According to a recent study released by The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and reported by Fox News, the United States’ education system is putting the country’s national security at risk. Yes, that CFR; the same elitist group that thinks they should be running the world. Apparently, it has finally dawned on them that the dumbing-down of America has gone too far and now they see a national security risk.
The CFR task force was co-chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein and included former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
“For starters, we don’t have nearly enough people who are capable in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math,” said former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, a member of the council’s task force that wrote the report, titled “U.S. Education Reform and National Security.”
[…]
“We don’t have people who know and understand foreign languages and other cultures,” said Spelling, pointing out that U.S. children are ranked No. 17 in the world for language skills. “On any given day, there are hundreds of (job) vacancies for people who speak Pashtu and Arabic, and Mandarin and on and on.”
The report goes on to define five threats to national security resulting from America’s educational failures.
- Threats to economic growth and competitiveness
- U.S. physical safety
- Intellectual Property
- U.S. global awareness
- U.S. unity and cohesion
So, the elitist have come to the conclusion that they need the masses to be well-educated. They claim they see a threat to national security. I don’t argue with that. But, I suspect what they really see is a threat to their own privileged life style. They now see that the unwashed masses need an education much closer to what their children receive. And, believe me their children do receive a much different education than our children receive. Blogger, The republican Mother, has written several posts on this subject in the past. Maybe if she comes by today, she will leave us some links.
The CFR report has three recommendations. Let’s take a look:
- Expanding state standards to offer more lessons necessary for safeguarding national security, like science and language.
- Provide parents and students school choice
- Conduct “national security readiness audits” of all schools and hold them accountable if they’re not meeting standards.
I suppose that I should be glad that the elites have finally recognized that we have a serious problem with our system of education in America. It is a national crisis. But, unfortunately, the elites see themselves and government as the solution. When I try to imagine what these “national security readiness audits” would look like, I have visions of DHS Brown-Shirts busting into a classroom and dragging off the teacher to a re-education camp.
You and I know that government is not the solution to our lousy public education system. Education, like any product or service, will be best when there is competition, when teachers are rewarded based on merit rather than seniority, and when parents understand there is nothing more important than the education of their children.
Well, that’s what I’m thinking. What are your thoughts?
The education system in America is so politically correct now. While no one will say it publicly, the purpose of education now is not to impart knowledge but to build self-esteem! So who cares if our kids can’t read or suck at math. Let’s start an anti-bullying campaign.
And let’s talk about why Johnny has two mommies.
The solution is simple. 1) remove all safety nets for the young and the stupid. 2) Get government completely out of primary and secondary education. Privatize it and run it like a business. 3) No more government grants for people to get useless college degrees.
This would bring down the cost of education and focus the minds of the students, teaching them that if they don’t learn something useful (doesn’t have to be physics, we need plumbers and carpenters too) their life will suck.
Getting government out of education is a must. But, parents must learn there is more to raising kids than than providing them a loving home. If the perents don’t get involved, nothing much will change.
We need to model our education on the system we had in the 50s-early 60s… My father-in-law was an engineer for Lockheed before retirement. About a year ago, when he was turning 80, he was asked to return to work for them part time.
I am a product of the 50s and 60s. It was better then, Edge, but the world has changed and children need a much better system.
Solution:
(1) Privatize it, privatize it, privatize it.
(2) Give an education tax credit to families with school age children equivalent or 80% of what we are currently spending.
(3) Remove the shackles of choice of schools. The efficient will survive. The inefficient will die.
(4) Make teaching positions an open-shop job (no need to belong to a union).
(5) Close the Federal Education Dept.
#5 on your list would go a long way to reforming education. Arne Duncan is a ham-fisted dweeb.
These people scare me, KS.
We are in 100% agreement.
