This election was lost in the public schools over the past 40 years.

[Elginoid]

intellectual curiosity has become a thing of the past- high school is about sports and popularity contests, not getting an education.

college and university is about making grades, not getting an education.

over the next 20 years, we are definitely going to get an education- unfortunately it's not going to be the one that so many missed out on so much as about the education that so many are lacking.

test it for yourself- think about how ignorant and uninformed the average american is...and realize that half the people are even dumber than that.

[gauguin57]

1. Let's start our own school and college.

Hail, hail old U.D.U. (University of Democratic Underground).
And hail, all hail, old D.U. High

We'll larn 'em what they need to be 'larned!

[Maddy McCall]

2. I teach critical thinking skills in my university history classes...

I am pretty optimistic about some of the kids in my classes.

We spend as much time discussing world events (and the students debating) as we do on lecture and other class work. Often, I am amazed at their intellect.

[Cleita]

3. Although, I'm not around young people that much,

the few I have had dealings with, who appear to be in their twenties, seem to be open to ideas and they are quick on the uptake. I think we need to reach these kids.

[mhr]

4. Yes - Anti-Intellectualism Is Alive And Well In The US

I could not agree more!

[jumpstart33]

5. You know, you have a great point. And it was lost on all races and sexes

not any particular group. Look at the Bush supporters.

[UdoKier]

6. Excellent point.

History in particular is lacking. EVERYTHING is glossed over and ends up just being filler between a few dates and places you have to remember.

I remember clearly learning that "Hawaii joined the union in 1959" but I never recall learning that increasing numbers of white settlers basically took over the country by violent means because they didn't like the Hawaiians' communal land scheme. Although the legitimate Hawaiian government had some sympathy in Washington, the US government took over Hawaii, and when those who remembered the legitimate government were dead or too old to do anything about it, turrned it into a state.

I always took it as a truism that "We" don't invade other countries without good reason.

Having studied a bit more, I've found case after case where that wasn't true. Cuba, the Phillippines, etc, then there are the assassinations...

How constructive is it to teach kids a sugar-coated version of our history? How are we to learn from it if we don't know the truth?

[UdoKier]

9. One other point. It's not just public schools.

I don't want to feed into the false notion that "public schools are failing". Most studies show private schools only marginally outperforming public schools at best - and that's pretty bad considering none of the really poor kids whose parents create a home environment of chaos go there.

The private schools teach history lite just as badly as the public ones do.

[Elginoid]

20. Parochial schools in particular.

they don't dwell on any aspects of history that might conflict with their particular belief structure.

I never had to read a single line of Shakespeare in my lutheran high school- after all, what literature could be greater than the bible? :eyes:

and our "guidance" counselor at the lutheran high school- his main function was to help you decide what you wanted to do with your life- as in, do you want to be a lutheran teacher, a lutheran minister, or a lutheran missionary? -those were pretty much the choices you were given.

[Elginoid]

16. Pearl Harbor had it's roots in Commodore Perry's visit to Japan...

forcing them at gunpoint to open their borders to the world...they were quick learners.

and so were the mudjahdeen and al queda.

[The_Casual_Observer]

7. college and university is about making grades

And why not? There isn't anything to do after college except either work for the government or work for a defense plant, either way, you don't need to know how to do anything.

[kodi]

8. i think public education was purposely undermined decades ago

those of us raised in the post war era, 1950-70 generally had educations that were liberal and broad-based and caused us to question assumptions at the drop of a hat.. we were in some ways taught to "think for ourselves". i think as a response to our "thinking for ourselves" and our reactions to viet nam, civil rights, and authority in general those who controlled the decision making processes about general education felt that such a highly liberal education of the masses would lead to their own downfall as masters, and they undermined it.

how? removing education as a core social concern of the entire nation (even with the dept of education founded in the '80s), tax policies that drove out the best teachers, and shut essential schools, and attacks on liberal education in general by special interest groups that attempted to alter curriculum across the nation away from teaching independent thinking.

as so the ancient spartans did who killed their smartest slaves each year to remove potential leaders in a slave revolt, so too has the master class in america undermined public education in fear of its own slave revolt by an educated working class.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

10. This is how empires crumble from within.

Empires eat their young.

