Unless you are stuck in a 1950′s Beaver Cleaver world you already know that are kids are growing up to be idiots. At least in comparison to other kids across the planet. A lot of people have been telling us that for years, and despite No Child Left Behind, things aren’t getting better any time soon.
Need the numbers? Take six minutes out of your day to look at this:
The funny thing is I lost about half of you when I said the video ran six minutes. The average attention span of an adult blog reader is less than a minute. Sad, because seldom does any conversation that has merit take less than one minute.
Part of the problem with our education system is that we have cut the balls off of our teachers. Back in the day if a kid didn’t act right in class the teacher would lay the wood on their ass in front of the entire class. Pain and humiliation are great tools to gain correct behavior with children. The best teachers were always the ones that were the hardest. The ones that tried to be “cool” or never gave much homework were always class favorites, but turned out to be the worst for the students over the long haul.
While I’m all for local control versus Federal control something tells me that DC’s schools are going to have to hit bottom before they get better. The District can’t seem to get much of anything right so I doubt turning the schools over to the Council is a good idea. Still, at least Fenty seems to be trying which is a step up.
The latest educational fad is to let computers teach kids. But guess what sports fans, that shit’s not working. You see nothing will ever replace good old fashioned teaching. And all of these “new techniques” are only distractions. They keep the parents from noticing that the kids aren’t really learning anything and they make school administrators look like they are hot stuff for being on the leading edge of technology. But it is just a smoke screen for the fact that our kids are getting dumber.
We need to get back to teaching kids how to read for comprehension, write clear concise sentences and paragraphs, and be able to do long math without a calculator. Because all our kids know today is how to Google a few websites so they can cut and paste a report together the night before it is due. From what I can gather kids don’t learn how to outline papers until high school. I remember learning how to do that in the fourth grade. Yeah, they can use PowerPoint before they learn to write, but don’t ask a sixth grader to apply logic to a set of facts and form a conclusion that’s not listed in a drop down menu.
And that’s my rant on that.
