It’s Official: We
Americans R Stupid
By Michael Snyder
March 17, 2015 "ICH"
- As Americans, we tend to be pretty full of
ourselves, and this is especially true of
our young people. But do we really have
reason for such pride? According to a
shocking new report from
the Educational Testing Service,
Americans between the ages of 20 and 34 are
way behind young adults in other
industrialized nations when it comes to
literacy, mathematics and technological
proficiency. Even though more Americans
than ever are going to college, we continue
to fall farther and farther behind
intellectually. So what does this say about
us? Sadly, the truth is that Americans are
stupid. Our education system is an abysmal
failure, and our young people spend most of
their free time staring at the television,
their computers or their mobile devices.
And until we are honest with ourselves about
this, our intellectual decline is going to
get even worse.
According to this new
report from the Educational Testing Service,
at this point American Millennials that have
a four year college degree are essentially
on the same intellectual level as young
adults in Japan, Finland and the
Netherlands that
only have a high school degree…
Americans born after
1980 are lagging their peers in
countries ranging from Australia to
Estonia, according to a new report from
researchers at the Educational Testing
Service (ETS). The study looked at
scores for literacy and numeracy from a
test called the Program for the
International Assessment of Adult
Competencies, which tested the abilities
of people in 22 countries.
The results are
sobering, with dire implications for
America. It hints that students may be
falling behind not only in their early
educational years but at the college
level. Even though more Americans
between the ages of 20 to 34 are
achieving higher levels of education,
they’re still falling behind their
cohorts in other countries. In
Japan, Finland and the Netherlands,
young adults with only a high school
degree scored on par with American
Millennials holding four-year college
degrees, the report said.
How in the world is that
possible?
I can tell you how that is
possible – our colleges are a joke. But
more on that in a moment.
Out of 22 countries, the
report from the Educational Testing Service
found that Americans were dead last in tech
proficiency. We were also dead last in
numeracy and only two countries performed
worse than us when it came to literacy
proficiency…
Half of
American Millennials score below the
minimum standard of literacy proficiency.
Only two countries scored worse by that
measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain
(59 percent). The results were even
worse for numeracy, with almost
two-thirds of American Millennials
failing to meet the minimum standard for
understanding and working with numbers.
That placed U.S. Millennials
dead last for numeracy among the study’s
22 developed countries.
It is in this type of
environment that Coca-Cola can be marketed
to Americans as “a
healthy snack“.
As I mentioned above, our
system of education is one of the biggest
culprits. From the first grade all the way
through post-graduate education, the quality
of education that our young people are
receiving is absolutely pathetic. In a
previous article, I highlighted some
statistics from
USA Today about the declining state of
college education in America…
-“After two years in
college, 45% of students showed no
significant gains in learning; after four
years, 36% showed little change.”
-“Students also spent 50%
less time studying compared with students a
few decades ago”
-“35% of students report
spending five or fewer hours per week
studying alone.”
-“50% said they never took
a class in a typical semester where they
wrote more than 20 pages”
-“32% never took a course
in a typical semester where they read more
than 40 pages per week.”
I have sat in many of
these kinds of college courses. It doesn’t
take much brain power to pass the multiple
choice tests that most college professors
give these days. The truth is that if you
fail out of college you really, really have
to try hard.
In another
previous article I shared some examples
of real courses that have been taught at
U.S. universities in recent years…
-“What
If Harry Potter Is Real?”
-“Lady
Gaga and the Sociology of Fame”
-“Philosophy
And Star Trek”
-“Learning
From YouTube”
-“How
To Watch Television”
-“Oh,
Look, a Chicken!”
This is a national
crisis. Parents should be screaming bloody
murder about the quality of the education
that their children are receiving. But
because very few of them actually know what
is going on, they just continue to write out
huge tuition checks all the time believing
that their kids are being prepared for the
real world.
To show how “dumbed down”
we have become, I want to share with you a
copy of
an eighth grade exam from 1912 that was
donated to the Bullitt County History Museum
in Kentucky.
Would eighth grade
students be able to pass such an exam today?
Would college students?
As you look over this exam
from 1912, ask yourself how you would do on
it…
In addition, I find it
very interesting that the reading level of
the State of the Union addresses delivered
by our presidents
has steadily declined since the
inception of this nation.
And it should be no
surprise that Barack Obama’s State of the
Union addresses have been
some of the dumbest of all.
But could it be possible
that I am being too harsh?
After all, scientists are
now discovering that our diminishing
intellectual capabilities are actually the
consequence of natural processes.
For example, a Stanford
University biology professor named Gerald R.
Crabtree has published two papers in which
he detailed his conclusion that humans have
been getting dumber for
thousands of years…
Are humans becoming
smarter or more stupid? Comparing our
modern lives and technology with that of
any preceding generation, one might
think we are becoming increasingly
smarter. But, in two papers published in
Trends in Genetics,
Gerald R. Crabtree of Stanford
University claims that we are
losing mental capacity and have been
doing so for 2,000–6,000 years!
The reason, Crabtree concludes, is due
to genetic mutations—which are the
backbone of neo-Darwinian evolution.
Why is this happening?
Professor Crabtree
believes that this loss of intellectual
capability
is due to the accumulation of errors in our
genes…
Based on data produced
by the 1000 Genomes Project Consortium
and two recent papers in Nature,
Crabtree estimates in the first article
that, in the past 3,000 years
(approximately 120 generations), about
5,000 new mutations have occurred in the
genes governing our intellectual
ability. He claims most of these
mutations will have no effect, while
about 2–5 percent are deleterious and “a
vanishingly small fraction will increase
fitness.” Crabtree bases his conclusion
that humankind is losing mental capacity
on the ratio between the deleterious and
the beneficial mutations.
Our DNA is mutating, and
it has been for thousands of years. And no,
those mutations are not helping us. Each
one of us has tens of thousands of errors in
our DNA that we have inherited, and we will
add even more errors which we will pass on
to future generations.
Given enough time, many
scientists believe that humanity would
eventually degenerate into a bunch of
gibbering idiots incapable of rational
thought.
Or could it be possible
that a large segment of the population has
already arrived at that state?
Feel free to tell us what
you think by posting a comment below…
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/