American Kids Can't Do Math Anymore (theatlantic.com) 258
An anonymous reader shares a report: For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.
Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900 -- and most of those students don't fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two.) One of the course's tutors noted that students faced more issues with "logical thinking" than with math facts per se. They didn't know how to begin solving word problems.
The university's problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.
"We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up," Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. "Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability."
Part of what's happening here is that as more students choose STEM majors, more of them are being funneled into introductory math courses during their freshman year. But the national trend is very clear: America's students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader's math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement. Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.
Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900 -- and most of those students don't fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two.) One of the course's tutors noted that students faced more issues with "logical thinking" than with math facts per se. They didn't know how to begin solving word problems.
The university's problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.
"We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up," Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. "Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability."
Part of what's happening here is that as more students choose STEM majors, more of them are being funneled into introductory math courses during their freshman year. But the national trend is very clear: America's students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader's math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement. Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.
wow! That's terrible (Score:2, Funny)
They won't be able to count how many genders are
Re:won't be able to count genders (Score:2, Insightful)
One's gender shouldn't be the govt's fucking business at school. Tell the Talibanjelicals to keep their religion to their OWN asses, I don't believe in your Fox Jesus.
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gender is a social construct, not biological.
Re: won't be able to count genders (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: won't be able to count genders (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you are conflating two different things intentionally
1. It is easy to assume that there are two Sexes, XX (Female) and XY (Male), but that is provably untrue because XXY and XYY sex chromosomes exist
2. Even when a fetus has XX or XY chromosomes, the presence of unusual levels of testosterone, can cause a XX chromosome fetus to develop Male features, like a penis or testicles, and the absence of testosterone can make a XY fetus develop to appear Female. Also, these can result in seemingly hermaphroditical babies showing evidence of both sexes.
These are two different concepts, which may occur separately, that make your whole word salad meaningless.
Beyond that, History shows us many variations of gender roles, with some cultures having Women in battle, and others with Men taking on traditional female roles.
THAT is why confusing SEX with GENDER is misleading and you are promoting lies when you insist they are the same thing.
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You're likely falling into the logical thinking word problem portion of those students.
Re:wow! That's terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not just a failure in maths skills, it's a failure in basic comprehension and ability to conceptualise a problem, which is far more wide-ranging and impactful than just being bad at math.
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8 * 2
Are we talking about signed or unsigned char or other type? O.o;
Re: wow! That's terrible (Score:3)
Re: wow! That's terrible (Score:5, Funny)
Re: wow! That's terrible (Score:3)
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2+3i
Re: wow! That's terrible (Score:2)
That's why they always want to use singular they. One pronoun to rule them all.
Re: wow! That's terrible (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, that is because Jews can count money really well.
Speaking as a member of that tribe, yes I can, and thank you for the compliment, even if it was intended as a joke or an attack.
It's over. (Score:3, Insightful)
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This 'splains it:
TFA: "One of the course's tutors noted that students faced more issues with "logical thinking" than with math facts per se. They didn't know how to begin solving word problems."
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Late-boomer, early gen-xer here
I was lucky enough to have a family of Engineers living next to me, and my early life was spent watching/participating with them identifying goals, solving problems, and using booth logic and mathematics throughout
The sons were 5 and 7 years older than me, so I was between 8 and 10 years old, watching them do algebra homework, and learning by example, so that I was already exposed to this stuff by the time our school system got around to it
Unfortunately, when my own kids got
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I'm having a hard time helping my kids with their math homework because every concept has some weird trick to get to the answer and they have to repeat that trick on the tests to get credit. So first I have to go and learn the trick myself and then help them.
I do remember my own Dad having the same issue from time to time when I was a kid, but it's gone to an extreme today.
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Pro-tip, if the homework assignment is to do the odd-numbered problems, then do the even ones as well since they will likely show up on the test
Each lesson plan is focused on a mathematical theorem [wikipedia.org] or lemma (which is practical step of a theorem)
The whole purpose of the chapter is to teach the student the 'new trick' as you put it and most textbooks are trying to re-word the theorem into some easily understood statement (and failing btw), which is probably what you are seeing with the new textbooks
Good on yo
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There must be something strange with the way math is taught where you are. I haven't had that problem with my kids, including up to helping my son with his math in 2nd year Engineering - after that, it's all just applied and he doesn't learn many new concepts.
I do have a BSc in maths and stats, so maybe I just don't notice the weird tricks.
Re:It's over. (Score:4, Interesting)
My kid is now in 4th grade. Over the years, I've seen math. Problems where they use weird terminology and ask questions in such a way that I have no fucking idea what the fuck they are asking. It's ridiculous. They will take something like "4+5= ?" And make it so weird that I don't have any clue that's what they are asking. "Use the 5 five rule and the 4 rule to complete the problem. Show your work".
What the fuck is the 5 rule? What the fuck In the four rule? No idea, but I know 4+5=9. Now fuck off!
