Faced with declining graduation rates from high schools, the drooling bureaucrats who run the schools have come up with a solution: Make it easier to graduate.
"Dumb it down", what a novel idea! So colleges effectively become the new high schools and so on.
I fail to see how cheapening whatever remains of the value of a high school diploma serves anyone.
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6 comments:
Didn't they do that to the SAT a few years ago?
Well, y'know, the goal is to keep the little darlings off the streets until hopefully they're old enough that they won't droll all over their pacifiers while trying to fill out employment applications. Or as was explained to me by one administrator, "so we send them home to get dumber every day? What good does that do? And then they're on the streets making trouble." Well, okay... so we bring them to school to get only a little *less* dumber every day?
It's all about babysitting, in the end. Which is sad as hell, because there surely has to be cheaper ways to babysit the little angels (bwahahaha!) than sit them in a schoolhouse for seven hours a day doing nothing of any real substance.
Oh yeah, about the teachers? Nobody seems to give a shit about children's educations, so by and large the teachers don't either. They're just putting in the time until retirement. If you learn, fine. If you don't learn, fine too, as long as you don't mess with them they're fine with that too. Teachers aren't paid enough to care. So they don't. Not after the first few years, anyhow.
- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
If they're just going to dumb down the test so most students can pass them, then why have tests? Tests should show deficiencies in learning, which in turn will be corrected.
The problem is that we aren't serious enough about education to pay for making it better. NCLB and these tests demonstrate that in different ways.
This is why I drink. Seriously.
I'm going to throw out a paranoid statement....It is easier for a government to control the populace where there is less education. The dumber the people, the easier it is for them to follow and believe the party line. Please, prove my theory wrong. Seriously.
Love this blog.
Yes, you're wrong, Allan. School boards here in the USA are local. What you are seeing is the education we want. Parents don't discipline their little heathens and don't want the schools to do so, either. Parents don't give their children any intellectual stimulation at home and don't want their children to get any at school, either, because if the little brats could think their way out of a cardboard box then the little brats might start doubting some of the "truths" they're told by their parents about invisible guys in the sky and crap like that. The old people who dominate school board elections don't want anything taught in the schools that weren't taught in the schools when they were kids 60 years ago, and want the exact same teaching methods used in the classroom that were used when they were kids 60 years ago, despite the fact that the world is much different now from what it was 60 years ago and if you look at the actual numbers, 60 years ago was even worse than today. If the school district has "those" kids in it -- you know, THOSE kids, brown, maybe speak one of them thare foreign gabbles instead of God's language, the language He wrote the Bible in, English? -- they don't want to pay taxes to educate "those" kids and underfund the schools in that district to the point where all the good teachers and administrators leave, which means that the schools fall apart because only the incompetent or the venal are left. And so on and so forth. The only conspiracy in the U S of A, my friend, is the conspiracy of STUPID. 50% of all people are below average, and average ain't so high.
Even authoritarian dictatorships don't crash their economic viability this way. See: South Korea prior to the democracy era, Singapore today, China today, etc. If someone conquered the U S of A they couldn't do a better job of destroying our schools than we've already done ourselves.
Yet... the majority of kids do leave school with some basic skills like reading and arithmetic. It IS possible to get an education in our schools. Just horribly frustrating both for the teachers and the kids, both of whom are trapped in a system designed by cretins (a.k.a. We The People) for generating cretins. We get the schools (as a nation) that we want -- and deserve. Alas.
- Badtux the Former Teacher Penguin
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