AN EDUCATION

[K: Since a college education is so much more expensive to the average student then it was decades ago…and since the institutes of higher learning were typically where more educated young people sprang from.}

I am sorry to bore this forum with the facts, once again, but they do bear in this discussion.

The OECD in Paris undertook a 26-member study of Student Assessment in a secondary-school environment, focusing on three attributes of learning: Reading Literacy, Mathematics and Science. There is a fourth that they are working on called Problem Solving - which is often a combination of all three.

The study is called PISA and has nothing to do with the Italian city. The PISA results are to be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment - seek the score-chart in the lower part of that page.

America has nothing whatsoever to be proud about the scores and, as a highly developed nation, it should be Very Concerned of the results. We’ve spoken of the “Dumbing down of America” and it shows through with a vengeance in the results.

In fact, we should be asking ourselves this question: How can Canada—a nation so similar to ours - achieve such significantly better results? How do their teaching methods function differently? Are their teachers more pedagogically competent than ours and why? Or, is it a societal problem, where our “be all ya wannabe” generation have decided to become dunces?

POST SCRIPTUM

More so, the ultimately Most Important Factor is a measure called Student Throughput. Which means how many students actually graduate with a High School degree and are then “throughput” to a Tertiary-level education, meaning vocational, college or university? It is from this process that they obtain the qualifications that determines their aptitude for for work and, thus, their lifelong earnings. 

That process is absolutely necessary to prepare students for this Brave New World of Global Competition. And, indeed, it is a process where numerous input-factors come to bear. Meaning both teaching abilities and a dedicated psychological counseling service—that begins at the youngest age tracking student performance.

And, along the way, it just might produce a better set of leaders—both locally and nationally.

Are the Republicans winning the young?

Who knows? The young are fickle voters. They are more than likely to stay away from the midterms.

Many gave up after putting their heart and soul

into electing Obama and the Democrats looking for

change.  Most didn’t move to the Republicans,  just

opted out.  We won’t see near as many young voting

again for a long while.  They also have a much clearer

vision of what is really happening in America than us

older folks.  We all still relate to what we grew up with.

Those days are gone.  The young see it. 

They see the side show of MSMBC VS FOX for what it is,

a sideshow,  they are laughing at us older folks. Well,

not really laughing.  They understand they’re screwed.

They understand there is little future for them and what

future they have is not in the political process of

Democrat vs Republican…..thats us old folks game.

What berniem said.

Being that there exists very little difference between Ds. & Rs. its not surprising that this demographic does not feel impelled to vote for the “supposed” liberal party. The tragedy of all this is the never ending tactic of “throwing the bums out” and replacing them with the exact same “bums” that were thrown out last time around!

If you stop to think about it, you know how pernicious polling is—how likely to be inaccurate, how easy to steer in the direction the polling agency desires, how propagandistically they are used.  Frankly, I think they are a destructive intrusion into politics and we would probably be better off without them. 
  The polls themselves are one prejudicial thing. Then reporting on the polls is still another level of distillation on top of the actual findings. 
  Pew?  Nonpartisan?  Pew is a conservative think tank as are most think tanks—not that conservatives think more, but that they have more money to put into tax-lowering entities like think tanks, to get rid of too much money.  Think tanks are pretentious revolving-door agencies of “experts” who make money by letting their findings (often prejudicial) pass as wisdom. They are revolving door agencies on the side of where the money comes from.  How could it be otherwise? Go to their website and read their economic policies. 
  Government uses them to make its policies sound more authentic; they use government to help maintain the market system. Agencies of media use them, often unconsciously, to make “authentic” sounds, like their polls are “unbiased” and “researched” etc., therefore unquestionable. It’s all one huge magic loop, part of a pressure chamber to make you think they know what they are doing—the Establishment.
  People who don’t know what to think take the word of think tanks and are easily persuaded “Oh, yeah. They did research on that and it proves ....  so ... since x percentage of people over 30 “think” that, I guess it looks like that will be the winnng side, so ... I’ll vote for that.
  Think tanks actually have considerable power to swing elections if they decide it is important to do so.  Who can prove them wrong?