America Dumbing Down?

What does author Ashley Merryman, Harvard Musicologist Aaron Berkowitz and Two term President of The National Academy of Sciences and Editor-in-chief of Science Magazine Bruce Alberts have in common? They were all found in one place at one time…the place being The Charlie Rose Show, the time was July 15 2010. They were all there, along with Charlie, to discuss the declining state of American education.

Ashley told us of a Mr. Johnathan Plucker who, while in China discussing the differences between the American and Chinese education systems and approaches to teaching, spoke about our turning away from our traditional curriculum and methods of teaching and the embracing of the new “No child left behind” method. He explained this in some detail and when his words were translated into Chinese, he was indeed surprised and confused when everyone started laughing at what he said. When he inquired as to why they were all laughing, he was told that America is adopting the old Chinese methods of teaching while they are vigorously pursuing the old and traditional ways of American teaching.

This old American method being the art of using Divergent and Convergent thinking, letting the students gather “tactile” experience by actually taking learned knowledge and applying it in the field, thereby using the challenges given, to formulate solutions in a real and applicable manner, as opposed to just learning a bunch of facts and not being able to use and impliment them in the field…commonly known as Rote Learning.

Rote learning was looked upon by Mr Alberts as a retardant way of teaching. Rote learning is a learning technique which avoids understanding of a subject and instead focuses on memorization.
I may add my own two cents here and also include the adoption of teaching Creationism in the classroom, as anything other than a history lesson in Religious Activism and delirium gone wild, as also a retardation of the progressive education process and a throw back to the Neanderthal era. We shall soon have the students worshiping fire and images of Jesus on slices of pizza, to the delight of their delirious teachers and parents.

I can only come up with one example when thinking of the extended results of our current Rote Learning system, and that is to offer the image of George Dumbya Bush. He , in my honest opinion is the perfect outcome, of that type of non-intelligent, ” lack of thinking ” old Chinese Communist educational process of do as you are told by the Maoists…or die.

Welcome to America 2010.