I'm currently reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, and four chapters in I have come to realize how much public K-12 education has completely failed my generation, the generation before mine (Boomers), and the subsequent generations that have come after.

Dewey may be singularly responsible for destroying education in modern America.

The thing that has become so evident to me in these early pages is that the mathematical, physics, and chemistry educations we received, along with foreign language, was woefully inadequate and far behind that of my grandparents and great-grandparents.

I took calculus, trig, and analytical geometry in high school. They taught us to regurgitate it, not to understand it. I could do the math, but I couldn't understand what it actually meant because they were incapable or unable to teach us that. They taught to the book, they taught to the test. I made A's, but didn't understand it.

Same with physics. I could regurgitate the formulas and do the math, but the application was never opened up to us.

Don't get me started on the abysmal failure of foreign language education in Texas K-12 in the 80's. You read about these scientists in the early 20th century, and they could all speak at least two languages, many could speak more. Even the American-born ones could.

Our public education system of today could never produce the type of learned individuals that were the ground-breaking scientists of the first half of the 20th century. For that matter, it can't produce the scientists and engineers who used slide-rules to do complex calculations during the space race and our missions to the moon.

Makes sense when you realize that education is way down the priority list for our "education system".

It's broken and the only way to fix it is to take out the federal government and put it back into local community hands. I've got a high school senior and 7th grader at home. I'm continually amazed at what the schools allow them to turn in and still pass. I thought my high school education 30 years ago was inadequate for was expected of me when I got into A&M. Looking at what my son knows now and has been taught compared to my own education at that level and am stunned at what they allow to receive A's and B's.

I fully believe our society is more dumb now than 100 years ago. The only thing saving us is readily available technology that we can fall back on like the internet and google searches. High school graduates that I interview barely have the reading and writing skills that I would consider a jr. high level. Their punctuation and grammar are abysmal in most cases.

Americans used to have pride in their ability to read and write. I was listening to a podcast on Texas History this past week and they mentioned the literacy rate of immigrating Americans into the Mexican state of Tejas was over 90%. My guess is our current literacy rate is probably less than 75%. The American immigrants took pride in reading and debating the topics of the day. Most people under 30 I encounter don't ready any more. They peruse social media and stupid Youtube videos.

The reason early 20th century scientists spoke multiple languages was so they could read research articles from Europe. Many were not English and our research was not as good as there's at the time.

It maybe shifting again but this time to the far east not west. Research in Europe is worse there than here

Ever look at tests they took over 100 years ago? Here is an example:

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA .. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina , KS - 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?

Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of N.A.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.

This board has told me vouchers are the fix.

Nobody is going to give you the education to overthrow them.

Compliance, group-think, relativism, and straight propaganda are the four pillars of public education.

On top of the obvious transfer of largesse to government workers.

The average 8th grader in a public school system in this country would probably score about 10% on this exam, if that...

LOL... 10 pages

10andBOUNCE said:

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This board has told me vouchers are the fix.

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They are better than what we have now, but not as good as pure privatization.

10andBOUNCE said:

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This Intelligent posters on this board have told me vouchers are the fix.

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FIFY

My grandmother was born in the 1920's. She had a seventh-grade education. She was literate, but her spelling wasn't great (she was embarrassed by that all of her life). She also managed multiple successful businesses, including keeping some of the books. I can't imagine anyone doing that today.

I will also say that public education mirrors society. Parents don't discipline their kids, much less let teachers or principals do it. Without basic discipline, the rest of the education process is disrupted.

I do agree that "advancements in pedagogy" definitely don't seem nearly as successful as the processes used for our grandparents and great grandparents.

Home schooling via "zoom" classrooms is becoming a big thing, if it's not already. Ex teachers of the iSD's are providing teaching instruction for the home schoolers via the internet. 2 days of the month you go to the teachers location to meet your fellow zoom classmates.

Quote:

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Public Education has been a dismal failure

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Oh I don't know... The millennials now know that "Heather has two Mommies" . This is a big success for our lefty friends.

You've got to fix the family at the same time to fix education.

I finally left public education (middle school) because the students were horribly behaved, there was no support from admin, and the parents didn't care.

And, initially, I didn't want to be a teacher. I had gotten a certification to move up in my former field.

But, I worked on being a better teacher, got excellent test scores, got teacher of the year, and enjoyed working with all my students (high school).

zooguy96 said:

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You've got to fix the family at the same time to fix education.

I left public education because the students were horribly behaved, there was no support from admin, and the parents didn't care.

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This.

Education mirrors society, Have a strong nuclear family, have strong emphasis on morality and ethics, have a strong APPRECIATION for our history, then you have better education.

Have a clownish society, built on everything being racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic, as well as allowing every "religious" view to be accepted and celebrate EXCEPT Christianity and Judaism, then add in a society that celebrates welfare over a family unit, then you get what you get today.

Wealthy white liberals send their kids to private schools or high-achieving public school. The 'at risk' groups attend the other schools. The achievement and wealth gap continue to grow for those groups. Mission accomplished!

