How did we get to the current state of education in the U.S? Well, it didn't just fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, Chicken Little style; it came from somewhere, for some reason. In order to find a "cure," we first have to understand the natural course of the "disease." The next few posts will describe the road we took that led us to today. If you are under the impression that our present system has existed since the creation of the United States, and that it used to be good and then, somehow, went terribly wrong, you share the belief of many people. Such is not the case, and there is a way out of this mess.
But first, the history of how we got here:
"Education is the transmission of civilization." - Will and Ariel Durant, co-authors of the multi-volume set, The History of Civilization
What if the longer our children stayed in our educational system, the worse off they became academically? What would that say about the transmission of our civilization?
It's exactly what's happening. At age 10, our kids ranked 8th out of the 24 nations tested, below 30% of all test-takers. Above us are Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Chinese Taipei, Latvia, England, the Netherlands, Flemish Belgium, and the Russian Federation. While that's not so very terribly awful, given the amount of money, time and effort we throw into the system, one could not be criticized for expecting better.
By age 15, 40 nations take the test, and our kids slip to 25th place, below 62.5% of all test-takers. They have dropped behind some of the countries that they outperformed as 10-year-olds just five years earlier - Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Hungary.
It is not an exaggeration to say that our future as a civilization is at risk because of the direction taken by our educational system. Alan Greenspan did not express "irrational exuberance" when, at a symposium in 1999, he warned that our nation's productivity, and therefore its prosperity, depends on our intellectual achievement, and that the poor state of our educational system from kindergarten through high school places our future in jeopardy.
(continued on Project Education Renovation)
