End of the American
Dream

Are we raising
the stupidest generation in American history? The statistics that
you are about to read below are incredibly shocking. They indicate
that U.S. high school students are basically as dumb as a rock.
As you read the rest of this article, you will be absolutely amazed
at the things that U.S. high school students do not know. At this
point, it is really hard to argue that the U.S. education system
is a success. Our children are spoiled and lazy, our schools do
not challenge them and students in Europe and in Asia routinely
outperform our students very badly on standardized tests. In particular,
schools in America do an incredibly poor job of teaching our students
subjects such as history, economics and geography that are necessary
for understanding the things that are taking place in our world
today. For example, according to a survey conducted by the National
Geographic Society, only 37
percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can find
Iraq on a map of the world. According to that same survey, 50
percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can’t even
find the state of New York on a map. If our students cannot even
find Iraq and New York on a map, what hope is there that they will
be able to think critically about the important world events of
our day?

Sadly, almost
every survey or study about high school students that gets done
shows that most of our students are not even receiving a basic education.

For example,
the following comes from an article posted
on MSNBC….

Just
13 percent of high school seniors who took the 2010 National Assessment
of Educational Progress – called the Nation’s Report Card
– showed solid academic performance in American history.

So only 13
percent of our high school seniors are proficient in history?

That doesn’t
sound good.

So what does
that mean exactly?

Well, there
have been some other surveys and studies that have quizzed U.S.
high school students about specific historical facts.

The following
are some of the absolutely amazing
results of a study conducted a few years ago by Common Core….

• Only 43
  percent of all U.S. high school students knew that the Civil War
  was fought some time between 1850 and 1900.
• More than
  a quarter of all U.S. high school students thought that Christopher
  Columbus made his famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean after
  the year 1750.
• Approximately
  a third of all U.S. high school students did not know that the
  Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
  (This is a topic that I touched on yesterday).
• Only 60
  percent of all U.S. students knew that World War I was fought
  some time between 1900 and 1950.

Even more shocking
were the results of a
survey of Oklahoma high school students conducted back in 2009.
The following is a list of the questions that were asked and the
percentage of students that answered correctly….

What is the
supreme law of the land? 28 percent

What do we
call the first ten amendments to the Constitution? 26 percent

What are the
two parts of the U.S. Congress? 27 percent

How many justices
are there on the Supreme Court? 10 percent

Who wrote the
Declaration of Independence? 14 percent

What ocean
is on the east coast of the United States? 61 percent

What are the
two major political parties in the United States? 43 percent

We elect a
U.S. senator for how many years? 11 percent

Who was the
first President of the United States? 23 percent

Who is in charge
of the executive branch? 29 percent

Some have criticized
the survey results above because they came from a telephone survey,
but the truth is that they are not some sort of an anomaly. Many
other surveys have produced similar results. It doesn’t take a genius
to realize that a large percentage of our high school students are
as dumb as a rock.

The following
is from
an article written by reporter Mark Morford in which he described
his conversations with a longtime Oakland high school teacher that
was nearing retirement….

It’s
gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he
is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as
to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning
American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely
irrefutable destruction, the shocking – and nearly hopeless
– dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now,
you may think he’s merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who
stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says
he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching
young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it.

Later on in
that same article, Morford tells us that the high school teacher
even admitted that very few of his students even know how to put
a sentence together….

It gets
worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school
students he estimates he’s taught over the span of his career,
only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning
understanding of written English. They do not know how to form
a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently,
after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized
that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is not that
our students do not have the capacity to be great.

It is just
that they have learned to be incredibly lazy and our schools do
not challenge them at all.

One study found
that 55
percent of all U.S. high school students spend 3 hours or less
per week preparing for class.

Other nations
require their students to work far longer and far harder.

And they get
much better results.

Today, American
15-year-olds do
not even rank in the top half of all advanced nations when it
comes to math or science literacy.

So how do we
expect to compete if this continues?

If we would
just challenge our students and require more out of them we could
do so much better. What most public schools are doing right now
simply does not work. The following is from a report that John Stossel
did a few years ago entitled “Stupid
In America“….

I talked
with 18-year-old Dorian Cain in South Carolina, who was still
struggling to read a single sentence in a first-grade level book
when I met him. Although his public schools had spent nearly $100,000
on him over 12 years, he still couldn’t read.

So “20/20”
sent Dorian to a private learning center, Sylvan, to see if teachers
there could teach Dorian to read when the South Carolina public
schools failed to.

Using
computers and workbooks, Dorian’s reading went up two grade levels
– after just 72 hours of instruction.

His mother,
Gena Cain, is thrilled with Dorian’s progress but disappointed
with his public schools. “With Sylvan, it’s a huge improvement.
And they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re on point.
But I can’t say the same for the public schools,” she said.

It absolutely
amazes me how millions upon millions of our students can get all
the way through high school without ever learning how to read, write
or speak at a functional level.

Instead of
producing the leaders of tomorrow, our education system is producing
a bunch of sheep that
are trained to take orders and that are pretty good at taking
multiple choice tests.

If you want
to get really depressed about the future of America, just watch
some of the Jaywalking
segments that Jay Leno does. Yes, it is funny to watch as he
demonstrates how little Americans actually know about world events.
But it is also a sign of how far our education system has fallen.

If Americans
cannot even answer basic factual questions about our own government,
then how in the world will anyone ever be able to persuade them
to think critically about the Federal
Reserve, the economic
crisis or about our corrupt
political system?

Our children
are the future of this nation, and right now that future is looking
quite bleak.

So what do
all of you think about the U.S. education system? Do any of you
have any education horror stories to share? Do you believe that
our schools have rapidly gone downhill? Feel free to leave a comment
with your thoughts below….

Reprinted
with permission from End
of the American Dream.

January
13, 2012

Copyright
© 2012 End
of the American Dream