If you get the chance, you should read the inscriptions in a yearbook from 100 years ago. Classmates wrote thoughtful, meaningful notes to each other. The grammar was perfect, the language expressive and well articulated, the thoughts coherent, and it was all personal and not cliched.

In the 1980s that has devolved to "stay cool, dude" and in present day down to "hags".

It's fascinating to think how far our collective knowledge has advanced while our individual intelligence has plummeted.

Pfft, it just needs more funding. That's all.

Fightin_Aggie said:

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The reason early 20th century scientists spoke multiple languages was so they could read research articles from Europe. Many were not English and our research was not as good as there's at the time.

It maybe shifting again but this time to the far east not west. Research in Europe is worse there than here

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Many scientists learned to speak English after coming to the US as a way to assimilate. We have brilliant minds working on amazing technologies, only we have those research departments tucked into industry more than we did before.

English is the desired language in scientific collaboration. Even those in Asian prefer it as they often want to practice it (they see it beneficial to their career).

Every article on the planet is available in every language imaginable from the moment of publication due to very good translation programs.

Multiple languages helps your brain process differently, but you hardly are left in the dust as an English speaker.

I agree with the OP.

For example, in math, I remember being taught the foil method on how to multiply two binomials, but I was not taught WHY. Same for thing for completing the square. It was just a bunch of steps we had to memorize for some reason. Then they taught us the quadratic formula like it was a shortcut on how to find the roots more quickly. They didn't bother to tell us why we were finding roots, nor that if we completed the square with A, B, and C rather than numbers, that we'd actually get the quadratic formula. That the quadratic forumula is nothing more than a generic form of completed square. They did show us a graphs of parabolas and how the roots were when it crossed the x-axis. But what about when the parabola doesn't cross the x-axis? The quadratic equation still has two roots, so how the hell does that work? The answer? "Uhhh... Ignore that."

It wasn't until way later that I figured out on my own how all of that works. That a parabola is really a 2D slice of a 3D saddle shape surface in a real/complex 3D world. And that there is actually 2 surfaces: a real surface and an imaginary surface. That the imaginary surface is the same saddle shape rotated 45 degrees. And that roots are where BOTH the real saddle and the complex saddle cross the x-plane. Kinda like this (green is real, red is imaginary).


How I wish they taught me was to simply say:

Math is simply a convenient way to express and manipulate logical statements. That using rules proved long ago by dead people, we can manipulate these math "sentences" into more useful forms. That it is sometimes useful to figure out when a parabola crosses the x-axis. And here are some ways people have figured out how to find that out.

Start with the usefulness, and then go into the minutia of how to figure that out. Don't start with the minutia and make the "why" an afterthought.

And don't get me started on common core. That crap is MORONIC.

10andBOUNCE said:

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This board has told me vouchers are the fix.

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Folks like you have told me DEI is the fix

10andBOUNCE said:

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This board has told me vouchers are the fix.

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Doing the same thing we're doing and treating taxpayer money as if it belongs to ISDs and teachers is clearly not working.

Tramp96 said:

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I'm currently reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, and four chapters in I have come to realize how much public K-12 education has completely failed my generation, the generation before mine (Boomers), and the subsequent generations that have come after.

Dewey may be singularly responsible for destroying education in modern America.

The thing that has become so evident to me in these early pages is that the mathematical, physics, and chemistry educations we received, along with foreign language, was woefully inadequate and far behind that of my grandparents and great-grandparents.

I took calculus, trig, and analytical geometry in high school. They taught us to regurgitate it, not to understand it. I could do the math, but I couldn't understand what it actually meant because they were incapable or unable to teach us that. They taught to the book, they taught to the test. I made A's, but didn't understand it.

Same with physics. I could regurgitate the formulas and do the math, but the application was never opened up to us.

Don't get me started on the abysmal failure of foreign language education in Texas K-12 in the 80's. You read about these scientists in the early 20th century, and they could all speak at least two languages, many could speak more. Even the American-born ones could.

Our public education system of today could never produce the type of learned individuals that were the ground-breaking scientists of the first half of the 20th century. For that matter, it can't produce the scientists and engineers who used slide-rules to do complex calculations during the space race and our missions to the moon.

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I understood it just fine. Honors math all thru HS. There was no "regurgitate" in those classes. The teachers taught it to us and we either figured it out, or got dropped to regular classes.

Some people are good at math, others are not.

One of my sons' got all A's in math. However, not so much in English/language arts and history.

The other one was the opposite.

The school system has been conditioned to teach to the lowest common denominator. Which unfortunately means they mostly just teach the test so they can keep the federal dollars coming in.

The biggest problem is that education stops for most as soon as they finish school. Learning should be a lifelong endeavor.

Funky Winkerbean said:

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The biggest problem is that education stops for most as soon as they finish school. Learning should be a lifelong endeavor.

