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    Deliberately Dumb: Understanding America's Education Failure
    Deliberately Dumb: Understanding America's Education Failure
    Deliberately Dumb: Understanding America's Education Failure
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Deliberately Dumb: Understanding America's Education Failure

    By Donald R. Miklich

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    For decades the learning of students in the USA has been significantly inferior to that of students in almost every other developed nation. This, the public has been persuaded, threatens our national prosperity. Accordingly the federal government has launched massive, and massively expensive remediation programs. Unfortunately, these programs did not begin with scientific investigations into the cause(s) of the problem. Instead, all started with the unexamined preconception that inadequate schools and teachers were necessarily responsible. On the basis of this presumption numerous reformed school programs have been tried. Most claim success, but none has provided scientifically adequate evidence thereof. Since on international comparisons the learning of our children continues as bad as, and perhaps even worse than ever, these success claims are clearly invalid.

    The failure of our school and teacher improvements programs to increase our students' learning suggests we should have looked for causes before attempting solutions. The time is long overdue to consider the learning problem and its possible resolutions, not in terms of our naive prejudices, but instead in light of what science knows about schooling and learning. This essay attempts to begin this discussion, but to do so in a nontechnical narrative way in order that everyone can usefully participate, whether or not he/she is educated in science. And what the evidence shows is that schools and teachers do not and can not cause learning. They can only facilitate it. Thus our school and teacher improvement programs are completely misguided, which explains their massive failure.

    The cause of our students' inferior learning lies in our students themselves, in all of them. This latter point is vital in understanding the problem. Many assume the learning of only lower classes and minority students is deficient. For our purposes we need not dwell on the bigotry of this. For our purposes we need only note that the facts do not support this assumption. Objective analyses show the learning problem exists across the entire US socioeconomic spectrum. Therefore its cause must be something characteristic of all of us. I suggest it is our widespread and deep-seated attitude of dislike and distrust of academic knowledge, the attitude the historian Richard Hofstadter labeled American Anti-Intellectualism.

    Americans, I firmly believe, learn less that persons from other developed nations not because we are less intelligent nor because our schools and teachers are inadequate. We learn less because we do not see any value in learning more. We consider the long hours of study needed to master abstruse academic material to be as impractical as it is unpleasant. Therefore, if the learning of our students is to be improved, it can only be done by programs which address student motivation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDonald R. Miklich
    Release dateAug 12, 2015
    ISBN9781311558374
    Deliberately Dumb: Understanding America's Education Failure

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      Book preview

      Deliberately Dumb - Donald R. Miklich

      DELIBERATELY DUMB

      Understanding America's Education Failure

      Donald R. Miklich, Ph.D.

      Published at Smashwords

      Copyright 2015 Donald R. Miklich

      ISBN 9781311558374

      Table of Contents

      Forward

      The Situation

      Supposed Solution

      Paradox Discovered

      Paradox Examined

      Paradox Explained

      Teaching

      Testing

      Willing and Able

      Possible Solutions

      Summary and Conclusions

      Epilogue

      Foreword

      This essay concerns the dismal state of school children's learning in the United States. It is essentially a long Letter-to-the-Editor. However, I do not send it to any newspaper. Even if it weren't longer than a letter, I doubt if any editor would dare print it. Newspapers are profit seeking businesses which must take care not to antagonize too many readers. However, I intend to expose the ignorance governing our nation's misguided educational policies, thereby offending people who have been advocating and/or profiting from them, many of them socially important and political powerful. More importantly, I accept a fact established by an overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence, but a fact which the people of the United States are loath to concede: Biological and cultural factors limit learning ability. Thus what I have to say will step on some toes. Even editors who might agree with me will consider it too risky to step on so many.

      Thus, this is an opinion piece. It is not a learned scholarly examination of the issue. It is fact based, but not fact filled. If you are looking for that kind of presentation, look elsewhere. There are several such works. But there's no need for another because the facts clearly and inescapably support only one conclusion. They show our governments' (federal, state and local) efforts to solve our knowledge deficiencies have failed.

      I intend to explain this failure. This requires no expertise about US schools, an expertise I definitely do not have. I'm merely a scientist who is distressed and disgusted by the patently ineffectual way our nation is attempting to improve student learning. Exposing this requires no prescience nor appreciable knowledge. Anyone with an iota of understanding of how learning occurs could do so, but no one does. I have no hard supporting data showing why no one tells it like it is, though it's likely those who could and should have provided this explanation have selfish reasons for withholding it. But my Social Security check neither increases nor decreases if I tell the truth. So I'm going to explain why our massive, expensive efforts to improve our schools haven't improved our children's learning and never will. I'm going to spill the beans.

      [Before getting started, a word about vocabulary. When I speak of Americans I am referring only to citizens and residents of the United States. Sometimes Latins and Canadians object to this usage, considering it USA chauvinism. That's not an unfair criticism, though, as will be apparent from the following, I am no chauvinist. But to avoid repeated circumlocutions I'll follow the common practice of referring to my countrymen as Americans. The present disclaimer is provided to inform readers of my meaning and to assure other Americans they are not the targets of my remarks.]

      The Situation

      Over the past several decades regular periodic investigations have compared the learning of students in developed countries. With a monotonous consistency as discouraging as it is demeaning America's students have never scored higher than mediocre, and rarely have done even that well. Usually we are near the bottom.

      Many in the US dismiss these data. They seldom say it out loud, for the claim is decidedly politically incorrect, but they think our nation is burdened with intellectually inferior minorities who pull down our averages. Without them, US exceptionalists believe, American students are as good as or better than foreigners. In response to this bigoted claim some have analyzed the data in a way which circumvents this alleged distortion. They have compared educational achievement only between American and foreign students of the same socioeconomic classes. The results do not change. In each class, American students significantly trail their international peers. This result was predictable, for some of the many nations whose learning is consistently and markedly superior to ours also have significant numbers of allegedly inferior minorities. The US does have many minorities, and the average intelligence of some may or may not be inferior. But this neither explains nor excuses Americans' abysmal learning.

      There is no easy out. The facts are abundant and unequivocal. The conclusion clear. Succinctly stated and devoid of ego salving window dressing, American students are significantly less knowledgeable, i.e., dumber, than those from most other developed countries.

      But is this a problem? In many respects it certainly is. However, it is not the problem it is usually considered to be. Whether anything is a problem depends on one's perspective, one's goals. There are those who consider learning to be an absolute good. For them the ignorance of Americans is, if not an evil, certainly something which shames us and which we should bend all efforts to correct. As a certifiable nerd with Ph.D., scientific publications and all the other ordinary trappings of an ordinary scientist, I might be expected to advocate this opinion. I do not. Nor do more than a small number of other Americans. Most concede the US has a problem, but the problem is also generally believed not to arise because knowledge is considered an inherent good. It is the practical, not the cultural aspect of knowledge which concerns most Americans. The vast majority who are alarmed by our educational inferiority are alarmed because they think it impairs and degrades the US workforce and will, therefore, destroy our prosperity.

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