Singularity

?

JimMe

Is your question part of the Entrance Exam?!?

Singularity

Sorry, my bad! I had a phone call interrupt me in posting an accompanying opinion piece article. Here it is:

http://www.alternet.org/education/results-are-america-dumb-and-road-getting-dumber?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark


The Results Are In: America Is Dumb and on the Road to Getting Dumber
Blame religious fundamentalism and the poor quality of science education in America's schools.

June 4, 2014 |
The success of National Geographic’s Cosmos might appear to offer a glimmer of hope that America is ready to break free of the anti-intellectualism movement that has left this country in the wake of other developed nations when it comes to scientific literacy.

But the deep structural and cultural obstacles in American society for attaining intellectual enlightenment will erase any short-term good news moments like popularity of a TV show.

America remains a scientifically ignorant nation for two reasons: the resurgence of fundamentalist religion during the past 40 years, and secondly, the low level of science education in American elementary and secondary schools, as well as many tertiary colleges.

While television ratings for Cosmos may have stunned media critics and your average fundamentalist, “Americans continue to poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth.”

This week, Gallup released a poll showing 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. Last week, the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire published a study showing only 28 percent of Tea Party Republicans trust scientists.

It gets worse. More than two-thirds of Americans, according to surveys conducted for the National Science Foundation, are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of 10 don’t understand radiation and what it can do the human body, while one in five adult Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.

A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.

“This level of scientific illiteracy provides fertile soil for political appeals based on sheer ignorance,” writes Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason.

Christian fundamentalism is based on the conviction that every word in the Bible is literally true and was handed down by God himself. In most Western developed nations, Christian fundamentalists represent a minority, loopy fringe. In America, however, one third believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, while nearly 60 percent believe the Armageddon predictions in the Book of Revelation will come true.

Amusingly, fundamentalist Christians are evidently as ignorant of the Bible as they are of science, given a majority of Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible. “How can citizens understand what creationism means, or make an informed decision about whether it belongs in classrooms, if they cannot even locate the source of the creation story,” asks Jacoby.

The great obstacle to educational and rational enlightenment is America’s disparate educational system. The Constitution asserted no federal power over education. In other words, states are free to spend their own tax revenue as they see fit. The reliance on property taxes to fund public education has produced an ever-widening gap between those educated in the historically more economically prosperous liberal North versus those schooled in the poorer religious South. Jacoby says it’s impossible to overestimate the importance of such regional and local disparities in the formation of American attitudes toward intellect and learning.

Today, for instance, New York spends $19,000 per student per year on elementary and secondary education, whereas Tennessee spends less than half that amount ($8,200). States such as Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana each spend less than $3,000 per student.

“Decentralization was wonderful for the initial diffusion of high schools,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard who helped write The Race between Education and Technology, one of the most comprehensive analyses of the spread of the American educational system throughout the 20th century. “But it created big geographic inequality.”

Among OECD nations, America remains an outlier, one of the few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children are afforded more funding than those serving poor students. Among the 34 OECD nations, only in the United States, Israel and Turkey do disadvantaged schools have lower teacher/student ratios than in those serving more privileged students.

Andreas Schleicher, who runs the OECD’s international educational assessments, recently told the New York Times: “The bottom line is that the vast majority of O.E.C.D. countries either invest equally into every student or disproportionately more into disadvantaged students. The U.S. is one of the few countries doing the opposite.”

For generations, the science curriculum in Southern states was “vetted by adults who believed in the innate inferiority of blacks and who also subscribed to fundamentalist creeds at odds with the growing body of secular scientific knowledge.” In other words, the content of education in the most backward states of the country would be determined by the most backward people.

“Suffice to say that in a society based for so long on the supremacy of the planter aristocracy and belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, there was little reason to provide decent public education for poor whites, much less blacks,” writes Jacoby. “Why bother, when just being white—even an illiterate white—made an inhabitant of the South superior to any black?”

