Didn’t get the chance to mention these items that all seemed to speak to a single issue. The first was a letter by a Laura Grafton from Michigan in USA Today (yesterday). While it’s message was about lowering the drinking age, I caught this:
* Although the United States grants all the other rights and responsibilities of citizenship to 18- to 20-year-olds, it denies them the right to drink. Should the government have a right to pick and choose citizens’ rights?
This lady just has not been given an adequate educational background. By definition, a right cannot be either given or taken away by government. Our Founding Fathers understood that, and created the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that enumerated basic, fundamental set of rights; emanating from God, they are not to be violated or abridged.
Once again, a citizen gets it wrong, confusing rights with privileges. Free Speech is a right, Freedom of Assembly is a right; Driving is a privilege and so is drinking. Last I knew, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is rather silent on the issues of either of the two.
Why do I bring up this nit-picking? This is yet another case of poor civics training; trying to make a case of which is what amongst the general public does not make for good policy understakings. Not understanding fundamentals of how our society is structured and ordered is a recipe for disaster. Yet, early to mid-last century, this would not be much of an issue as Civics was taught.
And we hear from the Dems that all kinds of things are a right – healthcare being the latest national one in the news and college for all (if one is to believe Edwards) another. One would have thought that if it were that important, wouldn’t the Founding Fathers have written about both?
And this doesn’t help much either in making me feel that our educational system is working all that well either:
U.S. students do worse in science and math
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. students are lagging behind their peers in other countries in science and math, test results out Tuesday show.
It gets worse…
The test, the Program for International Student Assessment, was given to 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries last year. It focused on science but also included a math portion.
The 30 countries, including the United States, make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs the international test.
The average scores for U.S. students were lower than the average scores for the group as a whole.
Yet, we spend far more per student than any other country. And the Dems wish us to spend more, and put more kids (mandatory pre-kindergarten) into what I consider a failing system. Yet, what is it buying us? And yes, I am asking for an ROI!
U.S. students also had an average science score that was lower than the average score in 16 other OECD countries. In math, U.S. students did even worse — posting an average score that was lower than the average in 23 of the other leading industrialized countries.
Finland’s 15-year-olds did the best on the science test, followed by students in Hong Kong and Canada. Students in Finland, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong were the top performers in math.
And why do you think this is so? Let’s add some gas to the fire, shall we? In the same issue of USA Today was this for a lead Opinion (by Jonah Goldberg, one of my favorite columnists). It takes a stab at what seems to pass for the most important lesson that schools seem to have embraced:
The education elite have redefined what it means to be ‘educated.’ If a child is ignorant of facts, dates and figures, no problem. The emphasis now is on self-esteem and ‘just being you.’ That’s much easier than learning.
While parents and politicians have been pounding the table demanding greater academic performance in the "Three R’s," social scientists, psychologists and education bureaucrats have slowly, but ingeniously reframed the battle onto more favorable turf. Rather than compete head-to-head in a battle we cannot win, these dedicated teachers and administrators have elevated the importance of the one area where no country can compete with us: Self-esteem.
Nearly 25 years ago, the Reagan administration released "A Nation At Risk," a scathing indictment of the educational system, proclaiming, "If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
25 years – how times fly. Plenty of time to watch overall test scores fall.
And what seems to be the answer by the educational complex? Let’s look at what they are NOT doing. Review and contrast what has been happening in the manufacturing sector. Faced with increased competition globally, it said that the "old ways" were a losing proposition. It embraced Six Sigma and other systems to weed out poor manufacturing processes and statistically proving best of breed ways to install quality into products. It stopped pointing the finger at others and started pointing it at itself.
Yet, overall in this country, it seems that the finger is yet not pointing inward. We hear "we need more money!". We hear "Just give us more time!".
I also hear "competition is nasty" for kids. Heck, the unions are against competition between teachers too (like almost all unions – they hurt their best and subsidize the worst – at taxpayer cost). I keep hearing that the parents are at fault; the School Board is at fault. I see the ACLU removing authority from Principals and removing higher standards for kids to achieve (oops, back to competition again!).
Ask yourself – in the private sector, when a company’s product or service is found to be sub-par, consumers vote with their dollars and that company either gets it act together or exits, stage left. In the private sector, how many times have you seen a company say "give us more for our product and then we will improve?", and you bought into it? Yes, failing companies can do bankruptcy, but that can only be done just so many times before the plug is pulled.
Yet, the teacher unions keep saying that over and over – just give us more money and we will fix it. I have yet to hear a good reason why we should, based on the poor results we have seen.
A quarter century after we declared war on mediocrity, some say it is time to face a painful truth: Mediocrity won. Now it’s time to cut our losses and admit that this battle is lost.
[snip]
This was the brilliant insight of America’s educational industrial complex, which has worked tirelessly to make our kids think the most of themselves regardless of their accomplishments.
[snip]
I remember during my own childhood how Saturday morning cartoons were punctuated with public service announcements informing me that "the most important person in the whole wide world is you." Looking at me today, who can deny the basic truth of these ads?
More broadly, America’s educational elite has built on this down payment of unqualified self-regard by redefining what it means to be educated. Rather than be educated about meaningless stuff — dates, names, facts, figures and other trivia — these selfless patriots have committed to drilling it into kids that no matter how "stupid" or "ignorant" they are on paper, in the real world they are brilliant and wonderful.
The payoff is all around us.
A study earlier this year titled "Egos Inflating Over Time," led by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, found that — you guessed it (Good for you!) — egos are inflating over time. They concluded that America’s youth are the most self-absorbed since we began testing.
Confirmation of Twenge’s findings abound. CBS’ 60 Minutes profiled the so-called Generation Y, which is so fond of itself that employers cannot keep up. These new employees demand to be told how wonderful they are. They want to hear that nobody has ever photocopied better. They want a gold star for getting coffee. This demonstrates that our new educational regimen is showing real-world results. Teach a kid that merely having a pulse is a major accomplishment, and he’ll carry that lesson for the rest of his life. Teach him how to do trigonometry, and he’ll forget it before his Xbox even warms up.
[snip]
A recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal decries the campaign to get rid of "thought competition." This isn’t, as I had imagined, where kids spend math class daydreaming they are, say, Klingons endlessly challenging each other to fights to the death. Rather, it is where students compete to see who is best at math or writing.
We must resist such backsliding. As one administrator said in the piece, "We don’t want kids to compete individually, put themselves in vulnerable positions as individuals." Exactly so. Promoting academic competition only misleads our students into thinking that hard work and dedication pay off.
Is it fair to state, amidst story after story of school systems no longer supporting the ideal valedictorian as that might hurt others feelings, that the idea of competition is actively being squelched by the educational elite. Heck, in my own town, a School Board member floated the idea that anyone trying out for a Varsity sports team shouldn’t be cut!
Only by pressing our advantages can we remain No. 1. "Objective" criteria used by our competitors are self-evidently illegitimate because they make our kids feel bad.
We need to make each and every child such a bundle of unalloyed self-regard that together they become black holes of self-esteem, the centers not only of their own worlds but of the entire universe, from which no self-criticism can escape.
