House of Eratosthenes

Caroline Baum finishes strong and I supposed I shouldn’t excerpt that part of it, but hey. It’s a wonderful column that just might save your weekend, that happens to have been put together upside-down. The final note is a perfect summary for all that came before.

For every number homegrown America-haters spit out to show our best days are behind us, there’s an offsetting statistic that points to our underlying strength. The solution isn’t a war of words or statistics. It’s the recognition that many of the characteristics that made the U.S. the envy of the world are still intact or begging to be resuscitated.

The naysayers don’t appreciate American exceptionalism and never will.

I was particularly surprised by the GDP per capita statistic, and even moreso when it was broken down further into GDP per employed person.

You know, it’s awfully funny how we think about this stuff. I doubt you’ll have any trouble at all finding an agreement across party/ideology lines that our country’s employment picture, in the near future as well as the distant one, is going to be affected in large part not only by how many of our children are educated, but by the depth and content of that education. Can they translate a hexadecimal number, can they refute from memory a quote Alexander Pope didn’t really say, can they name the thirteenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This concern is supposed to be driving a number of sympathies with the public school teachers’ unions, the skirmish currently taking place in Wisconsin being a case in point.

But nobody ever seems to stop and ask what our teachers are doing about this. There are a lot of pieces that have to be present and working in a child’s education before said child is given any kind of a boost in his potential to contribute to the country’s GDP. “Yay, he got a passing grade” or “Yay, he passed the state competency exam” isn’t going to get it done. I think, deep down, we all realize this…

So where are the follow-up questions? Especially from those who sympathize with the teachers. They, after all, are generally the ones quickest to spout off with the doom-and-gloom statistics Caroline Baum is offsetting here.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

But nobody ever seems to stop and ask what our teachers are doing about this.

Well duh! They’re skipping school and taking their students with them to exempt themselves from the financial realities of our recession/depression and public sector union over reach. Don’t you watch the news? 😉
- philmon | 02/26/2011 @ 08:48
The ones that aren’t cancelling classes and protesting…are bitching about being laid-off, how the schools don’t have enough funding, how Bush’s No Child Left Behind (written by Ted Kennedy) Act made their job harder, how they have to deal with so many discipline problems, diverse student bodies, administration, and irate parents, that it’s lucky the kids learn anything at all.

Makes you wonder how countries with far fewer resources per-pupil manage to get the job done, and better.
- cylarz | 02/26/2011 @ 20:26
They get the job done because if ever those kids stop paying attention they call it “not paying attention” and they react in a way that fits the situation.

We call it “he has a disability.”

It’s funny how, when you have an environment where everyone who “needs” one-on-one attention, gets it, suddenly a whole bunch of kids need it. And when you have an environment where nobody gets one-on-one attention no matter how much they may need it, no one needs it anymore.
- mkfreeberg | 02/26/2011 @ 20:52
I think simple ignorance plays a part in it too. Not trying to let folks off the hook — I’m all for sticking it to knee-jerk, pro-union, it’s-for-The-Children!! types — but unless you’ve recently come into contact with the special hell that is the American educational system, you might not realize how bad it has gotten.

A have a good friend — a dedicated, hard-core, rah-rah yay-unions lefty, natch — who is training to become a teacher right now. Her “coursework” is the most absurd mush I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across, and she complains constantly about the welter of pettifogging bureaucratic regulations that regiment almost every minute of her classroom day. And then she gets no support from the school district, and parents are always in her face about why Johnny didn’t get an A on everything when she’s not being hauled off to mandatory diversity seminars.

Yeah, I know — if she could make the incandescently obvious connections between all this she wouldn’t be a liberal. But that’s not important right now. I’m simply trying to point out that many folks might not be aware that all those “Americans are seventy-fifth out of fifty in international math scores” anecdotes are just the tip of the iceberg, and that it’s actually far, far worse. And don’t even get me started on college, where I actually do have quite a bit of recent, hands-on experience. If kids come out of grade school knowing anything other than how to put a condom on a banana and the complete lyrics of Justin Bieber, it’s news to me. The sheer breadth and depth of their ignorance routinely renders me –me!– speechless. Between the “self-esteem” and the “learning disabilities,” I’m about at the end of my tether. And these are the bright ones, the ones motivated enough — or with sufficiently involved parents — to actually have a go at college. Oy oy oy oy oy [puts head in hands, starts weeping softly].

[And oh, the “learning disabilities.” Learning disability…. ninja please. You can play World of Warcraft for ten hours straight, but somehow you can’t read ten pages a night without ritalin, aromatherapy, and a life coach?]
- Severian | 02/27/2011 @ 07:10

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Saturday, February 26th, 2011