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The dumbing down of American education

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an in-depth discussion.

The COVID lockdowns were a factor. But certainly not the only factor; “meritocracy” is now a dirty word in US education.

The learning loss debacle is the latest chapter in the decade-long decline in public schools. Achievement among black and Latino students on state tests was already dropping before COVID drove an exodus of families away from traditional public schools in search of a better education. Although by lowering standards and lifting the graduation rate districts have created the impression that they have bounced back, experts say that’s the wrong signal to send, creating complacency when urgency is needed.

It’s so much easier to lower standards – sometimes in the name of anti-racism – than to try to meet them. And it’s not as though schools weren’t given money to remedy this, but there was almost no effective oversight.

Comments

The dumbing down of American education — 39 Comments

  2. Wokeism isn’t the cause, it’s just the final stage. But the dumbing down was going on when I was a kid. And I’m 70.

    Korean War inductees were less educated than WWII’s, which reversed the trend from WWI. This was a common theme in early postwar conservatism.

  3. ‘Graduation rates’ are nonsense metrics, which is why educrats prefer them.
    ==
    1. Schooling is a fee-for-service activity which appears naturally on the open market.
    ==
    2. Government agencies and corporations are advisable as providers only when the clientele within commuting range of a school does not exceed a certain critical mass. You should have common-and-garden public schools in small towns and rural areas and metropolitan and regional public schools to offer niche programs. “Common-and-garden” schooling is that provided students who (1) do not have intolerable behavioral issues, (2) are proficient in English, and (3) do not have insuperable perceptual or cognitive deficits. These others are properly in the charge of the sheriff’s department or of regional / metropolitan consortia.
    ==
    3. Core cities should have voucher-funded private schools in lieu of public schools. Suburbs should be offered that option.
    ==
    4. All students in a state (including those homeschooled) should be registered for state regents’ examinations tracking achievement. The examinations should be administered annually by proctors working for the state board and school employees other than the school nurse, the dietary staff, and the building custodians should be banned from the campus that day.
    ==
    5. In any state, there should be no diplomas. All students should have a book of certificates indicating their level of accomplishment in given subjects as measured by state regents’ examinations. Guaranteed funding for schooling ends at age 18. Your book of certificates indicates what you got done with your time.
    ==
    6. Persons should be permitted to contract for wage work at age 14. School districts would have no obligation to educate children with behavioral issues beyond their 14th birthday. Between 5 and 14, youths with intolerable behavioral issues would be remanded to day detention centers run by the local sheriff’s department (which would attempt to stuff some remedial schooling into them).
    ==
    7. In a sensible educational order, about 40% of the manpower devoted to secondary schooling (ages 14 to 18) would be devoted to academic instruction, about 40% to vocational technical instruction, and about 20% to one or another type of remedial instruction. Some students would follow a mixed program including both academic courses and vocational courses.
    ==
    8. The only satisfactory teachers are those which (1) attended and absorbed the ethos of an eccentric teacher training program, or (2) sat through their teacher-training courses and inwardly rejected what their instructors were peddling. The rest are bloody clots.

  4. Korean War inductees were less educated than WWII’s,
    ==
    You’d be talking about the 1926 to 1935 cohorts. Non ci credo.

  5. Some public schools are beginning — but only beginning — to revert to older tried-and-true teaching methods like rote recitation and phonics. To quote G.W. Bush (and he was right about this), the soft bigotry of low expectations doesn’t actually benefit black students; it harms them, and all other students along with them.

  6. @David Foster said “If the airplane is losing altitude, just cover up the altimeter. Much easier than trying to identify and fix the problem.”

    So true. Here in NC years back, the state ranked almost last in national end-of-year testing scores. Their solution? Develop their own EOY tests. Presto, half of the schools are now above average.

    [side note: I think it was when the state came dead last in SAT scores across the nation, the state department of education put up billboards all over Raleigh with the slogan “Excellance in Education.” Yes, they spelled it with an a.]

  7. And it’s not as though schools weren’t given money to remedy this,

    It’s not the schools that got the money, but rather the Dem party ‘middlemen’ who made sure that most of it went to partisan organizations devoted to (a) adding paid employment for Democrats, and (b) shunting a sufficiency to activities benefiting said Party at the next election.

  8. Yes, this has almost nothing to do with Covid even if it did accelerate things a bit. This has been going on for fifty years now. And it has not been an accident.

  9. Every student should have school choice and/or school vouchers.

    The college Schools of Education should be abolished and/or their graduates should be ineligible to teach.