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I agree with you, but for many people, higher education is not affordable, or they don't "trust" that education. So they prefer to start working or something else. For example, I have always wanted to be a lawyer, and for me, it's not an option to skip university or study somewhere where the quality of education is lower, and so is the price. To be a good lawyer, I need to study hard and study in a good uni, which is what I'm doing now. But I also need to pay, so I need to work, and it's hard, and I don't have a lot of time. It's good that there are different websites, for example, this service https://essay-company.org/buy-essay-online/ which helps me out with writing tasks sometimes, where I can get help if I need it. Sometimes I don't have time for writing tasks because I need to learn something or have a lot of other tasks. It's not easy; it's not cheap to be a student now, so many people choose other alternatives.

Homeschooling and Christian schools for the win. Defund the public schools through all means possible.

90% of the 5 mil students in TX cannot homeschool or send kids to a private Christian school. Even if that was 50%, defunding the constitutionally mandated path available to those students (who become our community's next workforce….unless you intend on importing the labor force) makes zero sense and will result in more failed societal aspects and industries moving to other states / countries.

The state government has far more impact on Texas public education than the feds. The issue with Texas public education resides in Austin and with the state board of education. The people we elect are failing us because they know we won't stop electing them. There's no sense of accountability or fear of repercussion. We vote red over blue no matter who ends up on the ballot (not that I'd ever advocate voting Dim, but you know what I'm saying) and rarely primary anyone despite their abysmal contributions to improving areas that need improvement.

Tramp96 said:

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I'm currently reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, and four chapters in I have come to realize how much public K-12 education has completely failed my generation, the generation before mine (Boomers), and the subsequent generations that have come after.

Dewey may be singularly responsible for destroying education in modern America.

The thing that has become so evident to me in these early pages is that the mathematical, physics, and chemistry educations we received, along with foreign language, was woefully inadequate and far behind that of my grandparents and great-grandparents.

I took calculus, trig, and analytical geometry in high school. They taught us to regurgitate it, not to understand it. I could do the math, but I couldn't understand what it actually meant because they were incapable or unable to teach us that. They taught to the book, they taught to the test. I made A's, but didn't understand it.

Same with physics. I could regurgitate the formulas and do the math, but the application was never opened up to us.

Don't get me started on the abysmal failure of foreign language education in Texas K-12 in the 80's. You read about these scientists in the early 20th century, and they could all speak at least two languages, many could speak more. Even the American-born ones could.

Our public education system of today could never produce the type of learned individuals that were the ground-breaking scientists of the first half of the 20th century. For that matter, it can't produce the scientists and engineers who used slide-rules to do complex calculations during the space race and our missions to the moon.

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All good...except reference to "Boomers". They went through the system before "grade inflation", took courses in Civics, Chemistry, Algebra, Trigonometry, Spanish and French. Physics was an elective...and MOST IMPORTANT, if you failed, YOU DIDN'T PASS and weren't promoted. 2nd most important...corporal punishment was a real thing (Board of Education = pc of lumber).

Born in '46, graduated HS in '64. Tonkin Bay Resolution was based on a lie and Viet Nam was not fun. 3 HS classmates did not return and are listed on the Wall. Yes, I'm not as trusting of everything the govt. tells us or of everything that is published...regardless of source.

ETA - Also no calculators or computers, no internet. Encyclopedias and slide rules only.

Replace scantrons with blue books for all classes and force kids to have to use critical thinking skills. Multiple choice, true/false, and full in the blank have removed a lot of that.

"Women's Lib" killed public education. Without arguing the value of Women's Lib itself, it did have the effect of trapping a higher percentage of the gifted women in that profession. When they were allowed to move into greener pastures they were replaced by lesser lights.

JWinTX said:

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zooguy96 said:

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You've got to fix the family at the same time to fix education.

I left public education because the students were horribly behaved, there was no support from admin, and the parents didn't care.

---

This.

Education mirrors society, Have a strong nuclear family, have strong emphasis on morality and ethics, have a strong APPRECIATION for our history, then you have better education.

Have a clownish society, built on everything being racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic, as well as allowing every "religious" view to be accepted and celebrate EXCEPT Christianity and Judaism, then add in a society that celebrates welfare over a family unit, then you get what you get today.

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Right on point. However you see public education, the disintegration of the family has played a large role in educational failures. From kids raised by only one parent, or raised by other relatives but with neither parent in the home, the number of kids in one household from several different fathers, our trend to become less and less homogenous, decent people having fewer and fewer children while the underbelly has more and more children and larger family sizes and many in those groups place less emphasis on education. The raw materials are not what they once were.

TheEternalOptimist said:

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Homeschooling and Christian schools for the win. Defund the public schools through all means possible.

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The number one problem with public schools is the parents. The number two problem is the kids. The school itself is third at best.

Home schooling doesn't fix that problem and private schools are good because they can selectively side step bad parents and bad kids. But those parents/kids still need a place to be kicked back to. It's a problem that vouchers doesn't solve.

And we can't simply NOT educate kids. That would be waaaaay worse for the welfare state than anything we see today.