When it comes to creating a failing education system, nobody is better than the United States.  They’ve got an uncanny knack for looking at something terrible and coming up with a worse idea.  No Child Left Behind continues to be a terrible idea, and now got an excellent principle fired because she has the misfortune of doing an amazing job at turning around a school with large immigrant populations.  You’d think that alone would be enough, but that wasn’t what really caught my eye.  Americans bring failure to a whole new level.   We’re not content with failing to teach math, we’ve turned to teaching complex artistic abstractions and no, not in art class.  We’ve cut that out completely because taxing people to pay for education is socialism.  We can’t have the children of the poor learning; they might become middle class and not need to rely on government handouts.  Remember, if you learn one thing, investing in people instead of a multi-billion dollar mega corporation is socialism.

                Now ask yourself the famous Bush question, “Is our children learning?” Now answer this question from the article:

A sample fourth-grade question: “Use Xs to draw an array for the sum of 4+4+4.”

Now, my guess is, after getting past the “wtf” stage and the “well no wonder they failed, I’m working on master’s degree and don’t know what they’re talking about stage,” I think they might mean draw something like this:

XXXX + XXXX + XXXX = XXXXXXXXXXXX

Then again, I learned my multiplication tables in the third grade.  The point is if this is what we’re expecting out of fourth graders, our problem isn’t testing, it’s a set of standards so low that our students completely fall behind.  One of my biggest beefs with how we teach history—aside from the fact that we do ourselves a disfavor by teaching bullshit about Columbus, like he thought the world was flat, that later have to be corrected—is that you simply continue to rehash the same information year after year.  Certainly by high school you’ve got the general narrative of events that you can stop wasting time reteaching everything and spread things out so that you can go more in depth.   There’s a reason people know next to nothing about history, because unless they teach themselves, that’s all they get.   I used to think the period between the civil war and WWII were highly boring periods of history.  Most people wouldn’t think about things too much, but the first volume of Das Capital was published in 1867, two years after the American Civil War.  Marx himself had actually commented on the war; a war, which, was started, in part, by the influence of transcendentalists like Emerson (partly acting off of Margaret Fuller—who took a lead from the European revolutions in 1848 [during that time period between Napoleon and WWI that they tend to teach was so peaceful in Europe, neglecting that quite a bit of mainland Europe decided to have a go]).   As for class, you might get to hear about John Brown, minus his transcendentalist connections or why his raid actually helped to start the war.  Simply put, each action has a reaction, the abolitionists went violent, the South responded in kind.  As for the entire socialist movement in America you’ll get a few words about Eugene Debs; let’s see Obama get nearly a million votes (3.5% of the population, down from 6.5% that voted Socialist the last election) running out of prison. 

Though, I have a very easy solution for most of our education woes.  It’s cheap, efficient, and pretty much only requires that we teach students to read.  Assign them a list of Wikipedia articles.  Let’s face it; teaching kids to teach themselves is the best thing you can ever accomplish.  

You’re welcome America. Now stop teaching bullshit mathematics.