Dumbing Down Denied (updated 28apr24)

George Rebane

For years RR and its more enlightened readers have lamented and documented the degradation of our public schools and also of our higher educational institutions.  Over the last half century this decline has been relentless and extensively reported as anti-American socialists of all shades adopted policies and curricula designed to produce a workforce of diminishing value to our employers and benefit to our society.

Today with the woke movement the state of our education has reached new depths of idiocy.  Based on utter nonsense, school curricula are being removed, downgraded, restructured in order to eliminate what the Left says is our country’s ‘structural racism’ promoted by cadres of ‘white supremacists’.  These are identified primarily as whites of European descent who are now irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, …, the list goes on.

Apropos to this I refer to the latest op-ed, ‘Any learning loss recovery at local high schools?’, by my sweetie-pie Jo Ann.  Her piece in the 22mar24 Union (here) cited chapter and verse of the dismal numbers that document the downfall of our local public education system.  Since its publication the column has drawn a continuous stream of ire from our local leftwing loonies who also demonstrate their lack of prowess with the written word.  The initial criticisms were of Jo Ann’s purported attack on the incompetence of the teachers.  She did not single out teachers, but identifying the public school districts as part of the culprits hit close to home, and brought out the defense of the obviously weak component of our public education.  In that me thinks their ample protests are revealingly welcome.

To date these rebuttals have come in the form of the newspaper’s Other Voices columns, Hits & Misses entries, and Letters to the Editor.  This morning I was reminded of the Left’s desperate denial of this travesty by yet another letter to the editor, this time by one of our more prominent local Marxist worthies (here).  This time the criticism was not of Jo Ann’s quoted performance statistics, or of their perceived unfair umbrage against teachers, but the accusation that only rabid rightwing MAGA Republicans would dare point out such a devastating and divisive national deficiency.  The politically correct response to this ongoing educational tragedy and its long term impact on our workforce should instead be a prudent silence.

[28apr24 update]  I note the almost complete lack of interest in the dumbing down of the nation’s electorate.  It seems as if no one cares or is aware that it all starts with an ignorant horde of voters as our Founders feared and Bryan Caplan -The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (here) - pointed out several years ago and RR has argued forever.  It is such voters who believe the politicians’ bullshit about the economy, how government can spend money better that they can, and how the rich are taking it away from the poor.  And perusing the news confirms that people really like to focus on the knock-on and silly ephemeral impacts of national dumbth.  I suppose the readers of this little blog just reflect the country’s real interests.

Comments

[scenes]

I was just considering dumbing-down of testing and teaching over time. Naturally, the Wine Karens running the country know what the problem is (and was), the white patriarchy, but ignoring them for a moment, I wonder how tied together it all is with this statistic:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/

My gut tells me that you have to simplify high school in order to achieve higher graduation rates. No doubt the Randi Weingartens of the world are using it all as a screen for achieving social/political ends...besides, you get the extra-special goodness of using the better kids to drag up the shitty kids (and ignoring the converse effect)...but if you reach for a metric, the Iron Laws of Unintended Consequences are bound to edge their way in.

As a side note, if you are going to triple the college graduation rate since 1980, you probably need to invent beaucoup bogus degrees with lower standards.

[Gregory]

Statista is an interesting site:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/300418/us-college-ranking-sat-act-score/

[Don Bessee]

At every turn the chose wrong -

EXCLUSIVEAmerica's fight to save handwriting from extinction as IQs begin to fall for first time ever and teachers warn some 20-year-olds can't sign checks anymore
Americans reported they hadn't written a note or personal letter in five years
People are having a hard time reading their own and others' handwriting
Studies show writing can increase the brain's cognitive abilities

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13273363/handwriting-extinction-IQs-begin-fall.html

;-)

[scenes]

"Studies show writing can increase the brain's cognitive abilities"

There's been a lot of studies on that one for years.

It doesn't matter. Some teacher/administrator/school board somewhere is going to buy a shit-ton of laptops and single-handedly make that urban high school smarter and more well-behaved by having the youths make PowerPoint presentations. For one thing, it appears that school perfessionals got a bit of instant status by doing lots of handwaving about computers and kids and girls-who-code and whatnot.

It just occurred to me that you can tell just how much bullshit there is in an idea by looking at the growth of non-profits in that area. Outside of animal shelters, which naturally take advantage of the human tendency to view puppies and kittens as babies, it's probably not a bad approximation for nonsense. There's still work involved in non-useful work but then, pimpin' ain't easy.