It has everything to do with testing now. Teachers do not teach critical thinking they "teach" to get best test results for their school so they can continue to receive funding. They are not teaching anymore.

Yeah, when I was in elementary the basic attitude was, "okay, you don't really need to know what's on the test, just act like you're smart so the government can see how good our school is." My elementary school was very good, one of the best in the country. However, the standardized testing was bullshit.

The majority of parents went through the exact same schooling, not too long ago. They made it in life, so why not their kids too? This is America, is it? The land of the free. http://youtu.be/PtCa_OTf62E this is pretty much everything you need. Watch the whole thing, there's longer versions, they're all good. But at 2:30-4:00 he explains it perfectly.

Though, of course, you need to realize that instead of concentration camps, we have schools and office buildings. But they aren't considered the same thing in my context. Children must go to school. Then you should go to college. You must work. All they want you to do is be smart enough to pull the handles, but dumb enough to not ask why.

It's a perfect system, and our monopolized economy benefits 100% more than anything else.

When you take notes in school you're being told what is right and what is wrong. You don't figure it out yourself. You listen to, and write down, notes that someone else took. You must know the notes, and you don't have to think about them. You are taught to accept information, as much as people deny it, not to analyze it. When you go to college you'll sit in a lecture hall, and the professor will stand up and talk, and people will be scribbling away. Notes cover the test, my notes or no notes. The professor transfers his notes to his students. No one is thinking about what he's saying. Just writing, making sure we have the notes for the test. So we can pass. God. Damn. It.

I honestly think college is much better than public school, because they teach you things about America that you wouldn't learn otherwise.

In public school, they taught us history like America was the best little country ever that always fought wars for freedom and never did anything wrong. They never really touched on imperialism or the fascist dictators that we put into power during the cold war.

Haha. Yeah. Though, you don't need college, or the cost of $25-$45,000 a year, to learn what you just said. Also, sadly, generally all people explained this exact statement to me. It's not very impressive, considering if you would have read ANY historical non-fiction EVER, this information would be considered a basic piece of knowledge.

Charlotte Iserbyte:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCDu2z1WQ5k

Look up Dewey.

Look up Mann:

http://revisedhistory.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/kindergartens-socialist-origins/

This. Charlotte Iserbyte really clued me in the intents of education. Hint: It has nothing to do with education.

PS: Let's not forget John Taylor Gatto -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCuc-2tfgk

Perhaps I've made an error in memory. I'll refresh & get back after work.

My apology to OP if I misled...

No friend, I simply added a name to your list. Great contrib I enjoyed the article link you posted.

Thanks.

I'm at 2:07:15 and grateful to you for this introduction!

Thank you!

The dumbing down process started in the early 1970's. Something about the best educated generation of Americans now wanting to fight a bullshit war in Southeast Asia.

If you want proof, watch Youtube videos from the 1960's regarding Vietnam protests or civil rights. The protesters use words that today's college graduate has never heard before.

You won't find proof. However, If you can step back and look at the picture it will become glaringly obvious.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/12/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744163.html

susan jacoby Pay particular attention from 11:45 (in relation to your comment).

One question she asks is "why dont we have the time? (to read)" Well one thing she doesn't mention is that you Americans get only 2 weeks holidays compared to 4 weeks in Aus, and even more in EU.

Charlette Iserbyt

melanie

bill hicks

There's also the rising oligarchic class to whom public education merely represents billions in expenditures uselessly not being profited from. Corroding public education greases the skids of privatization.

I'll shamelessly repost this from elsewhere (NCLB, No Child Left Behind; RTTT, Race to the Top):

(The following are the opinions of a 10-year teacher, and may contain factual inaccuracies.)

... NCLB established a system where already-failing schools were crammed into a just-world fallacy system in which teaching is the philosophical panacea for all social ills: it prescribed high-stakes tests for all students, and counted minority, free and reduced lunch students, students with disabilities, and students in the bottom quintile as "specialty groups" whose performance gains formed the core of a school's grade and funding. If you live in Arlington, in a rich, well-educated enclave, well... you just don't have any of those groups to drag you down, so your school gets rewarded with extra money. In a shit rural school like one I taught at, you have a student body FULL of what we called "four-counters". They were in all the special qualifications because they came from poverty backgrounds and had difficult family lives, but BECAUSE JUST AS IN ANY BUSINESS, how hard you work determines your success, if Johnny Four-Count's mom got shot the night before the FCAT and he comes in and bombs the thing, he just killed our school four ways. By the time I left that one, all teacher time was eaten up by the regulatory requirements of the county and state officials who demanded per-class data on these students. No teaching occurred.