The word "corruption" comes from meanings of filth and decay as in rotting corpses. When grades and cheating matter more than learning and enlightenment, then the walking corpse is rotting from within.

[UdoKier]

11. If you got that kind of education, you were not the norm.

I agree that academic standards were higher then, but the notion that we bred a generation of independent thinkers is ludicrous. The social movements of the 60s were more a result of rock n' roll & the Beats than from public schools.

If anything the schools taught conformity and an irrational faith in the institutions of the state as benefactors of the citizenry.

Are you going to tell me the "duck and cover" films were aimed at a sophisicated, questioning audience? Or the "Commies are coming" movies?

The one thing that may have contributed is that schools used to teach civics and ethics (now that space is probably filled with multi-culti pablum).

Teaching kids civic responsibility and ethics probably led a few of them to question the unconscionable things going on arround them like segregation & the Vietnam war. And unlike previous generations, the postwar generation had the material comforts and leisure time to entertain such lofty thoughts.

Just my 2 cents.

[kodi]

13. nothing against artists, but they did not do it alone

"The social movements of the 60s were more a result of rock n' roll & the Beats than from public schools."

i don't think so. no social movement is sustainable without the participation of the masses, and the advancements made in social consciousness post-war can not be laid at jack kerouac's or the Beatles' feet. there was too much going on besides pop culture in america to think that. there was a brief moment in the country's educational processes that encouraged participatory democracy and raised it as an ideal.

you cite civics, so it was, but no more. those lessons that showed kids that they had responsibilities as well as rights and could by direct action affect the democractic process are what drove the social advancements in america, not bob dylan. we certainly did not need a weatherman to tell us which way the wind was blowing.

we were taught to read the declaration of independence and were lead to believe it actually meant something. it could be that such teaching of the lofty ideals of democracy was the up side of the propaganda war by the west in its struggle against communism, but it was tangible and taken seriously that people could make a difference by participation in the political process unlike any other time in american history.

[UdoKier]

15. Well, I don't disagree with your overall gist here, so I won't belabor it.

I just had a little problem with the ideat that the eduators of the time were actually trying to instill independent thought.

To say that it came about from the other lessons you cite makes much morre sense.

But then again, a huge number of people who grew up in that era are now the repug greedheads and fundie nutjobs that make up Dumbya's base. Do you think all that independent thought backfired to the point that they realized that looking out for number one is better than a just society?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. My school district began dumbing down

in the early 1970s, after I had left it but before my brothers had graduated.

My class was the last that was required to write a major research paper in senior year.

By the time my youngest brother was in high school, you could substitute filmmaking for one of your English courses.

They got out before the "it's okay to learn arithmetic only on a calculator" movement took hold.

It's commonplace to say that "schools were tougher when I was young," but I think it's true for those of us who graduated before 1970.

When working in a tutoring program for street kids, I happened to see what Scholastic Magazine looks like now--fluff and platitudes in large print for slow readers. It is less sophisticated than Junior Scholastic, the magazine for what would now be middle school age, was in the early 1960s.

For example, Junior Scholastic used to have simplified, but not dumbed down articles about the issues of the day. The Common Market, the precursor of the European Union, was forming, and although I had heard about it on the news, I didn't know what it was. Junior Scholastic explained what tariffs were, why the Common Market had abolished them, and what the future plans were: a common currency and free movement of goods and people. This was in a publication aimed at sixth graders through eighth graders.

They also used to feature a different country every week and interview two students, a boy and a girl, from that country, to find out about their lives.

The print was only slightly larger than today's news magazines. Nobody complained about it being too hard to understand.

[msmcghee]

12. An alternate view . .

What makes you think that smart, informed people will naturally become liberals?

