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Dumbing Down America
by James Glaser March 5, 2012 
President Obama wants every American student to be able to get a college education. This may sound a bit strange at first, but I think it would be better if he set our goals a bit lower. We should start with getting all of our students to get a high school education. Here are some High School graduation rates from ABC News:
This is what NEWSWEEK reported:
Right now we have millions of adult Americans who never finished high school, and in another twenty years we will have another 25 million joining them if our education system stays the way it is now. Sure, President Obama is thinking about successful kids. You know the ones he's talking about—kids who have it together and whose family made sure they finished high school. While it would be great if all those who finished high school could go on to college, what about the rest? When I was in school, getting a score of 68 on a test meant that I failed, and with a graduation rate of 68.8% our national education system has failed. That's the national average, but our most populated state, California, has a dismal rate of 62.7%. Sad to say. many school districts graduate less than 50% and some less than 25%. So, what happens if Obama makes it possible for all those who graduated from high school to go on to college? Will we just be creating a wider divide in this country? Right now there is a lot of talk about the rich and the poor—the 99% of "us" verses the 1% of the rich, and how the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are not. What happens to this country when we start talking about the smart and the dumb? When politicians give a speech, they have people who dumb it down so that it can be understood by the majority of Americans, you know, no big or uncommon words. What they are trying to do is have the text be understandable to a middle school student. Right now, every time a politician gives a speech, they have a person on the side signing for the benefit of the hearing impaired. Soon, they will need to have people who can interpret what was said for those who have lived here their whole life, but are not educated enough to understand the concepts the politician is trying to get across. What does it do if a third of our workers are functionally illiterate? This from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Do you ever wonder why we have such low voter turnout? Would you go to vote if you knew you would have to ask for help in reading the ballot? No non-reader likes to let people know they can't read. Sure, you can blame it on the internet and on e-books, but there are other reasons that newspapers are folding and book stores are closing. When over a third of your potential customer base can't use your product, your sales are going to plummet. Why do you think fast food restaurants took the numbers off of their cash registers and replaced them with pictures of their products? Why do many instruction manuals for products look like comic books? Too many employees and customers can't read. So I say to President Obama, yes, by all means every child who has the ability should have the opportunity to go to college or some form of higher learning, but don't split our country by forgetting those our education system is leaving behind. As a nation we could ignore it when we were losing 10 or 15 percent of our students, but when that number starts creeping up to 30, 40 and even over 50 percent of the school age population, we are in big trouble. In fact we are dumbing down America. |
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