    Every teacher should have a real major that is applicable to a teaching role (math, science, english lit, history, etc) if they wish to teach.

    Those college grads who majored in LGBQT, black/hispanic studies and other “hate” majors and majors not applicable to teaching (e.g. sociology, psych, etc) should be ineligible to teach.

    Every teacher candidate must pass an exam before being hired to teach.

    Bring back vocational training / schooling; many students simply are not interested in academic subjects .

    Bring back student expulsions for violent / disruptive behavior and cease moving failing students to the next grade; they should be “left back” to learn the subject material.

    The federal Dept of Education should be immediately abolished.

    Let each state determine how they will run their education system.

  12. Eeyore:
    Wokeism isn’t the cause, it’s just the final stage. But the dumbing down was going on when I was a kid. And I’m 70.

    Yup. When I was in FL with my daughter, circa 2004, i wrote science essay entries for Phearson for three years. I quit because they were requiring lower and lower grade level essays for the tests (for 8th grade). The straw was an essay on hot air balloons where I had to put in definitions for “basket”, “envelop” and other grade school words. In an essay of five hundred words, that’s a bite.

    Became very much not worth the money. My contact was a friend of my daughter and myself and she wound up having to write the essays as they were increasing the source cites and lowering the pay and hemorrhaging writers. She was not happy about having to do that on top of her other duties.

    It was noticeably degrading twenty years ago.

  14. Not a bug; a feature.

    A dumbed down populace is essential to the left. Ideally, the want the masses to be just smart enough to absorb and espouse leftist propaganda, but nowhere near smart enough to reflect on any of the propaganda they spew.

  15. Exactly right, Ackler.

    I was in high school in the deep south when school segregation was breaking down. Everybody knew the academic quality of the black schools was awful. I remember my father wondering aloud whether integration would bring the black achievement level up or the white down. Seems like the general result has been the latter, sometimes apparently as a conscious choice. Not that racial issues are the only thing operative, as anyone older than 60 or so can plainly see a very broad deterioration of standards of many sorts.

  17. Definitely saw this with my kids and their peers. I went to mediocre public schools, sent my kids to private. I was motivated to learn, as were my kids. I did well. They did well. Their education was less rigorous than mine. They had very little trigonometry. I don’t recall them doing geometry proofs. Grammar and spelling probably the same, but they went to an elementary school famous in our area for its strong grammar instruction.

    One went to a much higher ranked University (private) than I did (state school), and I’d say it was similarly rigorous to my Undergrad. One went to a similar state school and it was nothing like my Undergrad; more on par with my High School.

    My kids and their peers were as curious and motivated as my peers and I, but the schools require much less than what was required of us. (They weren’t even taught how to extrapolate logarithms with a slide rule! 🙂 )

  18. Ackler (6:18 pm) said:

    “A dumbed down populace is essential to the left. Ideally, they want the masses to be just smart enough to absorb and espouse leftist propaganda, but nowhere near smart enough to reflect on any of the propaganda they spew.”

    And that, friends, describes why and how the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was able to graduate cum laude from Boston University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in both international relations and economics.

    It is abundantly evident that she absorbed well what she was taught. But “reflect”?

  20. No Child Left Behind may have been intended to prevent this but it provided both the roadmap and the funding to achieving it. Change the goal from excellence to equity and voila

  21. They had very little trigonometry. I don’t recall them doing geometry proofs. Grammar and spelling probably the same, but they went to an elementary school famous in our area for its strong grammar instruction.

    Rufus T. Firefly:

    But could they diagram sentences, huh?

    That’s a lost art. I learned it in Catholic school. It’s one of the things I appreciated.

  22. It began in the 1960s at least. Our son went to first through fifth grade in California. The schools there were already beginning to use open classrooms, (No rows of desks – just chairs, sand boxes, and tables with art materials.) They were not using phonics to teach word recognition. Math was not rigorously taught either. No memorization of anything. Fortunately, my wife was a schoolteacher. She drilled him at home with phonics, memorization of multiplication tables, etc. The school called us in and asked why we were abusing our son. 🙂 My wife gave them a piece of her mind, and they left us alone after that.

    When we moved to Colorado, our son had to catchup with his sixth-grade classmates. The schools were much better there. With my wife’s coaching he was up to speed in a couple of months.

    In Colorado they had just learned how to get money from the Federal government. They had to show superior attendance and graduation rates as well as having administrative people to monitor those metrics and to write requests to the feds. They also began to pass mediocre students on and graduate them when they weren’t really qualified. A major disservice to those students.

