one grade or another, I have written “by grade five” or whatever. The schools were the public schools of the region.

Grades 2-5, Robert E. Lee Elementary, Arlington, Virginia (in the suburbs of Washington).

Multiply 457 times 56.7
Divide 345.7 by 45. 8
Divide 34 3/8 by 13/3

Diagram “Mr. Jones, the principal, who had been in the Army, said “Give it to her, please.” I knew subject, verb, appositive, direct and indirect object,
transitive verbs, proper nouns, collective nouns, helper verbs, tenses and, I think I remember, the dreaded dangling participle. I believe we had done most of this by the fourth grade, but I cannot swear to it.

I further remember that the drugstores in suburban Washington carried large rows of books, the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, and so on, the prominent display of which suggested that the stores expected people to buy them. My friends and I assuredly did buy them. (The Hardy Boys series has since been dumbed down.) We also, many of us, had chemistry sets and microscopes from Gilbert or Edmunds Scientific. We were ordinary American kids.

Athens Elementary, or maybe Junior High, Athens, Alabama, grade six, 1956.

Solve: “If a tank contains 34.5 gallons when it is 2/3 full, how much does it contain when it is full?” Calculate areas of rectangles, circles (using pi as 3.14 or 22/7), and triangles. Solve problems involving percentages. Give from memory percentages represented by common fractions, a sixth, eighth, twelfth, and so on.

Eighth grade, base school, Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, Virginia.

Calculate 2x2 y2z +7 divided into (22x3 y3z4 + 45)

Factor x2 – 9 at a glance and more-complex binomial products with a little thought, derive (for the test anyway) the quadratic formula by completing the square; solve quadratics by factoring or by the formula; solve pairs of simultaneous linear equations in two unknowns by three methods. In short, ordinary eighth-grade algebra.

Talk reasonably intelligently about Julius Caesar, which we read in English class, and quote short parts.

High school, 1960-64, rural King George High, King George, Virginia.

Here I am shaky because I can’t distinguish in memory what I learned in school and what I learned from reading medical texts and such which I had discovered I could buy on family trips to Washington. However, I do remember in chemistry class balancing oxidation-reduction equations, which alone establishes that the class was a serious one. Biology, 2nd-year algebra, plane geometry, and solid-and-trig were at a similar level. All of these were required of college-track students. We lots of did trig identities: sin2 + cos2 = 1, that sort of thing. I knew well the Indian trig-chief SOH-CAH-TOA, vital to later study of mechanics. . In short, ordinary high-school math

I still have a copy of the high-school newspaper. Adolescent writing, grammatical, decently organized.

I would like to attribute all of this to my preternatural brilliance. Unfortunately for this laudable understanding, the things listed were expected of all students until the eighth grade, when they were expected of all college-track students. Two of my schools, note, were of the rural or small-town South, thought in Brooklyn to be a motherlode of ignorance.

The moderate rigor described above apparently reigned everywhere in America at the time. In late 1964 I got to my small Southern college, Hampden-Sydney, which had average pre-dumbing-down SATs a little above 1100, the students being mostly boys from small towns all over Virginia. I remember that in freshman chem, the expectation was that everyone knew all of the above. Knew it cold. We did. Bad grammar would in no course have been tolerated. Students were assumed ready for freshman calculus. The college offered remedial nothing. If you couldn’t do the work you belonged somewhere else, and shortly were.

It was not an elite college. We were not elite students. As freshmen, we were only a summer further along than seniors at Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers. We didn’t digest in our own paste.

What am I, and people my age, supposed to feel other than raw contempt for pig-ignorant, self-righteous, utterly useless illiterates whom society will have to feed and house like barnyard animals for the next fifty years?

romanticf16 Loc: Commerce Twp, MI

And back then it was OK to say Amen, too.

dave.speeking Loc: Brooklyn OH

I preferred mucilage over paste. Tasted better.

old hippy Loc: Kentucky hills

I am sad you exist

Iwantitall Loc: Chicago (south side)

The op's point exactly. Now go read your Mad magazine and shut up!
Mike

lateron Loc: Yorkshire, England

For what it's worth, I watch a UK programme called "The Chase", and I must admit to being appalled at the level of ignorance displayed by our younger generation. English is one thing, History is another! Yesterday a quizzer actually thought that the 'Vietnam' war was at the same time as the Boer War!!! (Sorry, my Service background is imposing upon my thoughts!). I'm sure that the French and Americans would appreciate that!!!

amyinsparta Loc: White county, TN

When the population is dumbed down, it is much easier to manipulate and control them. I believe that has now been pretty much accomplished. People believe what they see and hear without so much as one effort to dig deeper to see if indeed what they see and hear is the truth.They make decisions based on half truths and outright lies.

