Reports have been stating what many people have suspected. Millions of public school children are not excelling academically. This is mostly true when it comes to reading and math, the two essential subjects for education beyond formal education. If someone can’t read well, it means that advancement in jobs that require reading skills is not going to happen.

Of course, there will always be good students. Most government schools have schools within schools. The best students are given their own track of courses and almost never find themselves in the classes with inferior or disinterested students. It’s always been this way.

Did you know that “more than half of first-year students at Harvard failed an entrance exam in writing — in 1874”? (NY Times) I’ll bet the 1874 writing exam was more difficult than the ones that are required for someone entering college today.

Every new program — from No Child Left Behind to Common Core — has not fixed the problem. Teaching basic skills at the lower grades is essential. They may be repetitive and hard at first (even boring), but they pay off in the long run. Once children learn to read, and almost any child can learn by age five, a world of learning is open to them.

Not everything can be blamed on teachers and schools since many students do excel. Money is not a factor. A child can learn to read with and do basic math for less than $40 in materials.

• Baltimore schools spend a staggering $16,00 per student — the fourth-highest rate in the nation — and still an investigation by Fox45’s Project Baltimore revealed that at six city schools, not one student scored proficient on either the statewide tests for English and math.
• Three of four African-American boys in California classrooms failed to meet reading and writing standards on the most recent round of testing, … More than half of black boys scored in the lowest category on the English portion of the test, trailing their female counterparts. The disparity reflects a stubbornly persistent gender gap in reading and writing scores that stretches across ethnic groups.

What’s going to happen to these young people when they enter the job market? They are going to be unemployable, especially when many of them can’t read a clock. “A new study shows that only 1-in-10 Oklahoma City kids ages 6-12 own a watch. And only 1-in-5 knows how to read it.”

What’s more important to many educators today is Social Justice, transgender rights, tearing down history, probably a history most kids have not been taught. Victimhood is the basis of today’s government school education curriculum. It may not be at your school today, but it’s in enough of them that it will have an effect on the nation in the future, especially for businesses that are looking for employees.

Only 37 percent of U.S. 12th graders were prepared for college-level coursework in mathematics and reading in 2016, but many public school districts have become fixated on the latest progressive trend of “social and emotional learning.” (Breitbart)

Competency factors aside, we are raising a generation of social misfits who cannot deal with the real world. Consider this:

According a recent poll administered in the state of Virginia, half of Virginia residents are more concerned about proper safe spaces than the issue of free speech. Virginia Commonwealth University’s Office of Public Policy Outreach, who conducted the poll over the summer, found that 50 percent of Virginians supported “protecting everyone on campus from discrimination, even if it means there are negative consequences for voicing one’s opinions.”

“Discrimination” now means, “if you disagree with me, you’re discriminating against me.” That’s the way Google sees it.

The good news is that many people are reacting to the nonsense with their feet and dollars:

The University of Missouri is home to perhaps the most infamous example of student “safe space” protests, a 2015 incident where a professor was captured on video harassing a student journalist. Now, the school is facing a substantial drop in enrollment, fewer attendees at football games, closing dorms and alumni who don’t want to support Mizzou anymore…. Enrollment is down by 2,000 students, and Mizzou is starting the school year with the smallest incoming class since 1999. Seven dorms have been closed, and the university has announced up to 100 layoffs, with around 300 more layoffs expected in the near future. (The Blaze)

Carl Sagan wrote the following in his book The Demon-Haunted World in 1995:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

As I write, the number one video cassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. Beavis and Butthead remains popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.

I agree with Sagan’s assessment of what was going on in our nation in 1995. He wasn’t the first person to make such a “prediction.” The thing of it is, it is Sagan’s matter-only worldview that has contributed to this mess. Let’s not forget that the secularists educate more than 90 percent of our nation’s children. There is no longer a personal transcendent reference point. Sagan and today’s New Atheists have dispelled God from the cosmos. As a result, people try to find meaning elsewhere but with little satisfaction. The opioid crisis is not first a medical crisis; it’s a worldview crisis, a way to escape from the cosmos that Carl Sagan said “is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”((Cosmos ((New York: Random House, 1980), 4.)).