Dumbing Down of American Education, Culture, and Society

For instance, to take just one part of the general mess, the many teachers’ institutions, colleges and universities, qualify and train the teachers, who are largely union members of the NEA, who also staff the educational staff who do then develop, approve, and administer the course materials taught by the unionized teachers; the staff positions at the schools logically get supplied by those trained at and then coming from the noted teachers’ institutions who are all, intimately, part and parcel of this incestuous system, which guarantees, on the whole, fundamental malfunction for American education; this is both now and, therefore, into the conceivable future, as is, sadly, ingrained within an act of national insanity.

Why Nothing Can Presently Change for the Better

The old saying has it, accurately, that: those who can, do; those can’t, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach the teachers.   Further than this cogent observation, however, a kind of largely emotion-based, affective, educational theory dating back at least to Jean Jacques Rousseau, which was carried forward by John Dewey and others to become what today still predominates, under various euphemisms, as Progressive Education (PE), has generally destroyed the inherent and integral ability to advance needed education in this country.  

The vast majority of teachers is indoctrinated and believe, more or less, in the fundamentally basic stress of PE, meaning in all of its various combinations and permutations of emphasis, style, methods, etc.  This, necessarily, covers such idiotic matters as: OBE (Outcome-Based Education), SEE (Self-esteem Education), and any/all variations that are infinitely possible.   In short, one ought to recognize, most clearly, that it is the proverbial case of the blind leading the blind toward a true systemic breakdown.

This can be empirically proven, moreover, to any fair-minded observer.   If one examines, e. g., the reading levels of most average American grade school texts from, say, 1810, 1850, 1890, 1920, 1950, 1980, and 2009, there is a rather marked decrease in the obvious sophistication of the language used, over each noted period of time, and, thus, expected of the grade school children.  Q. E. D. 

The dumbing down of education, generation by generation, has progressively dumbed down the resulting society and culture that exists today and, moreover, into the plainly foreseeable and worse future.

Another fallacious argument, often overused, against traditional education is that any real success is putatively just the rare exception to the rule.  Hale House, e. g., takes the troubled, failing kids from dysfunctional families in ghetto neighborhoods, meaning those rejected by the public schools, and about 90% of them go on to college.  Latin, interestingly, is a requirement in that school’s curriculum.

These regularly dismissed and assumed “exceptional” situations, however, have gotten themselves multiplied, time and again, in terms of the predictable success that essentially follows; so, every time this stale argument is used it becomes, less and less, intellectually and academically tenable and is revealed, therefore, to actually be the cheap canard that it really is and has, in fact, always definitely been.

Conclusion

Until the vast majority of the schools (public and private), school systems and teachers can, essentially, get back to basic traditional teaching and traditional academic standards, (though not ever, of course, absurdly calling for a supposed unreflective return wholesale to, e. g., the 19th century), however, then nothing truly substantive can really be done to necessarily stop and intelligently reverse the unfortunate dumbing down of America.  

As was briefly covered above, therefore, the always stubborn and self-righteous forces of reaction (the educational establishment and its allies) and mediocrity that, in turn, sustain such awful mediocrity and reaction, thus, cannot be realistically halted, much less viably reversed.  Traditional education done by the traditional means is, on average, still the best and substantially proven way out of the dis-education disaster that, disgustingly, exists today.