Just sad

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/

it is not just happening in rhode island.i have experienced the same thing down here in florida.

http://videosift.com/video/Charlotte-Iserbyt-Deliberate-Dumbing-Down-of-America

Let Charlotte Iserbyt tell you all about it. It is intentional and structured. They love monkeys who can't think critically or gather information for themselves.

This is by design. It is much easier to teach passive memorizing students than have them challenging ideas constantly, and being creative. Teachers who invigorate children's minds, challenging them and requiring of them creative independent thought are extremely important. They deserve to be paid very well, they deserve to be treated well.

I can remember the teachers who required me to think critically, I am who I am because of them.

This is happening in New Zealand. The govt call it National Standards... all schools results are now published in league tables and schools will soon be in competition with each other for students. The government is introducing performance pay for teachers based on test results so they will also be competing with one another. It's neoliberal bullshit and it's going to ruin education in this country.

It's nothing new...and I'm not sure the end results are deliberate. It is, however, the end result of conservative (or maybe just stupid) minds being placed in a position to make the rules. Simple minds produce simple answers (such as standardizes testing, instead of teaching to the individual), and simple answers to complex issues inevitably fail.

Absolutely. I don't believe there is a conspiracy of any sort, just idiots in government doing what idiots do. ("conservative" or otherwise) We need to solve this the same way we need to solve our other government related problems: Expose the truth with logic, reason, communication, and hard work.

The reality is always much more complex than one-sided narratives. (Since we're on the topic of critical thinking.)

In science and in business administration, decision-makers have an obligation to implement data-driven policies that can be shown in the data sets to be more effective than alternatives.

A voice crying in the wilderness mate, it's been going on here for quite some time-This woman regardless of which president she worked under is not about bullshit, sharp and schooled in the United States when 8th graders read Shakespeare and joined debate teams. Today, similar curriculum and standards are relegated to private schools and universities, the masses get seconds. It's evident in ANYONE who blames masses of simpletons on simply, "not trying hard enough" , ..etc etc blah blah

props for having the cahones to do this, most people let the dollar have the final say, it seems.

Costs will tend to go up and quality will tend to go down as long and as much as government is involved in the business of education.

Government mostly benefits from a passive conformist populace, they're a lot easier to rule over and exploit.

My PhD supervisor always advised it better not to make statements where you can say the opposite and it rings equally true.

Costs will tend to go up and quality will tend to go down as long and as much as profit-driven corporations are involved in the business of education.

Profit-driven corporations mostly benefit from a passive conformist populace, they're a lot easier to rule over and exploit.

Neither of these things is education, so why would we apply those standards to it? Critical thinking, creativity and emotional intelligence are not commodities and children are not an engineering problem or a chemical formula. Education is not linear, A+B!=C. As such, teachers are best placed to make decisions about the most effective method of education for their students. Technocrats and businessmen should not be setting education policy at the classroom level and we should not be attempting to convert the educational experience into a set of data points.

@btanner government IS a profit-driven corporation, they profit through taxes. You just forgot to add "profit-driven corporations that have a monopoly established by force", which is always the case for government, but not the case for most profit-driven corporations.

Instead of pointing out to me the irony of diametrically opposed views, I'd rather you make more refined distinctions than just whether a statement "rings true" or not.

OMFGROFLMMFAO!!

@Fletch you know what I meant, asshole

Federal mafia-funded government schools are an expensive racket. No competition means no need for failing schools to adopt successful schools' strategies.

If government schools weren't merely a dispensary for propaganda, fiberals wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail to keep Black kids in failing schools.

That's what people always say whenever you start making data-driven decisions, but then data-driven organizations outperform intuitive organizations.

Observe, for example, Google using a data-driven analysis of their large-scale hiring funnel in order to identify and correct biases that were resulting in false negatives for valuable female applicants.

There's nothing wrong with data-drive decisions - provided you know what data you need and can get it, and assuming your goals aren't so narrow they rule out any real innovation.

How do you grade education? Right now, the world over, the answer is - test scores. But what is it we really want from education? How well do an individual's test scores correllate with that individual's future success, whatever "success" is defined to mean? And how do you tell if you're grading the right things in the first place, or what your metrics in terms of individual or societal success would look like if the education system were radically different?

It's very hard to get hard data out of societies. Even optimistically, you'd have to form a hypothesis, test that hypothesis out on a group of children and observe their lives for several decades at minimum. In the mean time, politicians rely on the numbers they have, and that gives them the illusion they have the proper tools to make decisions, leaving less power with the actual experts - the teachers.

As an aside, I think it's absurd to sit a person down at a table for hours on end, listening and doing what they're told, and say that's a great way for most people to learn things, let alone become balanced adults.

As a father of a toddler, this scares the shit out of me. I've long disliked the established schooling system, and if this continues I'll be selling my kidneys for a spot at private schools.

As an anecdote, I did relatively poorly in testing but excel in the real world. Go figure.

@rebuilder

There's very good data showing test scores correlate with all socially valued outcomes.

That includes professional development, health outcomes (managing our personal health in the 21st century is complicated), lower divorce rates, lower rates of out-of-wedlock births, lower crime rates, etc.

I agree, however, that school is mostly useless. I encourage young people to get their highschool equivalency at age 12-16. Get a 4 year degree if you absolutely must, but do it as fast as possible. Aim to move to a tech hub like Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas to become a programmer, designer, marketer, bizdev guy etc.

Another Teacher Resigns Her Position Via YouTube has been added as a related post - related requested by Barseps on that post.