There is no politician or govt. leader that tells the truth, no matter what philosophy they hold. If they told the truth, I suspect the people would eventually have their heads on a platter.

We have been manipulated and lied to so long, we haven't a clue what the truth is-unless we go seek it. The truth is out there, but it is marginalized and dismissed as 'crazy talk' and the truth tellers are called mentally unstable.

Snowden told the truth and half the country would shoot him dead for his efforts. go figure. jmo

Old Grey Beard Loc: Salt Lake City, Utah

Mentally unstable, an extremist, or a conspiracy theorist, is what anyone that thinks with any degree of common sense, and seeks the truth rather than believe the MSM is labeled.

papayanirvana Loc: Kauai

the population isn't any dumber...it's just that there's so much more to learn...the world is much more complex.

If you want writing samples from "THEN" to compare, just look at the UHHers posts... you will find the same inattention to grammar and incorrect word use as your examples posted.

ttlthor Loc: Grapevine, Texas

I've always been astounded by the shear ignorance exhibited by people interviewed by Jay Leno on his Tonight Show Jaywalking episodes. Some of these people were teachers or college students in education majors. Search Jaywalking on Youtube for examples. It's bloody scary.

RichardQ Loc: Colorado

Unfortunately, ttlthor, I have to correct you -- the word you meant to use is "sheer" (complete), not "shear" (cutting), unless you meant "cutting-edge ignorance."

But I want to address another aspect of the U.S. educational system, i.e., the impact of the Texas view of textbook content. Schoolbook publishers are steered into rather strange learning channels, simply because of regional biases which the Texans mandate. Due to the cost of printing alternate versions of a textbook, the publishers stay with the largest order volumes, which come from Texas. It is long since time for school texts to switch into the modern media world and equip schools with electronic tablets which can be supplied with updated and appropriate material at much lower cost than new physical textbooks.

Another sore point, in which we are totally out of step with the rest of the world, is our insistence on retaining the former British system of measuring weight, distance, speed, capacity, and area. The whole world of technology is now metric, including the U.S. military, but we persist in teaching inches, yards, miles, ounces, pounds, pecks, quarts, and acres. A few years ago, a NASA satellite (the Mars Climate Orbiter) was sent up to orbit Mars and transmit readings to help our understanding of that planet's geological history. The design and construction of the craft were divided between the spacecraft team at Lockheed Martin, in Denver, CO, and the flight team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, CA. Unfortunately, the Denver team provided navigation commands in U.S. units, although NASA converted to metric units almost a decade earlier, while the Pasadena team worked with metric specifications. Nobody noticed the conflict until the satellite was commanded to move into its desired orbital path, at which point it dropped too low into the atmosphere, overheating the engine and causing the craft to continue beyond Mars into space, where it could now be orbiting the sun. Those people were real rocket scientists, not "dumb teen students."

As a writer, editor, and photographer now retired after 15 years at AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories, I learned quickly that some very learned scientists and engineers lose sight of basics. One correction I've had to make (and I am certainly not a mathematician) is to remind them that a statement like "the transistor is a thousand times smaller than a human hair" is mathematically incorrect, since "times" is a preposition denoting multiplication while the comparison describes subtraction. The phrase was usually changed to "the transistor is smaller than a human hair by a factor of a thousand times" or "a human hair is a thousand times larger than the transistor."

ttlthor Loc: Grapevine, Texas

I stand corrected. Or, should I say, I sit corrected as, technically, I'm not standing? :oops:

Accelerator

[quote=Old Grey Beard]Mentally unstable, an extremist, or a conspiracy theorist, is what anyone that thinks with any degree of common sense, and seeks the truth rather than believe the MSM is labeled.[/quote

Dag Nab It ! busted again. Being a conspiracy theorist just keeps getting harder and harder. I once helped the husband of a friend move some things. He is a high end attorney in Manhattan. He later called her and told her he had no doubt that I was a serious conspiracy theorist. I promptly said "I resemble that remark. Thank you." And Thank You Grey Beard of Old.!

Wink44 Loc: Montgomery AL

I couldn't disagree more-- I taught both university and junior college classes as an adjunct. The papers submitted and written essay exam responses simply defied belief as concerned incorrect grammar, spelling and lack of logic or meaningful thought; likewise the students' collective lack of knowledge of even basic history. My experience and opinion were shared openly by other instructors in several different school and university settings over a period of several years. I suggest you take the time to seek out teachers and professors in your area, and ask them for their opinions. I would be most surprised if their experience differed significantly from mine and that of other instructors I still converse with regarding this problem.

lateron Loc: Yorkshire, England