The Results Are In: America Is Dumb and on the Road to Getting DumberFirst, allowing the government schools to "educate" your children is a form of child-abuse, unless you get involved heavily to take up the slack and correct the errors. Second, the likes of Jacoby are also maleducated in the basics of scientific limitations and boundaries to knowledge, which makes for a religion of secularist Scientism and Atheism being taught in government schools. Parental involvement is the only solution... But we are several generations into the maleducation of Americans, so parents might no longer have the ability to guide their children intellectually. What to do?
"America remains a scientifically ignorant nation for two reasons: the resurgence of fundamentalist religion during the past 40 years, and secondly, the low level of science education in American elementary and secondary schools, as well as many tertiary colleges.
While television ratings for Cosmos may have stunned media critics and your average fundamentalist, “Americans continue to poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth.”
This week, Gallup released a poll showing 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. Last week, the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire published a study showing only 28 percent of Tea Party Republicans trust scientists.
It gets worse. More than two-thirds of Americans, according to surveys conducted for the National Science Foundation, are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of 10 don’t understand radiation and what it can do the human body, while one in five adult Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.
A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.
“This level of scientific illiteracy provides fertile soil for political appeals based on sheer ignorance,” writes Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason. "
There comes a time in every social history to throw off the onerous power of totalitarians in charge. Sometimes it is peacefully done, sometimes violence is necessary. We are at the cusp, the threshold, of losing the opportunity for peaceful retrieval of civil liberties and truthful education for literate and fully aware citizens.
9 comments:
The U.S. Dept. of Education was re-established in 1979. (It was originally established in 1867, but then downgraded to an Office in 1868.) Since its recent reincarnation, the educational level of graduates from the public schools at all levels has declined precipitously (i.e., the last 40 years). Perhaps it is time for the Leftist educational ignorati to take responsibility for the results that they have worked so tirelessly within the education establishment to achieve. They infest the educational institutions from kindergarten through post-graduate school. They have pushed their agenda at every opportunity, to the detriment of the students. Yet, ignorance still remains a major and increasingly alarming problem. Correlation does not imply causation; perhaps, the rise in fundamentalist religious movements is in direct opposition to the agenda of the Leftists.
Dr. Thomas Sowell has written may columns on the decline in education at all levels. It is fascinating that the Leftists continue to clamor for more money for "education," yet seem oblivious to the documented fact that more money tossed into the educational furnace is not causing a corresponding rise in anyone's intellectual temperature. It is also fascinating that when faced with a choice between more money for members of educational unions or better education for the students, the teachers' unions (dominated by Leftist policies) always come down in favor of the unions.
Consider a few of his columns (among so many):
Are We Serious About Education?
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell081313.php3#.U5ScS_mwJcQ
The ‘Education’ Mantra
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell051011.php3#.U5SeqPmwJcQ
The Role of 'Educators'
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell010813.php3#.U5SdzfmwJcQ
Education: Then and now
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell011206.asp
Spinning education
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell102903.asp
The education bill
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell012302.asp
Education or incitement?
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell032901.asp
The politics of education
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell082900.asp
After reading that small sample, then come back and try to convince me (with a straight face) that the "reason' for the declining educational level of American students is "fundamentalist religion."
Until control of the academy is wrested away from these purveyors of Leftist political correctness over real education, the results will only get worse over time. If the Leftists remain established and in control of the educational institutions, NOTHING WILL CHANGE, except for ever-increasing absorption of the Leftist policies and madness into mainstream society.
All of Dr. Sowell's columns are highly recommended!!
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/
The Vision of the Anointed
Dr. Thomas Sowell
“The great ideological crusades of twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields—from the eugenics movement of the early decades of the century to the environmentalism of the later decades, not to mention the welfare state, socialism, communism, Keynesian economics, and medical, nuclear, and automotive safety. What these highly disparate crusades have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government. Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia during the twentieth century, several key elements have been common to most of them:
1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.