Today, the South’s slavish devotion to the Republican Party’s corporate profit motive has ensured a continued devaluation of public education, with GOP-controlled states from North Carolina to Kansas inflicting dramatic spending cuts to education to make way for further tax breaks to the rich and corporations. The far right’s solution to a failing education system is to usher white kids into private schools and Christian academies aka “segregation academies.” The Republican-controlled South is where you see the right’s education strategy in action. “Inspired by home-school superstars such as Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, tens of thousands of other southern families have fled their public-school systems in order to soak their children in the anti-intellectual sitz bath of religious denial,” writes Chuck Thompson in Better Off Without Em.

Absent a national curriculum, and with the defunding of public education, some Southern states are experiencing a 2 to 3 percent annual transfer rate out of public schools into charter schools. Worryingly, we are also seeing this trend in a select number of blue states. “The charter school movement is another big part of the problem,” says Max Brantely, editor-in-chief of the Arkansas Times.

Study after study demonstrates that the claim attesting charter schools perform better than public schools is a myth. Worse, a charter school is free to deliver a curriculum that serves the ideological worldview of its shareholders and founders—a curriculum that may include the teaching of biblical creationism. Follow this trend to its natural conclusion, and you end up with an ever widening intellectual gap between us and the rest of modern civilization.

While charter schools aren’t unique to the South, conservative states tend to respond most enthusiastically to their message, which makes Republican-controlled states ground zero for the further degradation of public education. As such, expect the U.S. to continue to poll like Nigeria and Iran, rather than Japan and Sweden when it comes to understanding science. In other words, we’re dumb and getting dumber.

Artemis

I must assume this came from a Christian based school and not a public school.
Our education is in serious jeopardy, without a doubt. Charter schools are supposed to have a little more freedom on their method's and curriculum. I am not sure why the schools bars are set so low. Not educating our youth to compete with the worlds standards is equal to not planning for a retirement, one day you suddenly find out your in deep shit.
Interesting the lack of interest to this post :-(

Singularity

More likely a home school curriculum.
Patience. I only posted this within the last hour....

RetNavyCWO Loc: VA suburb of DC

Excellent post, Singularity! Unfortunately, it is likely to be dismissed by those on the far right.

RockKnutne Loc: Valhöll

[quote=Singularity]
http://www.alternet.org/education/results-are-america-dumb-and-road-getting-dumber?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark


The Results Are In: America Is Dumb and on the Road to Getting Dumber
Blame religious fundamentalism and the poor quality of science education in America's schools

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You know why so many people like me just laugh at this kind of tripe?

Biased Maximus!

Let me see, would a God hating atheist say that religious fundamentalism is da real debell, oh no, no, no, this would be fair and balanced reporting, sheesh.

"CJ Werleman (born 18 June 1973) is an Australian born atheist author, columnist, and U.S political and social commentator. He is a critic of the Christian right and the influence of corporatist politics and social inequality. Werleman has criticised the involvement of the Christian right in opposing LGBT rights in states like Arizona. Dan Arel, special correspondent for American Atheists referred to Werleman as a tireless fighter for separation of Church and State, and echoed his criticism of the role of Christianity in the Republican party"

"Born in Sydney, Australia, Werleman migrated to Bali, Indonesia in 2003. In 2005, he witnessed the twin suicide bomb attacks on Bali's Jimbaran Beach and it was this experience that piqued his interest in studying religious fanaticism and fundamentalism in organised religions.

**********************************************************************************************
Come on, you surely aren't that easy to mislead, maybe you are? Is that your credible source for why America is tubing educationally?

If you would have referenced the following, I would have bothered to read what you posted THOROUGHLY:

*******The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America*******

Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt is an American whistle blower and freelance writer who served as the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first term of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and staff employee of the U.S. Department of State (South Africa, Belgium, South Korea). She was born in 1930 and attended Dana Hall preparatory school and Katharine Gibbs College in New York City, where she studied business. Iserbyt's father and grandfather were Yale University graduates and members of the Skull and Bones secret society.

