…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.”