I know it feels good to believe that. But Karl Rove, William F. Buckley and most of the principle neocons in government and their ilk are anything but dumb and uninformed.

I think that future liberals and conservatives are created in the first three or four years of life. In those years a child learns that the world around them and the people in it are either theirs to use for their own purposes and take advantage of if they can get away with it - or theirs to share, take care of responsibly, love and respect. I don't think it has that much to do with intelligence or school-room education.

Many children born in the late 60's and the 70's had parents that rejected standard notions of child rearing and were heavily invested in "do your own thing" type parenting.

Some wise young parents interpreted that as simply being more open to their child's legitimate needs - while teaching them to respect others.

But many parents just decided not to place any restrictions on their kids at all - they let the kids figure it all out. I think kids that were allowed to do whatever they wished - which included being a selfish bully in many cases - will almost always become conservatives.

So, IMO, rebelling so strongly without having a new enlightened sense of morality to replace the old repressive one - caused the hippie generation to raise a lot of conservative jerks, who now vote.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. And in my teaching career, I saw spoiled bratty students

actually seek out authority figures, as if they felt out of control and thought they needed someon to take charge.

Two of my snarkiest students quit school to join the Marines. (I enjoyed imagining how their drill instructor would react the first time they mouthed off.)

Others would subject themselves to brutal regimens for a sport.

Still others would become rigid, uptight religious fanatics.

In fact, this is part of my theory about why right-wing churches have such a hold over people. They've taken in all the former spoiled brats who never got any guidance on how to live as a responsible and ethical member of society and given them a few simple rules to follow.

[Elginoid]

18. I never said that intellectual curiosity leads to liberalism.

"What makes you think that smart, informed people will naturally become liberals?"

where did i ever say or even imply such a thing?

my point is that an un or under-educated populace with little or no intellectual curiosity is easier to manipulate and lie to- by playing to their more base emotions, rather than to their non-existent intellect.

[msmcghee]

26. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just offering . .

. . an alternate view.

Yours is the conventional view that I read here in dozens of posts every day. That far too many Americans are ill-informed (usually because of the corrupt RW media) and are not intellectually curious (because of our poor education system).

I'm suggesting that that is a simplistic view.

I think there are more basic differences between conservative and liberal personalities. I assume that it would be very unlikely in this election for a conservative to vote for Kerry or a liberal to vote for Bush. That wasn't always the case. But the conservatives have purposely radicalized politics over the last twenty years and made it far more emotional than intellectual. Guess why.

In this charged atmosphere things like intellectual curiosity and facts have little to do with who people vote for. We are all subject to the spell. Bush (I know, it's a stretch) and Kerry both have some good qualities but you won't find many conservatives these days able to appreciate Kerry's and vice versa.

For the vast majority of voters there is nothing that either candidate could say, no intellectual argument they could make, that would change anyone's mind. It is all a matter of emotion now. The undecideds who will determine the winner will choose the candidate who they feel will make Americas safer from the terrorists - who they feel will make them happier in the future.

When a person's life is threatened, that's always the way they'll make decisions. And that plays perfectly into the radicalization of politics that the conservatives have pulled off. Long before this election season, liberals were generally percieved as the intellectual, sensitive do-gooders who don't want to hurt anyone's feelings (except for the red-neck's and conservatives') - and the pukes were considered to be the hot-headed manly types ready to kick some ass - liberal ass, Arab ass, whatever it takes to get the job done. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out.

Last night I watched Bush and Kerry on a campaign update segment on PBS. The differences were stark. Bush rails on with his phony Texas accent about knowin' how to handle the terra'ists - pulling punch lines right and left about Kerry's flip-floppin' ways. He was connecting directly to the audience's emotions. He has a very good instinct for that - and he's been expertly coached. People don't mind his verbal screw-ups because the words don't matter. It's the delivery - straight to the gut. The verbal screw-ups even reinforce the feeling that the words don't count with Bush, he's got your mojo.