Race to the Top is the next step. Whereas NCLB essentially punishes a school as a whole for being located in a place where disadvantanged children are, RTTT punishes teachers who choose to work in these schools, because obviously, JUST AS IN ANY HEDGE FUND, the reason the kids aren't making Adequate Yearly Progress is because teachers aren't working hard enough, not because Johnny Four-Count's dad just went to jail last night on a questionable pot bust. I'm at a top-30 in the nation school right now, and the self-gratifying bonus checks for succeeding with rich kids make me sick to my stomach, because I know some teacher busting his ass to help kids who have no home life and no chance got a giant middle finger because his kids didn't magically turn into college-bound nerds just because someone waved a $1000 check at him.

You want to know about Common Core? Common Core puts a capstone on the other two policies and says, "HEY. HEY HEY HEY. You know that shit that works at Wal-Mart? Where every employee is an interchangeable part and they follow a script and it increases efficiency and makes them really easy to manage. THAT'S HOW SCHOOL SHOULD WORK. Common Core is universally prescriptive in a Panopticon, surveillance-state kind of way. Oh yes, there are standards. But now there are "pacing guides" that tell you exactly which page of the book you should be on on any given day, and how it must be the same page that every other math teacher in the district is on because children are factory inputs here, not people with varying needs. Therefore, if a teacher follows the script exactly, and does the hours of extra documentation that covers his ass, educational consistency and success are guaranteed. Moreover, Common Core has only one goal, and that is to crank out units that are prepared to fit the square holes corporations have in store for these poor kids. Reading, Writing, and STEM are the real "Core", but Common Core standards exist for all subjects. For example, there is a set for foreign languages that dictates exactly what days each topic should be taught for ALL foreign languages. Consider the Latin Teacher: Yes, the standards dictate that he must spend 18% of his instructional time teaching students to speak the language from memory.

BY JUPITERS HANGLY NUTSACK NOBODY HAS SPOKEN CONVERSATIONAL LATIN SINCE THE GOD DAMN 15TH CENTURY AT PHALLUS-FONDLING FUCKING OXFORD. THE SHIT AIN'T DONE.

Yet, Common Core blithely jams the curriculum into this meat grinder so that every student in a US public school gets the same dry, bland, lifeless, and perfectly regimented curriculum. I don't know what the next fucking nail in the coffin could possibly be, because the people pushing this shit seem pretty damn close to putting public education in the coffin right now with Common Core.

It is deliberately shitting up every single thing that was once good about school: the inspiration of teachers, the sense of community, the free-wheeling, goofy projects, the arts, music, vocational training and killing it so that the only place these things can happen is in the private schools of the rich and exempt charter schools. The rich are getting their way, and we are re-segregating schools. I think I'm going to be quitting the profession soon, and it's a shame, because I'm a damn good teacher.

Find out why critical thinking, trivium were removed from curriculum.

Common Core.

One thing I think you might want to consider is that the education system here in the US is not all one thing. Where I live we have public schools that have much much higher GPA/SAT/ACT scores than the national average and I believe are turning out educations competive with most anywhere else in the world. We also have public schools like 4 miles away from that one, same school system, where the scores are much much lower and the graduates would probably not be nearly as well prepared as their peers worldwide.

So, why is that? Money, one school is in an affluent area, the other one 4 miles away is on the border of middle class and brings people in from impoverished areas.

I think it is somewhat of a myth that American students are stupid compared to the rest of the world. You look at some college performance statistics and you realize that our good kids are really pretty competitive worldwide. But there is a huge spectrum in the quality of education you can get from region to region.

There is no easy thing you can point out as to what is going on here and say fix that and it will be better. The only clear take away is if you have enough money you can get a proper public education. I don't even know if you could call it a proper conspiracy, it is an aggregate of a lot of problems that express themselves in this differential of education.

All that said, I like to go to thrift stores or garage sales and get old history text books and compare them to the new ones my kid sisters bring home. It is the trippiest shit you will ever read. Or get old and new encyclopedias. Make a comparison between what was said about the middle east say 20 years ago and currently. Any of the hotly contested areas right now are really interesting to compare. It will blow your mind how history is manipulated. STEM subjects not so much, but history is barely even worth reading, which is a place you will find actual conspiracy on a large scale.

Comparing old and new history books, or maybe even low level and high level current history books (that sounds real interesting) would give you some leads on your project.

sorry for wall o' text

Op is living proof the education system here is lacking. Can't even proofread his own title

Why is education poorer? One reason is that increasingly it is geared to serve non-whites, and their intellectual abilities are lower than those of whites (Asians excepted). A school that caters to blacks can never teach white students properly. It's like forcing whites to sit in the short-bus class. This is something you won't hear the media say, because any reference to race, other than to insult or accuse whites, is forbidden.

If you are black and you are forced to compete in a white school, you try harder and your level of education improves; if you are white and forced to sit in a classroom full of blacks and Hispanics, you don't need to try harder and you can't hear the teacher in any case, so your education degrades.