…
“The prevailing vision of our era is long overdue for a critical re-examination—or, for many, a first examination. This vision so permeates the media and academia, and has made such major inroads into the religious community, that many grow old to adulthood unaware that there is any other way of looking at things, or that evidence might be relevant to checking out the sweeping assumptions of so-called “thinking people.” Many of these “thinking people” could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the critical insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes.”
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.
"Ever learning, but never able to come to a knowledge of saving truth..."
the resurgence of fundamentalist religion during the past 40 years,
Are they out of their minds? The resurgence of fundamentalist religion is what the school system, with their own army of litigious mercenaries in the ACLU (what I call the Anti-Christian Litigation Unit) who have been squashing any attempt to do what was completely normal 30 years go, i.e. pray before an assembly, is blaming for their complete failure? I shouldn't be surprised. These morons are pathologically incapable of self-evaluation.
Robert your posts are very well articulated and true. My I offer, however that the fallacy is that correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation, unless that causation can be drawn, and I think, as you have elucidated, it can. The Department of Education with its statist-bent ideology, shares the lion's share of the blame in causing colossal ignorance to flourish from K through adult hood.
When I discuss with people why Obama can get elected twice, I just remind them that every four years more people who know better disappear from the planet while another 4 batches of High School seniors march ignorantly to the polls, their heads full of leftist propaganda, to replace them.
It used to be said that if, when young, one is not liberal, then one has no heart; but if, attaining age, that one is not conservative, then one has no brain.
When schools teach that blue ribbons are to be had by everyone because each person is so special just for existing - but no one is more special than the others, that is communism training for being equalized.
When schools punish with police and suspension those who chew a pop tart into a gun shape, that is totalitarian training for submission to stupidity.
When schools pass out condoms and abortion literature, that is training for amoral licentious libertinism and the devaluing of humans.
There now exist homeschool cooperatives which serve as de facto alternative schools. I'll be interested to see the quality of the individuals who emerge from these, since homeschooling is already empirically far superior in all categories to government schooling. There are links to two studies showing this, in the right hand column.
It seems to me their perception of Americans not being scientifically inclined so much anymore goes hand in hand with scientists who are liars and pushing obviously false propaganda.
My own experience has been that I'm labeled 'ignorant' when I refuse to accept a scientist's conclusion. Apparently scientists are some sort of holy men, immune to temptation AND error. And if you disagree, so much the worse for you, eh?
That infallibility is what tells me an agenda that means us no good is what's driving them.
Steven,
That is exactly what they are. They are the priesthood of secular Humanism, but only if their doctrine doesn't stray from the political appointed boundaries. Once you've dared challenge that, then you are persona non grata. A heretic if you will.
A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.
And of course they're implying the bible's to blame.Unless the biology text books teach christianity,the reason for americans lack of science knowledge are from other sources.
For at least 40 years, the USA has increasingly gone away from a moral code based on Judeo-Christian values and toward the Atheo-Leftist moral void. The consequences are becoming more evident every day, from a President and his administration who will lie and scheme on any subject, to media executives and personnel who with rabid partisanship will cover and lie for them, to so-called "scientists" (actually scientismists) who will falsify data or destroy data that does not suggest, much less support their computer model predictions of impending doom, to teachers who indoctrinate their ideology into their students rather than teach and educate, to parents who do not care about their children's education as much as they do about the Kardashians' latest attempts to remain in the limelight. The "dumbing down" process is inevitable in a society which cannot bring itself to make ANY judgement of right or wrong on any topic, except to wring its hands over being "judgmental" (i.e., condemning immoral acts as immoral acts, regardless of who is committing them.
"What difference, at this point, does it make?" - Hillary Rodham Clinton
To the majority of ignorant Americans, not much, if any at all. Consequently, the ever increasing rapid decline will continue until the sudden stop at the end of the moral free-fall.
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