Yes, the maleducational system, from K through grad school, is the biggest danger to the Republic. It’s been almost forty years since that report that said that if a foreign nation had imposed it on us, it would be considered an act of war. It’s only gotten worse.
5 thoughts on “Dysfunctional Education”
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I pretty clearly remember the moment it happened to my school system in Prince William County, Virginia. It was between the 6th and 7th grades for me (so Fall of 1962). Suddenly, instead of Arithmetic, we had “New Math,” and all the non-STEM subjects other than things like PE became something called “Block,” where teachers were allowed to concentrate on whatever they wanted, across a broad range of “social studies” that included English and History. For whatever reason, that year my grades crashed and never recovered. And my friends who did succeed in this new environment went away to college five years later, and came home startlingly changed. I didn’t go to college, so was mystified. How does a boy who had an “AuH2O64” bumper sticker on his locker wind up gibbering about “the liberal hippie ethic” for the rest of his life? Did his meal plan include mind control drugs or something?
I grew up in St. Louis County, Missouri, and had been an excellent student in mathematics. Because of that, I was selected for a special summer session in 1961 where they were going to try out New Math on us (and get the teachers working on it). By the end of that session, I was unable to learn any more math until one particular teacher connected with me during the last half of my junior year of high school, in 1971. It was a mighty struggle from then on, but I managed to get into engineering school, and would up with a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue.
I have studied and practiced mathematics almost every day ever since, getting comfortable in one area after another, then repeating. It has been the only way I could remain proficient enough to work in the engineering fields that I do. That, and I enjoy those occasions when I get that little rush that accompanies a sudden understanding of a previously arcane concept. If it hadn’t been for that one high school teacher, the destruction wrought by the New Math would have made my life turn out entirely different from the way it has.
No teacher rescued me, either from New Math or “Block,” but I had one thing going for me: by the time I reached 4th grade (would have been 1960, so just before the change), I was reading testably on a adult level, andf I guess they couldn’t take that away from me. Curiously, when I got into computing in the late 1970s, stuff I remembered from Old Arithmetic (like modulo) popped back up. I learned Boolean algebra by accident, while reading some book or another.
Related: An outstanding essay at Quillette on the late Napoleon Chagnon.
The quest for knowledge of mankind has in many respects become unrecognizable in the field that now calls itself anthropology. According to Chagnon, we’ve entered a period of “darkness in cultural anthropology.” With his passing, anthropology has become darker still.
Gone at 81, a huge loss for all humanity. Rest in peace.
Fascinating article, thanks for the link.