The Stupid Science Invades Education

            It was a standing joke at the college I attended that the psych majors were the shallowest and least sensitive of all students.  Also, not coincidentally, they were broadly acknowledged as the dumbest students.  Psychology was the major of the neurotic and the stupid. 

            It is no wonder that these same people, inheriting the field of education, have turned it on its head, made it unworkable.  What else would you expect the dumbest students to do?   They could never make it with the highly workable education system that America had developed from the time of Jefferson.  So they changed it and changed it and changed it until it became the abortion that we see today.

            We read with wonderment that Lincoln and Mark Twain and other great names in American history had only a 6^th Grade education.  What we fail to realize is that a 6^th Grade Education in the 19^th Century was equivalent to a college degree in the 21^st Century.  Not just equivalent, but superior.  I have seen a typical final exam for graduation from 6^th Grade in the 1890’s.  Not one in ten modern college graduates could pass it.

            No wonder people have to buy software to teach their children math and reading.  The schools aren’t doing it anymore.   There is even a grassroots movement afoot to pass laws to force math teachers to teach the times tables and English teachers to teach phonetics.  Why in the hell do the teachers have to be forced to do their jobs?  What in the hell have they been doing up til now?   Something else, I assure you.  Fuzzy math and the look-say method and cooperative learning and values clarification and antidepressants … and … and …  If it is unworkable and ruins the young minds entrusted to their care, the education system has introduced it and sworn by it. 

            And then they come back to the taxpayers pleading for higher appropriations because they work so hard and care so much.