I think that I just might have stumbled onto where our educational system went off the tracks. It was with our colleges and universities. Now just how can what happened in our colleges have such a negative impact on our k-12 education? Think of what just happened in the real estate market. First we had a feeding frenzy and then a total melt down. The real estate problem was the direct result of voters giving themselves loans on homes they could not afford. Seemed like a good idea for everyone to have a fine home. We all wanted a free lunch and you know how that type of thing ends up. Now, education. We all wanted our kids to go to college. It was the responsible thing for our parents to want for their kids and we did the same thing with our kids. The problem is that we did it the same way that we did the real estate thing. We changed the rules so that more kids could go to college. Sounds good so far?
What we did was to dumb down our colleges and we all know that shit runs down hill and that means to our k-12 schools. If our parents want us to go to college and don't make any other specific demands, we will find the easiest way to get the job done. Knowing that our colleges have been dumbed down and simple minded majors added, all we have to do is the minimum in k-12 knowing that we can still get into college. For many college majors, the only prerequisite is that you graduated from a high school. The college does not care what classes you took in high school since many will be repeated in college. You might have to get good grades in high school, but that is taken care of by "grade inflation". Have you noticed how many bumper stickers you see saying that, "my kid is on the honor roll"? I saw one that said, "my dog is smarter than your kid on the honor roll". I feel this latter one is very true. How can 75% of our kids be on the honor roll with only 60% even graduated from high school?
It is clear that our kids are among the dumbest in the world with it comes to reading, science and math and we need to do something about it. Here is my solution. In most college majors, there are a set of classes that all majors have to take. These are like English, History and Philosophy. Notice that none of these required classes are very hard or require any prerequisite. My solution is that all majors would have to take Physics, Chemistry and Math thru calculus. These are the hard classes that most of our dumb kids don't want to take. If we want smarter kids, we have to start making all college majors more difficult and stress math and science like all other counties in the world do.
What would happen is that at least 50% of our kids could not get in or stay in college. This would mean that we could cut the cost of higher education and at the same time make tuition much less for those who were qualified. You know the old expression, "bad money drives out good"? It is the same way with education. When we let our kids go to college and take bull shit majors and classes, it removes any incentive to work hard and be competitive. Some parents feel that their kids need, "the college experience". Exactly what is that? Do they need a period after high school where they can be more irresponsible than they were in high school? When I look back at my own college days, I know a lot of students who were in these bull shit majors who seemed to be having a very good time. In engineering and the sciences, it was much different. Do you think that is the reason that we have been going down as a nation in terms of engineering graduations since 1986? Our dumb kids saw that engineering was a lot more work and that bull shit majors were a lot easier and seemed to count just as much as a more difficult major with their parents and society. Well, they seem to have gotten their wish. The USA can't pay it bills and the main reason is that our citizens are on average some of the dumbest in the world. We know that all countries in the world have access to this data on education and they know that they are smarter than we are. How much real respect do you think they have for us? Not much. How much respect to do you have for a bum on the street? Look in the mirror, it is the same for us.
We have to change our colleges first and then our k-12 schools. Seems a strange way to solve the problem, but I feel it is the right way. As side benefit is that it would also get rid of many of our dumb teachers at the same time. We know that at least 50% of our k-12 teachers could not graduate college if our colleges had any real standards.
Think about it.
