Below is just a tiny clip from a fantastic article that I really encourage everyone to read. I must give Jaspar credit for my finding this, it was in his evening edition today.

The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces

By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01_pf.html

"The odds that my daughter will marry a blockhead are about 15 to 1."

Thomas Jefferson...roughly translated

Some things never change

Our founding fathers, the rich land/slave owning, white males, they were, were also the best educated and informed of their generation. While the system they put in place did everything it could to insure that other rich land/slave owning white males would be the office holders of the day, they did it because they felt ignorance was a rule among the general populace. They had so little trust in the general populace that President and Senators were purposely set up NOT to be direct elections from the people. The great middle class that we have had in the United States was a fairly recent, post WWII, occurrence. The education of the masses for other than "production" purposes is a progressive and radical idea. The regressives of the new right have always fought the idea of Federal education. A truly educated populace would never have had the number of "Reagan Democrats" voting against their own self-interest. When the NeoCon talks about education he talks about an education that involves making the average worker a better drone/cog in the business/Walmart model, where everyone works for the mega corporation for just enough salary to spend all their money at the mega corporations' stores. The arrogance of ignorance is praised as a virtue, for it keeps the sheeple in line. Education is the key to a true democracy and that is something the status quo will always fear, for a true democracy would result in real change. So maybe it isn't the dumbing of America but a continuation of the ignorance, even making it something to be proud of that is different.

Great thread!

If you want examples of what the article is about, read the comments page. Yup, Americans, at least a lot of them, are dumb and proud of it.



Comments link: Comments

THANKS FOR POSTING THE INFORMATION, LEFTY!

I just sent a copy of it to my daughter, who is a high school English teacher!

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/education/20graduation.html?ei=5065&en=59d68494c9665a24&ex=1206676800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print]States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School
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Bush's NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND allows for more lies to be told about high school dropouts! I hope someday the name BUSH replaces the name PINOCCHIO as synomous with LYING!

JACKSON, Miss. — When it comes to high school graduation rates, Mississippi keeps two sets of books.

One team of statisticians working at the state education headquarters here recently calculated the official graduation rate at a respectable 87 percent, which Mississippi reported to Washington. But in another office piled with computer printouts, a second team of number crunchers came up with a different rate: a more sobering 63 percent.

The state schools superintendent, Hank Bounds, says the lower rate is more accurate and uses it in a campaign to combat a dropout crisis.

“We were losing about 13,000 dropouts a year, but publishing reports that said we had graduation rate percentages in the mid-80s,” Mr. Bounds said. “Mathematically, that just doesn’t work out.”

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

California, for example, sends to Washington an official graduation rate of 83 percent but reports an estimated 67 percent on a state Web site. Delaware reported 84 percent to the federal government but publicized four lower rates at home.

The multiple rates have many causes. Some states have long obscured their real numbers to avoid embarrassment. Others have only recently developed data-tracking systems that allow them to follow dropouts accurately.

The No Child law is also at fault. The law set ambitious goals, enforced through sanctions, to make every student proficient in math and reading. But it established no national school completion goals.

Check this data out.

This is for my area (I live in Starkville, where we have the states largest public land grant university). Also, this data is from 2006, but has not improved. You can go here to see the school districts problems with graduation and their pathetic attempts at raising the rates.



http://www.cdispatch.com/articles/2006/ ... tate01.txt

This report isn't about education so much as it is a commentary on our society as a whole. What's wrong with a country like ours when we aren't outraged by so many things that are going on around us? What's wrong with a nation that allows its president and its representatives to carry on a disastrous and unnecessary war for over five years, with no end in sight? What's wrong with the American people when they care more about their ipods than they do about those flag-draped coffins coming home everyday? What's wrong with a nation's people who can't answer correctly the number of troops who have died in Iraq?

We've become a nation of STEPFORD DUMMIES.

[url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/03/28/notes032808.DTL&nl=fix]Free iPhone with Every Outrage!
Bored with the 'war' on Iraq? 4,000 dead merely induce shrugging? Need an incentive to keep caring?
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by Mark Morford

It is a time for a radical rethinking. It is a time to reconsider it all, to perhaps reassess how we are presenting and digesting America's most costly and lost and unwinnable and brutal and ignoble and inept and insidious and depressing war that's not really a war; it's time to revolutionize how it's all packaged and broadcast and pumped like hot sticky misery into the heavily narcotized American cultural bloodstream because, oh my God, we are sick sick sick of it all, and only getting sicker.

This is the problem: People are getting bored. Check that: People are already bored, insanely so, have been bored for a few years now, so utterly and thoroughly jaded and burned out on stories and pictures and woeful tales of Iraq and death and Baghdad and cluster bombs and burned-out trucks and limbless soldiers and flag-draped coffins and photos of a grinning George W. Bush posing with a horribly burned, mutilated U.S. soldier, it might as well be Lindsay Lohan snorting blow off the dashboard of an Escalade.

We have now accomplished 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Did you see that headline? Did it cause anything but a stab of pain and a heavy sigh and a need to click a different headline, maybe the one about cute baby polar bears in Germany? Did you simply mash and mix that inglorious number with tales of wretched economic meltdown and torture and health care system collapse and roll it all into a little ball of sadness and hurl it at the wall of forgetfulness? You are not alone.

Yes, 4,000 dead soldiers was a miserable milestone indeed, one that doesn't even hint at the roughly 100,000 wounded and brain-damaged and clinically depressed U.S. soldiers and simply shrugs off the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, a number which is probably far closer to 1 million but hey, they're just civilians and they were stupid enough to live in Iraq in the first place and therefore the military couldn't care less about them and besides, all those stats are just boring too, so who's counting?

Certainly not the media. Sure enough, war coverage has apparently dropped to less than a fifth of what it was even a year ago, as increasingly desperate, budget-strapped news organizations understand that everyone's exhausted by incessant death tolls and no one wants to read about suicide bombers or failed surges or Bush's staggering ineptitude anymore, even if John McCain is now wobbling around the nation trying to defend Bush's idiocy and rally the frothy, paranoid faithful by actually suggesting that what the world needs right now is not less war, not the U.S. out of Iraq, but rather the U.S. into everywhere else. 100 more years! 100 more years!





BUSH POSING WITH A HORRIBLY BURNED US SOLDIER


PEOPLE ARE GETTING BORED

Mark Morford is fantastic. Thank you Catherine for a wonderful addition to an already very important thread.