Why Americans are Getting Dumber?

It is a profound error to think that learning has to be paced at all. In fact it has to be encouraged and made competitive in a non stressful manner.  Let me put it another way.  The fundamental tool available to everyone is simply reading a book and taking what you can from that book.  No testing involved.

Even a book about the Bobbsey twins (  Really date myself here )or its ilk teaches you words you can use elsewhere.  Add in an effort to read a passage from the bible which is couched in adult language and you connect the child to our cultural history and advance his vocabulary and allows for a real discussion as well.

My point is that you offer material they can read and material that they need a lot of help while introducing advanced cultural knowledge.  I was forced to memorize the lord's Prayer when i was six years old and it was difficult.  But look at the quality of language i was challenged with.

Yes it is nice to have mental talent, but the machine also needs lots of content as well and ample practice.  The truth is that most do not have a special advantage but at least two thirds are capable of working with highly sophisticated material provided they are challenged to do so.  That is not so bad.

The important difference today is that you have content on you smart phone and you are now using that content.  No one can be functionally illiterate in practice.  Observe that in this past election that the electorate discerned media bias and made up their own minds by reading alternative resources.

The audience is becoming too well informed to allow simple manipulation any more.  The media will take a long time to wake up to that truth.  Instead you can have conversation with your audience with twitter...
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Why Americans are Getting Dumber and How to Fix It

Annie Holmquist 
 

Tuesday, January 03, 2017

 https://fee.org/articles/why-americans-are-being-dumbed-down-and-how-to-fix-it/

Recently I learned that long time economist Thomas Sowell is retiring from his position as a syndicated columnist. Curious, I flipped through an archive of his many columns and stumbled on one entitled Education: Then and Now, written in early 2006.

One paragraph in particular caught my eye. Like many of the older generation, Sowell notes that the education he received in the New York Public School system of the 1940s was stellar and well-rounded, a far cry from that experienced by children enrolled in the New York Public Schools of the late twentieth century:

“Some years ago, when I looked at the math textbooks that my nieces in Harlem were using, I discovered that they were being taught in the 11th grade what I had been taught in the 9th grade. Even if they were the best students around, they would still be two years behind — with their chances in life correspondingly reduced.”

Sowell’s words are reminiscent of those from another individual well-acquainted with the New York Public School system: former teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto. In his book, Dumbing Us Down, Gatto declares:

“Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for ‘basic skills’ practice is a smoke screen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve years….”

So why were the students of previous generations able to handle such difficult material? According to Gatto, the answer is simple: they didn’t have a school system which put every student in the same little box. Instead, children were encouraged to learn when they were ready and at the pace which they desired:

“[T]he truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things – it really isn’t very hard.”

The investigations of Sowell and Gatto confirm what many Americans have long feared, namely, that the content in the classroom has been “dumbed down.”

But Gatto also hints at an interesting solution – which many of us never hear – when he suggests that the way out of this problem is to get children out of the institutional mode of schooling.

Do you think he’s on to something? Would we see a natural genius and a quest for learning spring out of many children if they were not consigned to a classroom and the learning level appropriated for their age?