She is known for writing the book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America. The book reveals that changes gradually brought into the American public education system work to eliminate the influences of a child's parents (religion, morals, national patriotism), and mold the child into a member of the proletariat in preparation for a socialist-collectivist world of the future. She says that these changes originated from plans formulated primarily by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education and Rockefeller General Education Board, and details the psychological methods used to implement and effect the changes.

In an interview concerning secret societies and the elite agenda she disclosed that in the early 1980s she had a chance to meet with Norman Dodd who had been the chief investigator for the United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations commonly known as the B. Carroll Reece Committee. In the video interview she claims that Dodd discussed a 'network' of individuals including Carnegie who planned to bring about world peace by means of rapid changes in society. These changes would be brought about by involving the populace in various wars and military conflicts. She further claimed that Dodd had discussions with Rowan Gaither, the president of the Ford Foundation in which he revealed that directives from the President of the United States compelled foundations related to the Ford Foundation to direct their funding into bringing about the merger of the USA with the Soviet Union.

When will you understand it's not a religious or nonreligious anything?

Do your homework and use that wonderful mind that you may have to absorb more than atheistic propaganda. I mean that in the most sincere, noninsulting way.

RockKnutne Loc: Valhöll

The sky is falling, the sky is falling, save us from the far right. You are a moron. How many kids get taught in public schools opposed to anyothers.

Here, maybe this will help you:

"88% of school-age children attend public schools, 9% attend private schools, and nearly 3% are homeschooled."

Wake up and smell the propaganda. Stop thinking it's a God v. No God matter and Google search something constructive Chief, instead of just looking at porn.

:thumbdown: :thumbdown: :thumbdown:

RockKnutne Loc: Valhöll

You know something about homeschool do you? Please enlighten us all.

:?: :?: :?: :?: :?:

RockKnutne Loc: Valhöll

It's because you assume anything, you remain ignorant dipwad. Where'd ya get yer edukshawn, publik skools?

:roll:

RockKnutne Loc: Valhöll

So, how does CC help your child, I don't know ask a teacher?

"Common Core isn’t just a mindless infection of our society; rather it is an intentional takeover of our education delivery system and therefore a takeover of our children’s minds. It is a one-size-fits-all, homogenized, centrally controlled education delivery system steeped in Progressive ideology. It is antithetical to everything that makes our country exceptional. This cult is relentlessly pulling our children under its control, with a seemingly endless supply of money, and uses intimidation to silence its opponents."

"the one concrete thing that Americans should fear most is the NSA-like data suctioning systems set in place by the Common Core groups to gather all manner of data about our children and their families starting in preschool and going up through college and career."

http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/05/22/a-scathing-interview-with-a-5th-grade-teacher-who...

Gee-man-e people, wake up!

Kirk

kmikale your posts on this topic although a little harsh, were right on. Thank you.

RockKnutne Loc: Valhöll

Thanks Kirk, I only want folks to know the truth and stop with all the religion bashing already.

If religion was a threat to education, I'd be one of the first to sound the alarm.

I'm not harsh am I? What's your source, who has been taking about me?

:wink: :lol: :lol: :lol:

RetNavyCWO Loc: VA suburb of DC

How can you be so callous and dismissive to disregard the absolute tripe that little science quiz reveals about what is being taught in religious schools and religion-based homeschooling? I think it amounts to child abuse, and if left to spread into public schools (probably Texas first) would have dire impacts on all of our future security. It's insane!

Artemis

Another arrogant ass who thinks himself supreme, how unusual. There was no choice but to assume, there wasn't a school letter head on the test. tell me factually without assuming oh mindless one, where di it come from. I also never said anything derogatory about Christian schools so calm the f*** down.
Typically you don't look for a conversation about our education you just make sure you insulted everyone on your little hit list.

Why would your opinion mean anything to us, you just called all of us Muslims, more typical ranting from a ill mannered buffoon.
Why don't you go back from your cave and learn how to be civil.