Gee, I’m glad I came by! Firstly, people think about education from their own frame of reference – when they went to school. But the American public education system started to suck long, long before the ’50s. Allow me to give you some milestones in the progressives’ 100 year plan to dumb us down deliberately:
* 1895 General Education Board established, funded by Rockefeller and Carnegie Money
* 1910 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace founded – the founding minutes incuded the goals of commandeering public education and also taking over American History education at the colleigiate level.
http://therepublicanmother.blogspot.com/2011/11/my-grandpas-english-book.html
*1918 – Alexander Inglis writes The Principles of Secondary Education, which is chock full of sick eugenicist crap.
http://therepublicanmother.blogspot.com/2012/01/history-its-your-birthright.html
Please check out John Taylor Gattos’ Underground History of Education for a total footnoted hashout of every socialist/progressive who’s been involved with literally tearing our country apart and the money behind them. It’s been going on a lot longer than anyone realizes.
When entering the service, draftees had to take a literacy test to see how well they could read. Observe:
WW1 – 98% literacy
WW2 – 96 % literacy
Korea – 81% ruh roh (mostly schooled in the 1940s)
Vietnam – 73%
See a pattern?
Also check out Charlotte Iserbyt’s masterwork, the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, a chronological listing of every important document and book these progressive Orwell people have written. She was fired from the Dept. of Ed for not going along with it, under blessed Ronald Reagan.
She says beware the “privatization” angle, because what’s going to happen is a whole lot of crony capitalism to an unaccountable corporation. That’s just a Mousoillini card trick shifting a bureaucracy from gov to corp. Check out her whole study on that in this essay “The Death of Free Will”. http://www.newswithviews.com/iserbyt/iserbyt102.htm
As far as not enough kids having a STEM background, I just can’t but help to feel that that is a big, steamy load. I graduated (with a 3.4 gpa) with a degree in chemical engineering and could find no work whatsover (grad 02), and I know I was not alone. Worked out for me because I’d rather be with my kids, but there were a lot of real talented guys who had a hard time finding work. They blow all that science and math sunshine up your rear, but the manufacturing that used to employ so much of that has been Shang-haied, so to speak.
Return the authority of schools back to the communities and see what happens. That was the way it used to be before they started the whole “licensed” business, which was just to get their brainwashed minions in and phase the old-fashioned teachers (who could have 12 year olds reciting Latin and Shakespeare) phased out.
Thank you, dear friend. I hope my readers bookmark those links as I have.
Good post, goo analysis. But, there will be massive resistance from Federal, state, and local bureaucracies, who don’t want their power curtailed, and actually want the population dumbed down. Then, you’ll have the unions, who could care less about whether or not the kids learn or not anyway,
They will not go away without a fight, that’s for sure. But, some day soon, the education of our children must become the number one priority in America.
Good analysis, not much to add except why did this group come up with these thoughts? Ever the cynnic, I look for the motivation!
Good question, Bunker. My guess is this: what can’t the government do when the issue is national security?
Being the CFR, this is how I read their recommendations: They will let you have the “choice” to educate your child as long it is from their approved list of choices. You can homeschool you kids IF you play by their rules. Check out the “readiness audit”? Something tells me conservative Christians might not make their cut a few iterations into the future. I hate to impose on this thread more, but I did do a massive piece on the CFR when I started blogging to help me get my mind around them.
http://therepublicanmother.blogspot.com/2010/09/establishment-naming-names-and-tracing.html
This is the epicenter of the Elite in the US, for those who are curious to the source of the tainted fount.
I happen to agree that our poor education and teaching of US history has put our nation’s future in peril because young people don’t understand what the proper role of government should be. But having the government solve this problem certainly isn’t the answer.
Sorry, that should say “lack of teaching US history.”
I agree with so many of these comments that I’m just going to say: ditto. But I do have a (not so) funny story. My son is taking a class as a Freshman in high school called BMAS which is supposed to be a business management course. I met with the teacher at the parent night event and asked what he was teaching. He seemed sort of flumoxed. I said, “Profit and loss? Pricing? Economics?” He answered, “Well, no. We’re going to teach them how to use Power Point to create a presentation and about advertising.”
This was intro to business and they weren’t going to talk about profit and loss, or how you price a product. Instead, they were going to skirt around the far edges of the who-gives-a-shit aspects of what you might do while working. How about, “Why would someone bother to pay you for making a Power Point presentation, and how is a salary determined?” Wouldn’t that have been useful info?
Don’t worry… I teach my kid about economics at home.