    My wife went to war with the school district (Boulder Public Schools.) because they were using the new money to hire more administrators – not teachers or raising teachers’ pay. She was known as Mrs. Trouble at the PTA and school board meetings. But the bureaucrats shrugged and went on with their agenda.

    Our son and daughter did not get the education that my wife and I got, but with my wife’s help, it was sufficient. Both did quite well in college

    It’s plain to me now that the agenda of dumbing down our children is part of the Marxist march through our institutions. I can’t believe anyone who cared about the country would do such a thing.

  23. Thanks, Mike, Mac and M J R.

    AOC is a very good example. It’s pretty clear she’s not all that bright. But, she’s just intelligent enough to absorb and regurgitate leftist talking points rapidly and charismatic enough (to other leftists, anyway) to stay relevant. She’s the model progressive human.

  24. You folks have not acknowledged the depth of corruption in any school–every school affiliated with the National Education Association (NEA) teacher’s union.

    When did it start? DH found a 7th grade school book from 1920–with the exception of DH there is not one person in our family who can pass the tests in that textbook!
    Some of us have doctorates and master’s degrees!

    It is right to say that the scholastic levels have declined for nearly 70 years. What you need to remember is John Dewey our first and most beloved socialist under the skin!

  25. @ crasey > “it provided both the roadmap and the funding to achieving it. Change the goal …”

    Applies to every government program and many philanthropical ones as well.

  26. @ Bob Wilson – an excerpt from your link:

    According to Texas’s Optometry Center for Vision Therapy, cursive has a powerful connection to a person’s brain function:

    Forming letters with the hand by using a pen or pencil is cognitively different than pushing a physical or virtual key on a keyboard. When learning, forming letters by hand creates a connection with the movement of the hand to the visual response of seeing the letter on the page. There are multiple processes coexisting simultaneously: the movement of the hand, the thought of the letter, and the visual cue of the letter. This is reading and writing concurrently, which is a necessary skill.

    Children need to go through this process to fully understand the English language and connect words to motor memory. Learning cursive handwriting is important for spelling skills, enabling children to recognize words when they read them later. Typing doesn’t have the same effect on the brain, as it doesn’t require the same fine motor skills and simultaneous activity.

    I can’t find anything online, but I remember reading quite some time ago that the act of handwriting, especially cursive, was beneficial in helping ADHD kids to focus their attention and remain calmer in school.

    More resources:
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202010/why-cursive-handwriting-is-good-your-brain

    Audrey van der Meer, a neuropsychology professor at NTNU, said in an October 1 news release. “Given the development of the last several years, we risk having one or more generations lose the ability to write by hand. Our research and that of others show that this would be a very unfortunate consequence of increased digital activity.”

    For this study, Van der Meer and colleagues used high-density EEG monitoring to study how the brain’s electrical activity differed when a cohort of 12-year-old children and young adults were handwriting in cursive, typewriting on a keyboard, or drawing visually presented words using a digital pen on a touchscreen, or with traditional pencil and paper.

    Data analysis showed that cursive handwriting primed the brain for learning by synchronizing brain waves in the theta rhythm range (4-7 Hz) and stimulating more electrical activity in the brain’s parietal lobe and central regions. “Existing literature suggests that such oscillatory neuronal activity in these particular brain areas is important for memory and for the encoding of new information and, therefore, provides the brain with optimal conditions for learning,” the authors explain.

    The latest (2020) research on the brain benefits of cursive handwriting adds to a growing body of evidence and neuroscience-based research on the importance of learning to write by hand. Almost a decade ago, researchers (James & Engelhardt, 2012) used MRI neuroimaging to investigate the effects of handwriting on functional brain development in young children.

    Karin James and Laura Engelhardt found that handwriting (but not typing or tracing letter shapes) activated a unique “reading circuit” in the brain. “These findings demonstrate that handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading. Handwriting, therefore, may facilitate reading acquisition in young children,” the authors noted.
    …
    Audrey van der Meer and her NTNU colleagues are advocating for policymakers to implement guidelines that ensure school-age children receive a minimum of handwriting training and encourage adults to continue writing by hand. “When you write your shopping list or lecture notes by hand, you simply remember the content better afterward,” Van der Meer said in the news release.

    “The use of pen and paper gives the brain more ‘hooks’ to hang your memories on. Writing by hand creates much more activity in the sensorimotor parts of the brain,” she added. “A lot of senses are activated by pressing the pen on paper, seeing the letters you write, and hearing the sound you make while writing. These sense experiences create contact between different parts of the brain and open the brain up for learning.”

