…must die.
I was reasonably well educated in the 60s and early 70s, but I was in one of the best educational systems in the country at the time, thanks to Charles Stewart Mott, and even then, I could see that a lot of my cohorts weren’t doing that well.
It’s gotten much worse.
In 1979, when the Department of Education was forced on us, the US’ education system was #1 in the world.
Today after 46 years of their ‘expertise’ the system is rated as #49
Well there was “New Math”. Which victimized me starting in 5th Grade right up until 7th Grade when our newly hired math/science teacher threw it all out! Disgusted by the fact that NONE of the students in his class could do math with fractions. Instead we’d been spending 2 years in Grade & Jr. High doing division using factors of 10 with remainders of the divisor and studying Set Theory and Venn Diagrams. I could tell you all about unions and intersections, even addition with non-base 10 numbers, and what a null-set was. But ask me to mix antifreeze of a specific percentage from alcohol and water? Forget it!
Nor could we do division of fractional numbers in decimal representation. Kinda handy when dealing with money. Of course if only we could get the US Mint to make coinage in the denominations of the divisors in our math problems, then we’d have been all set!
Yeah, I remember that, too. Fortunately, I’d learned how to do fractions before they started to torture us with that.
As was once said by a famous musical philosopher: “It’s the process that matters not the final answer.”
Yeah, I suffered through new math in first and second grades, I think. Fortunately it didn’t last long
Maybe that was before my time (grade school in the 60s)–just a week or two of alternate bases, which I’d already learned from the World Book Encyclopedia–but otherwise pretty much traditional stuff. Even so, the state apparently had gotten tired of people graduating high school without knowing decimals and fractions and had added a math proficiency exam requirement about the time I graduated.
The corruption goes much deeper than the teachers. Last I checked it was over $17K per student per year in costs K-12. Obviously most of that doesn’t make it to the classrooms. Otherwise one wouldn’t hear of teachers buying student supplies with their own money. And running constant fund raisers for various activities.
As for education quality decades back, it is now 50 years since I p[assed a GED before finishing any high school night classes. That would not be possible if the test represented real education.
So defunding the public schools seems like a possible win.
My 6th grade teacher was complaining that too many parents regarded public education as free baby sitting, and that he’d be better paid if he were a baby sitter. That was around 1969.
Anyway, it’s going to be hard to convince people to give up free baby sitting.