When we criticize Bush's verbal screw-ups we reinforce the image they have created for us in the voters' minds - they see us liberals as that geeky girl in class who would correct someone's pronunciation and then expect praise from the teacher for that.

Kerry is still delivering the intellectual reasons (granted with slightly more passion lately) that the listeners will then have to translate into feelings (if they want to spend that energy) before they can have any effect on their choice. I think it was Lee Atwater who said that if you're explaining, you already lost. He was right.

But this stuff is not rocket science. Any good marketing/PR firm manages these things for their clients every day. I'm afraid that our Dem leadership believes that PR and marketing is demeaning because we are right, and we therefore shouldn't have to resort to such tactics. In their minds, we are that little girl - and Rove is making us pay the price.

Every salesman knows that you have to sell the sizzle. People do not buy things for logical reasons. They decide in their gut - then they dig up the intellectual reasons to justify their choice.

In our guts, we liberals will vote for Kerry because we hate Bush - not because Kerry inspires any great confidence (based on his campaign performance to date). And in the vast majority of cases we were liberals long before we ever entered a classroom.

[MissMarple]

19. Oh, I don't think people have changed that much.

Elections have always been partisan and contentious. And the American public has been both gullible and biddable and wise and contrary. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed.

[Elginoid]

21. I don't think that enough have suffered enough yet-

but ultimately, Americans as a whole just aren't all that sophisticated.

in just about any other industrialized nation in the world, if a leader or candidate invoked his god or his religion as much as * does, he'd be laughed off the ballot.
instead, the would-be faithful rubes flock to his side.

on the world stage, it's just plain embarrassing.

[LWolf]

22. Ok. I have questions, though.

I don't disagree with the gist of your post. It's the title:

"This election was lost in the public schools over the past 40 years."

Blaming everything on public education, and teachers, has become a mantra that is so widespread I can't seem to get through a day without hearing it a few times. This irritates the hell out of me.

As a teacher, I could rant for days...literally days, about the faults in the public ed system. I've lived 'em all for 21 years now. But the constant "blame game" directed at schools and teachers always leave out some key factors in the condition of public ed:

We are not separate from the general population. We are a part of it. Whatever social changes are occurring in our culture are also occurring in our classrooms, and in the system. All the people that work in the system, and all of the families they serve, are part of the social fabric. We don't stand outside and direct it. We are nothing more than a reflection of the society we exist in.

We are controlled by politics and politicians. Thus the predictable pendulum swing from one philosophy/methodology/agenda to another. If you want to bitch about it, bitch about the politicians and administrators, writing legislation and setting policies. And remember; they aren't "public education." We are. The people in the classrooms, teachers and students. Isn't that where public education is supposed to be happening? Instead it happens outside the classroom, far removed from the realities of the day, for the enrichment/status/careers of people who never did the job, or people who left the job to move "up the ladder."

So the questions...what is your solution? Are you amenable to leaving the blame game behind and doing something to address the problems?

If so...where would you start? Personally, I'd start by taking the politics out of public ed.

[DeepModem Mom]

23. Education in history and government seems lacking --

there seems to be little understanding of what this country is supposed to be, the precepts on which it was founded (including separation of church and state), the importance of checks and balances, the stability we owe to our strong two-centrist-party system (with opposition respected).

On edit: I agree with post #22 above. I do not fault teachers and students for this shortcoming -- it's whoever sets educational policy.

[noamnety]

24. NCLB at its best

Standardized testing promotes a culture of regurgitating facts. I doubt that concept is lost on the current administration. The more they can force classrooms to teach to a test, the more unquestioning supporters they will foster.

[randr]

25. Exactly! The dumbing of America

can be seen as an intentional result of conservative interference in our educational system.
Back in the 70's when the conservative revolution started, the conservative activists entered the political field by running for school boards and local county positions. They systematically devalued the education that the last two generations of Americans received by cutting taxes for education and controlling the purchase of text books.
We are living the results of years of neglect.