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....
meant “dumbed down”, my education is fine, typing skills, not so much…….then again, my IQ in past was around 117 (when I was sick and having memory issues 2nd to hypoxia) and went to private school most of my time….
The time required to teach does not need to be expanded. The quality of time spent teaching is important. Smaller classroom sizes, quality teaching, and a good attitude make a difference.
Homeschooling is on the rise for many of the reasons that you state in your article. Homeschoolers may not spend 6-7 hours learning how to work to the sound of bells, and getting their attendance taken repetively, but they do get in quality education in a small classroom setting from teacher-parents who care deeply for their children’s well-being, success, and understanding of the world around them.
My kids have known the location of Iraq on a world map since they were in early elementary school and we were learning about Mesopotamia.
Here is a shocking thing to say: Lets ban the monopoly the government has on state sponsored education. Public unions and the government are the raison d’tre for MORE of this style of education? If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. BUT…the assertion is that the system is broke right? Don’t put the same people in charge that broke the system in the first place. They have to go. Imagine a world without PUBLIC UNIONS and GOVERNMENT MONOPOLY ON EDUCATION. Just IMAGINE!!!
The early mid 1970s in HS was no picnic for sure. Many did learn vital math skills like there are 28 grams in an ounce.
I had an interest in history and like most here learned it by reading on my own. I wish the internet was around back then. If you don’t know history with the availability of the internet no teaching will drill it in your head.
The majority of people just don’t care about anything except that which provides them with immediate pleasure and comfort.
How does one “prepare” to be dumbed down in the classroom? This article says that kids need to prepare better for class.
I am a 30 year old researcher and writer who was luckily blessed with two things growing up. Number one, I am naturally intelligent. Concepts come easy to me and I am aware about the proper ways to discern true and false information. Secondly, I went to private school from kindergarten through third grade. In addition to learning how to read at a very early age using phonix, we also learned French from 1st grade on. When the tutiton became too high in 1st grade, I moved back to public school for the rest of that year, but I hated it in public school so I eventually went back to my old school. While I was in public school, I noticed that I was a far better reader than the rest of my class. I went back to private school till the beginning of 4th grade. Public school that year was a nightmare. I had a physically abusive teacher who routinely put her hands on me and shoved me around for misbehaving. One day she grabbed me by my cheeks pressing up against my gumms so hard that I had bruises. My principle and family didn’t believe me and never thought to ask my classmates what they saw. Then one day, one of my classmates was pushing in line and all I did was push back and tell him to stop. My teacher grabbed my arm, flung me around as hard as she could and rammed my lower back into the metal chalk tray. I sunk to the floor, writhing in agony. If I wasn’t so hurt my rage may have led me to do something completely out of character, but to this day my back is messed up because of her. Nobody believed me when I told them and nothing was ever done to dicscipline this teacher. Middle school and high-school weren’t much better, educationally. I luckily had a few teachers here and there who actually taught me a lot. My 8th grade English teacher knew I was a good writer and nurtured my talent, for example. It wasn’t until I graduated and went to community college that I found out how much I didn’t know. This was especially true with history. I had always been extremely facsinated by the past, but apparently during high-school I had been taught a bunch of useless crap because my college history professor enlightened me to a great many truths that I had no idea about. I also had a few English professors who molded my raw writing talent and who taught me that having the ability to write beautiful prose is only the first step towards becoming a good writer. I learned about a whole range of things about writing that I never knew beforehand. During the time it took me to get my associates degree and move on to a 4-year school, critical thinking and original ideas were encouraged. Some professors structured their entire class in line with that. Community college’s aren’t funded by the state, and therefore do not have to teach pre-sanctioned, politically correct nonsense in place of real education. I will always be grateful for my time there, because had I gone from highschool straight to a four year school without community college inbetween, I would not be the person I am today. I attend Rutgers University now, and original thinking seems like a pair of dirty words. By the time I got there, I’d already had four history courses with a professor who taught us the truth. Rutgers history professors are forced to teach from preapproved books and cannot tell the truth about certain subjects. Challenging some of these professors is akin to academic suicide, and in all my courses, to see how little my classmates actually know makes me sad and worried for this once great and free nation’s future. Kids are getting dumber and dumber, public education is coddling and encouraging their stupidity. Then Americans wonder why our country is going down the drain and why the rest of the world hates us. It isn’t freedom other countries hate. It’s America’s self-imposed role as world police, and the brutal, hypocritical and almost completely failed foriegn and domestic policies. Our government is screwing up so bad, that they are now coming after our right to call them on their crap! That is what SOPA and PIPA are about! The government never wants their own words and actions to be used against them. They want to act with impunity and the dumber the public is, the easier that will be…
Europeans are sucking more… they cant even use computer and internet… who needs education these days??
“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.”
I should have figured that this should be where I stopped reading, however it all panned out as I thought it would and well done to you for having idiots complain about the system which they enabled – good job!
It’s the NAGGERS….the system has to cater to the lowest common denominator.
i’m been a hiskull grad and haz berry goodt comprehennzion, allso goodt in spieling, reeding and *phonix*.
[...] has completely and totally failed them. As I have written about previously, our education system is a joke and most high school graduates these days are simply not prepared to function at even a very basic [...]
I had a very similar experience to the teacher mentioned in the article. That, and other such experiences led me to abandon teaching and go back to engineering. High schools in America are sexually saturated, politically correct, indoctrination centers, that have no intention of challenging students and imparting knowledge. I wrote about this scam we call public education in my book, Set Our Children Free. Only radical change can save us from this next generation.