World Education rankings... USA 28th

a reply to: 727Sky

How is it even surprising that the US is 28th?

The world knows Americans are all noise and show.....intelligence is not their forte.

You only have to look at their results in war scenarios.

When an education system, such as the U.S.'s public school systems, cater to the lowest common denominator, I'm not sure what else we can expect?

We've no one to blame for it, except us. We allowed it to happen.

As we sow, so shall we reap.

Yummy, yummy.

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
a reply to: Greathouse

why the British Empire is subservient to the U.S.

Haha...that's what you've led yourself to believe. Your reality is coloured through your over indulgence of 1 1/2 inch rib eyes.
What do you mean by subservient. I think its the other way around. Didn't your president bow to the Queen of England and the Pope?

While I appreciate it's not the point of your post, bowing was never meant to mean you were subservient, it meant you were prepared to offer your neck as a target as you trusted the person you are bowing to would not put a sword through it. The western tradition of a handshake is actually exactly the same as you offer your sword hand holding no weapon. If anything, it was meant to imply no fear, or that you considered the person you were greeting as no threat.

That's the original reason, and why I believe it's still held as etiquette when heads of state meet where the tradition is still one to be honoured.

ATTENTION:

The topic is NEVER each other. Please stick to the topic and knock off the insults.

Do not reply to this post.

Blaine91555
Moderator

originally posted by: wagnificent
Florida adopted the new standards this year (14-15), which was a good move in my opinion (at least for Language Arts), but I hear that our state test results won't be back until December. My students told me that the test was surprisingly easy, but they might be overconfident.

It's possible they were easy, or it could have been Dunning Kruger in effect. If someone is sufficiently behind the material they simply don't realize how far behind they are, and something can appear easier than it really is.

To answer your other question, I think Florida's education problem is mostly cultural. Education simply is not valued in the same way as it is in the Northeast US, so changing standards and dumping money into education probably won't solve the problem. Florida will need a lot of social engineering to catch up to New England's education systems.

I think you have that culture in every state, the US just doesn't worry about education the same way some other nations do. At the end of the day you can get almost every person in the nation to say education is an important issue, but few will practice the discipline necessary for themselves or their family to learn. People are far more often content to confirm their preconceptions than to learn new facts that may challenge them.

I can prove this statement by going no further than Congress. As a group Congress is very highly educated, yet to them and the followers of most political positions education means having a stance and being able to defend it and that's what most people treat school as, a way to confirm why you're already right and that leads to low test scores.

There is also a strong push for privatizing education in Florida, but Florida's Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional. I predict that the test scores will be used to make invalid inferences about Florida's public schools, and this will generate public support for a constitutional amendment to allow privatization of education.

Both sides will. If Florida ranks #1 in the world in the next tests, proponents of private school will state they're #1 with few private schools and they could increase the gap by making even more. While opponents will say they're #1 despite the private schools, and that they need to be eliminated in order to increase the gap.

As someone who just graduated high school, I can most definitely guarantee that students these days are less than intelligent. It doesn't help that the teachers are almost as dumb as the students. Of course that's just my experience, but the general consensus among people I know is not much different.

originally posted by: SaulnierCryogenics
As someone who just graduated high school, I can most definitely guarantee that students these days are less than intelligent. It doesn't help that the teachers are almost as dumb as the students. Of course that's just my experience, but the general consensus among people I know is not much different.

Less than intelligent or simply ignorant?

When I was teaching, the students were all very bright and certainly capable mentally, but they chose to be willfully ignorant. They did not have the cultural value for education that we had traditionally had in this country and some ethnic groups still have (Asians for one).

Intelligence is the measure of ones capacity to learn and absorb knowledge. Ignorance is simply how much you don't know. We have a LOT of ignorant people in this country.

originally posted by: SaulnierCryogenics
As someone who just graduated high school,

Recently graduating high school doesn't qualify you as an expert on the intelligence of a generation. I don't agree this is just a generation of idiots. The educational system is flawed.

originally posted by: SaulnierCryogenics
As someone who just graduated high school, I can most definitely guarantee that students these days are less than intelligent. It doesn't help that the teachers are almost as dumb as the students. Of course that's just my experience, but the general consensus among people I know is not much different.

The one thing I've learned in life (I just turned 33) is that very few are actually intelligent. Sometimes people claim to have a plan but when you really get down to it, very few are capable of actually breaking that plan down into steps, timetables, and details. To paraphrase a quote from XKCD the comforting part in any NWO conspiracy theory is that the people in charge are capable of implementing any sort of plan at all.

Also, let me try and explain intelligence in another way. I assume you're familiar with what an average is. So lets define below average intelligence as the bottom 1-33 percentiles, average would be the middle third at 34-66, and the above average people are 67-99.

If you are an average student that means 2/3 of everyone are going to be at your level or below. By any standard, even if everyone is quite intelligent, many are going to appear below average and in comparison not measure up.

Additionally, there is a well documented effect called Dunning Kruger which causes people to over estimate their own abilities and not realize how far behind others they are. It's typically the ones who know the material well enough to see the nuance and how little they know that are smarter, and those same people under estimate their own abilities. The ones who think they are average or above average typically aren't.

One of the problems with evaluating what you learn in high school is that you haven't had time to go beyond what you've learned in high school and had time to apply that and other knowledge to life. By the time you have reached that stage 30 years have had to pass, and the experiences in high school that you can use as a first hand account are no longer representative of the experience.

Well, I had an interesting experience today at a family gathering. The topic was Common Core and of course every single person except for me in the room was against it.

Fortunately I had those good old Obama tools of a pen and a phone, and some paper. I wrote out explaining the core concept, and then explained the advantage conferred in speed and reliability using the methods they teach (I focused on multiplication). I think the example I used was 54*73. I used the traditional method where you get:
54
x73
-------
_162
3780
-------
3942

Then I used common core which looked more like
54*73 =
50*70 + 50*3 + 4*70 + 4*3 =
3500+150+280+12=3942

In the end I convinced one person, but the others didn't want to hear it saying something about it of course makes sense to me and that they think it's ridiculous people have calculators but aren't taught to use them for the answer.

Oh well, at least one person is now a little better informed.