Quote from: K-Dog on Oct 06, 2023, 05:15 PMAnd everyone thinks they know everything.

Except I am the only person who actually DOES know everything about everything. lol

Quote from: NFThese things come in waves, hopefully yours retreats soon.

Unlikely.  Having experienced the Public School system as both a student and 20 years later as a teacher, and in between first got my university education at an elite Ivy league university, then returned to get the education credential thru NYS public SUNY university system and the NYC CUNY system, I have seen nothing besides a steady downward slide in the methods and goals set by the system to bring the students to a "successful" outcome of HS graduation after 12th grade at the approximate age of 18-19. Besides gobbeldygook junk revisions like New Math (now deja vu new all over again), you had the manifestly stupid "No Child Left Behind" program implemented nationwide at the federal level during the Bush1 era with mandated testing and goal for every grade level and every school district to meet.  How can this be accomplished?  You dumb down the tests so a chimpanzee can pass them.  Nobody fails, nobody gets left back, problem solved!

It is inherently impossible to achieve this maintaining a fixed standard, because regardless of "nurture" (aka education), "nature" (aka genetic intelligence) means every kid has a best possible outcome.  To make a physical analogy easier to grasp, every boy can play PeeWee league football, most can play club football in elementary school, fewer can play JV football and fewer still Varsity football in HS, especially in Texas where its more important than the NFL.  Very few can play Collegiate football, especially for a Division 1 NCAA team, and for ALL boys who ever held a Pigskin on the Gridiron, only a microscopic few can play in the NFL.  Maybe that number is .0001%, WAG.

What No Child Left Behind purports to mean is every kid can play on the HS Football team at least, but in reality most boys can go no further than PeeWee or Club teams.  That's why kids used to leave school after 3rd or 6th or 9th grade rather than go further, because it just got too hard, and they didn't need it for the jobs their class of people had available.  The plum jobs were only open to the Elite, including a Commision as an Officer on enlistment to the military, which required a Bachelors degree + ROTC training here in the FSoA.  During the Vietnam War, they needed more Officers and college was a way to delay being drafted, which is when more public universities popped up along with private ones cheaper than the Elite & 2nd & 3rd tier schools built slowly up beginning with Harvard in the 1600s, then Yale etc followed, + 2nd tier like Duke and Notre Dame for the sons (not daughters early on) of the elite members of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  To be fair, Harvard etc were all male as well into the 1950s or so, girls had Barnard, Vassar, Mt.Holyoke etc.

So, if you want to use the wave analogy, is it's more like a Tsunami which rolls in successive building waves until the wave big enough to roll in over the people living in the lowest lying areas drown, while the folks living in Mansions at the top of the hill wave goodbye to them as they get washed out to sea.

Now New Math, circa 1965.  Courtesy of Harvard Math Professor and Folk Singer Tom Leherer.



RE