What the hell is the matter with US education? In the latest world wide Pisa tests the US came 36th out of 65, even Vietnam was away ahead of you.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25187997
I'll have a guess at the reason: Lack of discipline in the classrooms. Kids talking back to the teacher, ignoring the teacher, talking on cell phones, talking to each other... etc.
Strangely enough, there's an exception, "If Massachusetts was ranked as a country it would be sixth best in the world, ahead of any European country". What's Massachusetts doing that the other States aren't?
What the hell is the matter with US education? In the latest world wide Pisa tests the US came 36th out of 65, even Vietnam was away ahead of you.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25187997
I'll have a guess at the reason: Lack of discipline in the classrooms. Kids talking back to the teacher, ignoring the teacher, talking on cell phones, talking to each other... etc.
Strangely enough, there's an exception, "If Massachusetts was ranked as a country it would be sixth best in the world, ahead of any European country". What's Massachusetts doing that the other States aren't?
The Massachusetts exception, I think, is a very good one to think about. Part of it is that Massachusetts is wealthy and wealthy areas do better than poor ones, generally. But that's not the whole story. Massachusetts isn' our wealthiest state, and some fairly wealthy states have lousy education stats. I think it's more about culture. In Massachusetts you find a lot less of that creationist, climate-change-denying, egg-head ridiculing, redneck attitude that mistakes willful ignorance for folksy authenticity. I live in Massachusetts, and it's a state others might call snobby, because of the respect people here have for educational credentials, fine arts, and science for the sake of science.
It probably has a lot to do to being the location of so many of the world's finest universites and colleges (Harvard, MIT, BC, BU, Wellesley, Amherst, Tufts, Brandeis, and so on), as well as various research institutions and elite hospitals. And there may also be some residual effect from Puritan history and the centuries of intellectual traditon that gave rise to. Take the town of Concord, for example. Outside of Massachusetts, it's mainly known for one of the first battles of the American Revolution, but it was also the epicenter of the transcendental movement -- a place where you can find the homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott ("Little Women"), and Daniel Chester French (sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial), along with the cabin of Thoreau on Walden Pond, all in small town of fewer than 18,000 residents. That kind of intellectual and artistic tradition leaves a mark on the culture.
So, some of what makes Massachusetts succeed so well where most of America fails can't easily be replicated elsewhere. That intellectual history has to develop with time. But we could at least work to combat the know-nothing culture present in so much of the country, which reflexively dismisses conscientious thinkers as elitists, and to foster a renewed respect for the egg-heads. Kids pick up on the messages the adults around them are sending, especially those that are not meant for them. When adults sneer at people of learning, high art, impractical science, etc., kids get the message that mental endeavors aren't really worth the effort. When adults treat those things as prestigious, on the other hand, kids strive for that prestige.
I also think, just from a more practical perspective, that Massachusetts spends a lot on education, which has to help, and that, like Europe, it's relatively unreligious. States and countries that are extremely religious tend to be educational backwaters (Mississippi, our most religious state, is also our worst educated), while states and countries where religion has fallen more out of favor tend to be more educationally accomplished (Massachusetts is one of our least religious states). It's hard to demonstrate cause-and-effect in that correlation, but I agree with the main author of our Constitution, who said that religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and renders it unfit for every noble enterprise. When you're training children to believe in utter nonsense from the time they are most vulnerable, and wasting countless hundreds of hours of their lives sitting in pews being taught to submit their minds to absurdities, you shouldn't be surprised when they can't then think their way out of a paper bag. In Massachusetts, a lot more of those Sunday mornings are spent on things that at least have a hope of strengthening, not weakening, the mind.
