OBG, I've hit that Vietnam wall several times already.

"That my friend, is the future of our nation... "

Yes, but is that dumb enough, or do we keep going downward???

"... the glory that was Rome is of another day..."

I'm afraid our glory days are past, too.

I'm not sure it's still true ....

Unfortunately, being somewhat a younging I was in-between the "old" math and the "new math." We still learned most of the old stuff, but they tried to introduce other methods and procedures. To this day I think it did me more harm than good. I had problems learning the basic fourth/fifth grade math, and now I have problems with advanced material. (for the life of me I couldn't do high school algebra, even when being tutored by two people).

Now I often end up helping my 12 year old brother with his school work (everything other than math at least ). The kid is twelve years old and he can't write his name in script. While talking to him about it, I learned script is no longer taught in schools. If script is gone, what else is missing?

The more I sit back and look at what he is learning the more I think our educational system needs a full revamp. They spend a lot of time trying to learn concepts without having a firm grasp of the basics.

I recall taking a test as a freshman in high school and having the results tell me I was at the same level academically as a freshman in college. Then I took a similar test as a sophomore with similar results. After that, I wondered why I would need to go to college if I was learning the same thing now as I would be there.

Later on, I found out my conclusion was spot on. My first two (and only) years as a college student were little more than review of the same stuff I was doing in high school. I think maybe the last quarter of my 2nd year on an Associate's degree was to start into the actual "degree specific" content. Too bad the school abolished my degree right before that quarter started.

I've since discovered that most of the college grad engineers, accountants, and business managers learned very little about how to actually do their job while in school, and got most of their education on the job, just like I have. That is, if they are worth a darn.

I never could stomach all those required liberal arts classes I had to waste my time and money on either. If I want to study Shakespeare, I will do it when I have spare time and nothing else of any interest going on in my life, not when I am scrambling to get through a program so I can get a job.

It all comes down to parenting--or lack of it. A large segment of our society has bought into the European notion that the government should be raising the kids rather than the parents. Another large segment simply doesn't care what happens to their kids as long as they can score some crack or meth. There is a definate gap between kids whose parents care enough--or are capable enough--to be active in their education, and those who do not.

And that's why I don't buy into the doom and gloom visions of the future. We still have parents who care about their kids enough to get involved. You won't hear as much about those kids because they don't end up on Leno, but there are still plenty of them around.

Since I'm a private school teacher, I'm not qualified to discuss the public school system in detail. However, what I've found in education is that there is a fascination with being "bleeding edge" as opposed to "leading edge" when it comes to educational teaching methods. Many so called 'new' ideas are just rehashed old ideas that went out of favor.

Their really is a crisis in education. I've seen it with the declining skill sets (with inversely related 'self-esteem')
of people I had to hire.

The business world simply doesn't tolerate too much of this nonsense, especially if a company's existence is in question. The Darwinian process of weeding out weaklings helps keep it in check. However, in education, I've seen more consultants in 7 years than with nearly 20 in the corporate world.

That being said, most teachers and administrators are honorable, decent, hard-working people who can only do so many miracles when absentee parents bring their spoiled and lazy children to the school.

I'm afraid you are right. Sigh.

I'd say our Glory Days were back in the Age of Reason. Since then we seem to have only gone downhill in general. As we've progressed technologically, we've regressed intellectually, on average. I think this can be largely blamed on two things: 1. the strive towards political correctness, and 2. the fact that our technology now does most of the thinking for us. Why learn math when a computer can work the whole equation for you in the time it takes for you to read the problem? Why learn proper English when chatspeak is becoming the dominant form of communication?

Can you provide a link to that segment? It's not that i doubt your word, but I just CANNOT believe that anyone who's managed to graduate from high school wouldn't know how many moons are orbiting around the planet on which they live. She must have been putting him on.

"She must have been putting him on."

Sorry, no, it's not hype and it's not propaganda.

As a group...
They don't know which states surround their own.
If you gave them a list of the Revolutionary War, the Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, they couldn't put them in chronological order, or even tell you what any of them were about.
They have no idea what a Periodic Table is.
They can't really tell the difference between 'receipt', 'recipe' and 'receive'.
They can't compose a grammatically correct sentence.
They don't know what a gross is, or how many cubic feet are in a cubic yard.
They don't know how to address an envelope.
They don't know how to balance a simple checkbook.
Even given all the information, they can't figure out a relatively real-life problem in logistics.

OF COURSE, their parents are partly to blame: THEY were brought up by the SAME school system! What would you expect?

I think it happened in Israel, where the schools copied the American way of education. A year or two later, the parents were screaming in rage, and insisted they go back to methods that work. Do you see the parents here complaining very much?

I heard that private schools are are quietly hiring more and more homeschooled instructors, because the system-educated ones are ignorant and inept.

Sue