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399101/

    Proponents of computers in the classroom stress the benefits of children being able to produce large texts earlier and receiving immediate feedback on their texts and questions through the Internet (Hultin and Westman, 2013). On the other hand, critics of computers in the classroom have found computer use to have a negative impact on course grades (Patterson and Patterson, 2017), lower class performance (Fried, 2008) as well as being distracting in the way that students habitually multitask (Sana et al., 2013). Compared to typewriting training, handwriting training has not only been found to improve spelling accuracy (Cunningham and Stanovich, 1990) and better memory and recall (Longcamp et al., 2006; Smoker et al., 2009; Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014), but also improved letter recognition (Longcamp et al., 2005, 2008). These benefits have not only been found in traditional handwriting using an ink pen, but also in handwriting using a digital pen (Osugi et al., 2019). These results suggest that the involvement of the intricate hand movements and shaping of each letter may be beneficial in several ways. Therefore, the next question might be if any motor activity facilitates learning, or if the keyboard and pen cause different underlying neurological processes within the brain. If so, changing the motor condition while children are learning may affect their subsequent performance (Longcamp et al., 2005).

    From the sensorimotor point of view, cursive writing and typewriting are two distinct ways of writing and may as well involve distinct processes in the brain (Longcamp et al., 2005, 2006; Alonso, 2015). The process of cursive writing involves fine coordination of hand movements when producing the shape of each letter, whereas typewriting requires much less kinesthetic information (Longcamp et al., 2006; Smoker et al., 2009; Kiefer et al., 2015). Several fMRI-studies, in preliterate (James and Engelhardt, 2012) and preschool children (e.g., James, 2010, 2017; Vinci-Booher et al., 2016), as well as adults (Menon and Desmond, 2001; Longcamp et al., 2003), have shown that areas related to writing processes are also activated when simply perceiving visual letters, suggesting that writing and reading are interrelated processes including a sensorimotor component (Longcamp et al., 2005, 2006).

    Even though several researchers have pointed to certain task-specific brain areas, recent findings in modern neuroscience suggest that the brain is not that simple. Neural processes are highly dynamic (Lopes da Silva, 1991; Singer, 1993) and we still know very little about how the different brain systems are working together (Buzsáki, 2006). As recent findings of cognitive neuroscience have found processes in the brain to occur every millisecond, the EEG technique lends itself well to studying brain electrical activity as a function of cursive writing, typewriting, and drawing. The EEG-technique allows us to investigate changes in the state of the underlying networks (Lopes da Silva, 1991), and can reveal the continuously changing task-specific spatial patterns of activations (Pfurtscheller et al., 1996). Studies of cortical oscillations have become a fundamental aspect of modern systems neuroscience, yet, there are still conflicting definitions regarding the different rhythms and their cognitive usefulness (Fröhlich, 2016).

  27. AesoFan:

    I love taking handwritten notes. Learning French clicked into place when I came up with the right format in the right notebook with my favorite mechanical pencil.

    I use a language app called LingQ which also tracks the stuff I write down — so I can access it all later with the requisite computer fiddling around — but it’s not the same as my notebooks.

    Plus, as you note, writing something down nudges it into one’s brain in a different way.

  28. With regard to cursive writing – I always used writing something out as an aid to memorize materiel. I would write it out, over and over – and bingo, after so many repetitions, I would be able to recite the lines from memory. So, yes – the motions of writing something by hand does fix it in your mind, or at least, it worked that way for me.

  30. they used to joke about my handwriting, but the samples I’ve seen public school students, scrawl, since the Shells (ht Bradbury) became a thing, are disastrous,

    yes miss Cortez is probably a disciple of Zinn, even if he passed before she could take a class from him, the Peoples History is an ur text, much like Open Veins is for Latin Americans in forming the perfect American idiot (ht Vargas Llosa fils)

    its not merely what they don’t know can full multitudes, its what they think they know is voluminous, so 57 genders, the AGW praxis, the 1619 project, even though that is a new thing, the catchall is Common Core, or Rotten Core, chalk full of category error from Soviet designed constructivist templates, where facts are well unsafe for young minds

    the latter I derived from the invisible serf’s collar blog, which sadly is no longer extant,

  31. We have been affiliated with universities for more than 40 years now. I remember how thrilled I was DH started working with America’s most liberal institution. Back in the 1980’s supporting women’s rights for equal opportunity was important and very forward thinking!
    Within 10 years that school was teaching socialized economies with Marxist disregard for the individual. Their mantra repeated in every class room every day was this: “YOU will become an AGENT OF CHANGE”. “You will improve the condition of every woman/man in America, because you know you are the enforcers–the AGENTS OF CHANGE!

