Bob Herbert - Clueless in America

This op-ed in the New York Times makes a great point (well, several great points).

Clueless in America

We don’t hear a great deal about education in the presidential campaign. It’s much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or Barack rolling a gutter ball.

The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

“We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world,” said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he described the situation as “actually pretty scary, alarming.”

Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education.

Read the rest of this piece.

The article notes that Bill Gates said -- a few years ago, now -- that our school systems are obsolete. Not that they are failing. Not that they are not working. Obsolete.

The school systems as designed can no longer prepare our kids for life in the world. Hell, they are barely educating our kids at all. When less only 14% the population believes in evolution, and a third don't even know what is contained in the Bill of Rights, we are screwed.

Why isn't education on the lips of every politician? And why isn't anyone calling them on it?

Tags: Bob Herbert, Clueless in America, New York Times, education, culture, Gates Foundation