Lack of Education

There is a test called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery or ASVAB. The test is given to see what jobs someone can hold in the military. When I was in high school every man had to take it in his senior year. I don't know if it is mandatory anymore as there is no draft.

The ASVAB is a pretty simple test and I am guessing many of my American readers have taken the test. I wish to be fair in what I am about to say. When I took the test I scored in the top 1 percent. That is not why I think the test is easy nor related to my coming comments.

This year one in four high school graduates failed to get a score high enough to join the military. This is pitiful. This is worse than pitiful. We are indeed failing to teach anything in school. I do not compare others to myself, I am looking at the passing rates from the past.

Why can't high school graduates pass a basic test? Simple answer, they don't know the basics and get passed not knowing much. Prior to the Vietnam war kids were taught the basics in school and more. A high school graduate could write a paragraph and a report. You cannot twitter a report.

While in college I was a teaching assistant for a class in political science. The class was designed for business majors. I graded their exams and was appalled by what I saw. In my opinion one quarter of the students should have been failed. Some of the exams I read indicated illiteracy.

Over the last 40 years I have witnessed a continual degradation of students abilities. There are still smart kids, problem is the others are allowed to not learn. Over the same period we have seen numerous attempts to teach kids better and all have worked less well.

The media responds with a blathering mess of finger pointing. I don't buy any of it. We search for solutions and cant seem to find any. Here is a solution, teach kids the way we used to. Teach the basics first instead of focusing on opinions. Make them write a short paper every week and go over their mistakes. Yes, mistakes.

In the last 20 years there has been a push to focus on what kids have done well. In school every kid would get an award so that their egos would not be deflated. We have become a Narcissistic culture that is unwilling to be corrected. In that situation fewer and fewer learn. We learn from mistakes; but, only if they are pointed out and we are willing to see that we can still improve.

The beginning point in all learning is language. I cannot teach someone math or science or anything else if they do not have the vocabulary to learn it. Learning to use words with precision allows for deeper thought in every field. The next step is learning to put words together in a understandable manner. I am amazed at how many college graduates cannot write a simple document.

We were the richest nation in history and undermined ourselves by not teaching children to read and write well. I don't blame the teachers or the parents as much as I blame the methods the teachers were taught to use. Those methods failed.

We have raised a nation that wants leisure and comfort. Both need to be earned. When I talk to people who are under 30, most cannot tell me when World War I was or when the middle ages were. They have no world perspective and no understanding of the history of other nations. As G. Gordon Liddy told one person, "In the battle of wits you are unarmed."

One of the biggest mistakes that occurred was to grade on the curve. The normalization and comparison to the others that are uneducated. Another mistake is to have children do group projects. They need to know the basics before being graded as a group. Grading on group projects allows those who have not learned the basics to be hidden and holds back the best.

Schools are often paid in a way that prevents them from spending the time needed to teach students who don't get it off the bat. Schools often are paid based on how many students pass. The teachers therefore and the school system itself is rewarded for passing students rather than teaching them.

I know people who graduated high school and could not read. I mean they were functionally illiterate. Why is this acceptable? The current system teaches children who don't get it right off the bat to hide behind those who do. Worse yet, it teaches kids that do get it off the bat to look at those who don't as stupid. As the years progress the gap gets larger because those on the bottom never learned the basics so they cant learn the intermediate or advanced. Everyone can learn the basics if we spend the time to teach them.

The bar exam is given in every state. California and New York have traditionally had the lowest passage rates. As a consequence their attorneys tend to be better. Some states have over a 90% passage rate. Those states don't have enough attorneys so they pass just about everyone who graduates. This is pitiful.

An application has been developed that allows people to put their phone over foreign languages and it is shown in English (or whatever language you choose). The tower of Babel has risen again and we now can communicate without learning the languages of others. If you cannot read you own language an application will translate what is written into verbal communication. Sounds great but it has consequences. Why bother learning another language if you don't have to. Yet the writing doesn't give the context, learning a language requires that you learn about a culture.

As we rely more and more on technology to think for us, we become less able to think. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. What happens when the technology fails? Then we enter a new dark age.

How many stories have you read about people who were using GPS and drove off the road because the GPS was wrong. They relied on the technology and ignored what their eyes told them. There are now people seriously talking about melding technology with humans, the Transhumanists. I have written about this before.

We don't live in the Matrix yet; but, we are creating it. We are willingly relying on technology to make our decisions. With the advent of cloud computing this will only increase and the conformity of thought will be oppressive. We need to move away from simplicity and comfort and seek the strenuous life. We grow more from strenuous learning than we do from varied experience.

Ringo Starr - It Don't Come Easy

UPDATE:

After writing this post I came across a video saying what has happened to the educational system. I don't agree with all of what he says; but, the video brings up some good points. I still have not decided what I think about the fluoride debate so I will not comment on what he says about that at present.

This second video is in direct contradiction to what I have written. This famous educator wants us to go even further down the road that we have travelled. If you watch the video you will find that he declares that 98% of all children are geniuses who are dumbed down by schools. Nope, it might feel nice to believe that every child is a genius but they are not.

If we teach people that are below average that they are geniuses who are being held back then they don't bother trying to be the best they can be. The educator proposes that copying and reading the answers rather than learning them is a better way. This is also societal poison. It is teaching people that they cannot learn and should follow those who did. It is teaching to not think for yourself.

We are all born with a set level of ability; but, what we do with that ability determines how far we can go. The educators answer is to teach people by grouping them not according to age; but, according to where they are in their learning. Put the dumb with the dumb and the smart with the smart. That leads to little if any learning on the lower end and conformity in thought.

Ayn Rand feared a world where the best and the brightest were held back to prevent anyone from excelling. I fear a world where the average and below are kept apart from those who do know better. We want people to try harder not to try less.

The educator wants to teach that there are no answers only unlimited possibilities, this is garbage and is what we see in the educational system now. People are not taught to seek the truth and all answers are considered equally valid. All are not equally valid. By refusing to ask the questions properly all answers cease to be valid at all.

The educator attempts in the beginning of the video to downgrade the value of a traditional education. He does this by saying that in the past we were taught that if we learned in school, worked hard and got a college degree then we would get a job. He says this is wrong because there is no guarantee of getting a good job. This is garbage that has been spread for the last two decades.

The reason we should study hard is so that we can LEARN. If we learn then we are less easily led and are more likely to come to a greater understanding. Education is not primarily about getting a job, it is so that we can understand our life and our experiences in a better context.

The teaching of relativism is what has completed the destruction of learning. All knowledge has value including geography, history (with dates but not the focus) and the aberrant and amazing. We do live in an amazing world and we don't teach that. We are capable of so much more than we do. We are capable of greatness, individual success, the achievement of what we can get out of ourselves.

We are trained that the goal in life is to retire and take things easy. We are trained to use the least amount of effort to get the most amount of reward. This is wrong, the goal should not be the reward the goal should be to push ourselves as far as we can and then to share what we have learned with others.

How can we excel as a nation if we fail as individuals? How can we understand the complexities of the world if we don't bother to learn the basics. We should learn not because it is easy but because it is hard. We should learn because otherwise we allow ourselves to be marginalized. We should attempt to understand our world because we can then understand our place in it.

We are taught that there is no God, we live and we die and we don't matter to the universe. After telling kids that enough the logical conclusion they come to is that they should seek out all the experience that they can. This is a simple and foolish belief set. Experience is a distraction from growth. Growth is the goal.