(07-17-2019 09:07 AM)bullet Wrote: (07-17-2019 06:30 AM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote: (07-16-2019 09:44 PM)JRsec Wrote: (07-16-2019 07:50 PM)49RFootballNow Wrote: We used to do great and awesome things in this country, now we can't even agree whether the country should continue on as one nation or not.
Well that's what tends to happen when you move from stressing math and science and teaching logic and problem solving to "no child left behind" which loosely translates into "Smart Kids Can't Get Ahead." From the vantage point of my years the overall decline is rather staggering. We moved from kids learning to use a slide rule to work geometry and calculus problems to kids that can't count your change without a computer to tell them how much to give you back. We went from kids that grew up reading the classics and dime store novels to kids who can't type or spell because of texting. Where I come from we call that devolving. If we go another 1000 years like this we may crawl back into the seas and become jellyfish.
This is a sad state of affairs. We had a 21 year old kid beg us to let him work in the cigar store part time. He was a good kid just not terribly bright. This was before we upgraded our cash register to a POS device. He simply could not grasp the concept of counting backwards from the total amount of a sale up to the denomination used to pay to give change. That single inability disqualified him for what has to be one of the easiest jobs in the world.
Y’all forget. In the 70s I was always having to correct the cashiers. Now they do have the amount of change calculated for them, but they do get the counting of the change right. And maybe no child left behind has a lot to do with it. It’s reviled by left and right. That ought to be a clue it was a really good thing.
And the best students do far more than we did. It’s the broad middle that is failed by today’s system. They separate the truly gifted and the extremely limited but throw everyone else together. And that is due to the “educrats” not no child left behind.
Three of W’s best achievements are reviled by left and right. NCLB, Medicare drug benefit, and getting rid of Saadam. We wouldn’t want such a madmen sitting on that oil with today’s high oil prices.
It is the broad middle that drives the commerce of the country. So whether you attribute that to the act or to its implementation and oversight it is still a whopping failure. We don't move with the top 5% because there aren't enough of them to cover all of our bases of need. We move with the broad middle and the broad middle is way way down. My experiences in the 70's were quite different. Perhaps your memory is skewed by factors peculiar to your location at the time. And where I am now the cashiers still screw up regularly even with computers. They double scan, still get confused counting back, and the stockers mislabel, stock in the wrong slots, and misprice merchandise at the location and the computer scans a different price at the register.
For over 20 years I dealt directly with business owners in a three state area.
The average business owner in the 70's was not only more capable, but their help was as well, and their interpersonal skills were light years ahead of what we have today. You actually had people working areas of hardware stores who knew how to use all of the product located in that area. They mixed paint by formula and did a better job of it than the computer systems today which are so sophisticated that the dumb and lazy employees constant screw them up by placing the tint in the wrong container, letting the tint run out, or failing to read the label sufficiently to pick out the right base. God help you if you need a particular sized screw or bolt with a particular head configuration.
We've gone backwards and it's not even close.
As far as Saddam he was our creation run amok. We had to take him out. He was pissing off the Israelis and the Saudis.
So Saddam was a creation of our foreign policy, No Child Left Behind hurt the middle and therefore can be no good thing as it damaged the majority of the nations working force. But I will agree about the pharmaceutical inclusion.
True we have greater technology these days, but it has become a crutch for ignorance rather than an advancement for our development. To understand the theory of the science that creates our world is more important than knowing that 100-73= a qaurter and two pennies. Sliderules didn't prevent theoretical comprehension. Calculators do. In finding an easier way to get a result of a singular function we have lost the framework out of which to accomplish the same function with our minds by understanding the relating parts and concepts of the symbol 27.