    All those people in our top-level bureaucracies graduated from our universities that believed in passing through students who were not qualified, particularly women. They graduated from our universities that believe in permitting plagiarism in order to help women look as if they were better scholars than they were–the goal was to get them leadership jobs in governments and other schools. Those obedient little “agents of change” will do anything their leader of NOW, or the Democratic party tells them to do! They like that good money and those secure jobs. They love that feeling of being a leader–it feels so good when you actually help to change the system, i.e. bring down America.

  32. Cheryl Iserbyt
    mentioned her before, her work on deliberately dumbing down America
    all this is way old… like Ronald Reagan old..
    She has made a career out of it after leaving the administrations.
    https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/

    “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America — A Chronological Paper Trail”
    “Exposing the Global Road to Ruin Through Education”
    “Back to Basics Reform or OBE Skinnerian International Curriculum”

    “Soviets in the Classroom” — first published in 1989 — is an important piece of work which outlines the agreements made between our government and the Soviets with regard to education. Included is a timeline starting from the 1930s on, which lists important events related to this transformation.

    As did another (even older from before the board of ed and was teacher of the year… gatto)… neo can look them up no one is much interested, unless things have changed in them

  34. Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living are to the dead.
    —Aristotle, 384–322 B.C.

    “I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”

    ? John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

    “This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”
    ? John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

    Free Book:
    The deliberate dumbing down of America
    A Chronological Paper Trail
    https://mpnl.org/Dumbing%20Down%20of%20America.pdf

    Not the first time… probably the last…

  35. Mike K on January 24, 2024 at 2:51 pm said:
    The best book on this is “The Dumbest Generation” It is about the “digital age” and kids with computers in school.

    Iserbyte pointed out that there were more nafarious reasons for computers in school… now everyone is sold on the excuse… and no one knows the dirty reason that she discovered when she was in the Reagan administration

    Charlotte Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational
    Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms.     Iserbyt is a former school board director in Camden, Maine and was co-founder and research analyst of Guardians of Education for Maine (GEM) from 1978 to 2000. She has also served in the American Red Cross on Guam and Japan during the Korean War, and in the United States Foreign Service in Belgium and in the Republic of South Africa. Iserbyt is a speaker and writer, best known for her 1985 booklet Back to Basics Reform or OBE: Skinnerian International Curriculum and her 1989 pamphlet Soviets in the Classroom: America’s Latest Education Fad which covered the details of the U.S.-Soviet and Carnegie-Soviet Education Agreements which remain in effect to this day. She is a freelance writer and has had articles published in Human Events, The Washington Times, The Bangor Daily News, and included in the record of Congressional hearings.

    I won’t redo things again.. i dont have the time, nor the will
    it would be a 2nd waste of time, like he first time i put up great detail and references…

    “In our schools, every classroom in America must be connected to the information superhighway, with computers and good software, and well-trained teachers. We are working with the telecommunications industry, educators and parents to connect 20 percent of California’s classrooms this spring, and every classroom and every library in the entire United States by the year 2000. I ask Congress to support this educational technology initiative so that we can make sure this national partnership succeeds.”

    — President Clinton from his State of the Union Address

    Ronald Reagan promised to get rid of the Board of Ed!
    how did that go?

  36. @ Artfldgr > “Ronald Reagan promised to get rid of the Board of Ed!
    how did that go?”

    Javier Milei’s bureaucracy-cutting chainsaw keeps looking better and better.

    Thanks for the references and citations: so much of the foundation for the destruction of American schools happened before I was paying attention.
    Your knowledge base is much appreciated.

  37. Carlos Mercia had something to say, about our dumb, education system, in his tune: The Dee Dee Dee Song:

    “This test is too hard! (So they lower the standards!)

    I’m not good at sports! (So they give them all trophies!)

    My dad used to spank me! (So they lower the standards!)

    I’m too fat for this seat! (So they widen the standards!)

    They say no cause I’m black! (So they lower the standards!)

    They say no cause I’m white! (So they lower the standards!)

    They say no cause I’m Asian! (So they lower the standards!)

    ¡No habla Inglés! (y cambiamos de Standards!)”.

    (p.s.- Carlos Mencia uses VERY, R-rated language in this song, so- you might be startled by the song’s words, if you: watch a video of the song, or if you look up ALL of the song’s lyrics.)

  39. Well he thought a strong figure like bill bennett could tame the department the indoctrinators thought otherwise

    They saw harrison bergeron as not a cautionary tale but a how to manual

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