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and I'm not making it up about the sputnik generation. I was part of it, and if you do some research, I think you can probably pull up a reference or two to it.
According to the history channel, a lot of drastic changes we are experiencing as a people/nation came out of the late 1960s, partly the Viet Nam war, and a lot from the so-called Hippie generation. I lived through this all, so I hope I'm not being biased.
I had never given it much thought, but I was watching the History Channel the other morning, and they attributed the rise of the religious right to the Hippie movement (which they then traced back all the way to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation). Anyway, the religious right movement is something I find very scary, and it apparently started as a backlash to the freedoms espoused in the late 1960s. I wasn't really part of that movejment; I was in college in my dress for success mode studying math and once walked by a demontration. My ex was actually tear gassed in his dormitory during the riots.
You need to have been there to really grasp it, it is really alien to thinking today.
Anyway, the decline in education stems from then, partially with more freedom and wanting to escape from The Establishment. A lot of people from that generation are now running a lot of liberal-oriented things, especially education. I'm not pro-either, but that's just the way it is. This has led to the idea that self esteem is really important. I tend to disagree. My lack of self esteem is what drove me to achieve when I was in my 20s and 30s, not to what I am now, close to retirment.
Anyway, there is also the MTV generation and this total adoration for sports figures. When my daughter was in school I met so many parents spending 4-5 nights a week with athletics intending their children to get athletic scholarships to college. Well, they seemed to forget there are also ACADEMIC scholarships, and this is primarily what higher education is about.
I don't knock practical knowledge; in the 24 yrs I was married to my ex I would sometimes have killed for someone who knew how to use a screwdriver w/o kllling himself. But still, we do need very bright highly educated people, not necessarily to lead, but to keep a grasp on very complex ideas and situations. We don't need a lot of them, but we do need some.
Anyway, I spent over 40 yrs in higher academics, in Iowa, which used to be a leader in literacy (and where almost all of your national standardized tests are developed), and so it is difficult for me to get used to the low levels of knowledge people can be satisfied with, but there's a place for everybody, and everybody needs his place.
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My ex is a professional educator; I've gotten lots of info from him - leopold/loeb
