Spoiler alert: by dismantling public education in the US. This is a well written article, and I can state from my own firsthand experience as a public school teacher in NYC back in the 80s, that this has been the plan for over half a century. The goal is a 2 tiered society in which you're either affluent or in servitude. They want to make public elementary ed so bad that even if you could afford higher ed (which most people can't), you would be unprepared to do the higher level work required. In fact, this happened in my family recently. We had many struggles with public schools with our daughter over the years, and we couldn't afford quality private schools. She squeaked her way to a h.s. diploma (which was a for-profit charter school that graduates everyone to keep their stats up and the taxpayer money rolling in), and then flunked out of (expensive, out of state) college within 1 semester.Â
I've reached the conclusion that it's better to homeschool if you are parents with college degrees yourselves. Too late for me, but maybe this will help someone else.
Laura F, thank you for sharing. I think there is a lot of truth to this too. My own parents - from the Depression Era - have seen this coming for awhile. My mother used to call it "dumbing down America" so we wouldn't know the difference of maltreatment and be so gullible. Just search that expression and you'll see the various warnings out there. Just for kicks - compare math textbooks among the early grades - today and back then.Â
I agree, public school education is dumbed down (at least in the Florida public school my daughter attends). She will be a freshman in a public high school in August. This child is in 8th grade, yet never seems to have any homework, and is not allowed to take home textbooks. Somehow she easily makes straight A's with very little effort. However, she can't seem to write essays without my help, has difficulty reading the same literature and the same books that I read at her age, and her spelling is atrocious. She can't remember the year women won the right to vote, and geography must not be taught well in her school because she has never heard of some countries, like Panama and Ecuador for example. (Yes this is my fault, as a parent I'm ultimately responsible for her education, but I do have to work for a living). I had to teach her cursive myself so she could write her own signature and read her grandpa's letters to her -- because cursive was not taught in the elementary school she attended.
I attended Catholic school, and literally, it took me hours to do my homework. We had to buy our textbooks, but at least we owned them; we could keep them and take them home to study. My daughter is not getting that practice, because most of the time, she doesn't have homework, nor does she have textbooks to bring home to study. How can students develop critical thinking skills and retain math skills, etc. without homework practice, and without the textbooks to take home and study? If she were to attend a Catholic high school, she would probably struggle, perhaps even flunk certain subjects. I'm worried that her public school education won't prepare her for college. She was accepted into an accelerated AICE program for high school next year, which supposedly is more rigorous, so I'm hoping that will make the college transition easier, but I'm concerned about the extreme shock factor when she realizes she actually has to put in some hard work.Â
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