These fuckers need to get back to just using plain English. I'm tired of have to Google shit just to figure out what they are asking.
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Use the 5 five rule and the 4 rule to complete the problem.
Nothing wrong with giving these things names. They don't have formal names and they are probably more standardized by textbook publishers rather than known by mathematicians.
What they are bad at is providing parents with a definition guide and explaining to the students that the names aren't universal.
They are teaching in many different learning styles, which helps with understanding but some schools are holding back on teaching the rote memorization part (which is still important). You need to know 4+5 f
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We have a 14-year-old, so have seen similar stuff. I think a lot of what they're trying to do with Common Core is explicitly teach kids all the shortcuts that math-literate people use instinctively, without formal instruction. The problem is, those shortcuts shouldn't really be taught, or at least not as the main technique. You should teach the basic math facts and methods as simply as possible, then let students figure out the fancy ways themselves. Otherwise you just create confusion.
For example, if I ask
Re:It's over. (Score:5, Interesting)
Most math education is being concocted by education majors experimenting on our children.
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Yea... I have long since forgotten most of my math. But I actually graduated with a minor in mathematics, basically because I only needed two more MA electives (Differential Equations 3, which, admittedly, was a beast and Advanced Number Theory, which was a "Why the heck is *this* a 400-level class?" class.) than I already had for my CS degree. A few years back, I ran across one of those "This is how kids are learning now under Common Core" articles. And DAMN!!! WTF sort of jobs do the people who came
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Here is a case where in "the good old days" (of just a few years ago) things were actually better and there's no way to sugarcoat the decline.
And people, nincompoops like dfghjk and rsilvergun want to blame Republicans; as if this same problem isn't happening in other countries, as if Republicans are the proponents of awful math curricula, as if Republicans are the ones admitting these innumerate kids into California post-secondary schools. This is an example of the complacent attitude of the Democrat party
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It would be great to say you're wrong, but you're not. Worse yet, the younger generation's answer to this is to blame it on you. Republicans have done this, very deliberately. And destruction of education is part of it.
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You do realize the young people aren't choosing their own education, right? Its the previous generations making those changes.
It's our generations fault (Score:5, Interesting)
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The current US budget has a deficit of about 34% over revenue and the opposition party was arguing for even more spending.
Yes, but spending is only half of the budget. The slashed revenue policies of the current administration have had a bigger effect on the overall deficit.
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That's a nice idea but we don't have any kind of labor contract that links inflation with a yearly raise. We also don't have a single labor unit that everyone in the world can agree on. Worse, the labor units we do have are not 1:1 with each other and are therefore subject to speculation themselves.
I'm not seeing how we get out of that mess, especially when becoming a politician is more a popularity contest then us electing the brightest and smartest to lead us.
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I agree we're in the state of decline. Every nation in history has gone through or is going through the same cycle of ramping up, peaking, and then declining.
It's not just in the level of formal education people absorbed .... It's everywhere. I've always been into music and played in an alt-rock band for a while, back in the 1990's. I used to say there was no such thing as "bad music". It was all subjective and anything could be pleasing to the ears of the right listener. In recent years, I'd have to s
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Well, since you admit to being a boomer I gotta say chapeau! I probably wouldn't have the stones to admit that considering this. Is. ALL. Your. Generation's. Fault.
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We're [...] in rot mode now. No better evidence than more than half of the US voted for the orange one.
>1/2 of the US did not vote for trump; see me after class.
-UC San Diego
Re:It's over. (Score:4, Informative)
Get this political shit off slashdot (Score:2, Troll)
This is a commentary about what happens when you let any-fucking-one that wants to attend in.
Re:Get this political shit off slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
This is a commentary about what happens when you let any-fucking-one that wants to attend in.
It did say they admit fewer than 30% of applicants. I don't care what your applicant pool is, if people in the 70th percentile and above can't halve a fucking number, you're in trouble.
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So How Does It All Work? (Score:5, Informative)
the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants
Sounds exclusive! So, how does such an exclusive school admission process wind up admitting 900 applicants that can't do middle school math? Additionally, if their math skills are so poor, how do their reading and comprehension skills measure up?
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The talented ones can (Score:4, Insightful)
Talent is real. It takes a special kind of mind to be good at math, engineering, science, programming, etc.
For years a myth has been promoted that the key to riches is a STEM degree, and that anybody can do it.
Some believed that the only thing that mattered was the degree, not the talent or hard work required to get it. So they slouched through college, putting in minimum effort, socializing, binge drinking and cheating on exams, with predictable results.
Talented people set their own standards, so to them, the concept of lowered standards is meaningless.
Meanwhile, in China, millions of very talented people are working hard.
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There is a process in brain development that occurs during the Adolescent years call 'synaptic pruning' where the body eliminates brain pathways that are not being used in order to reinforce those that are
IF we do not start deep training in math and logic before that occurs, it will be nearly impossible to retrain their brains later in life
Introducing advanced math in the early grade school years is an effective method to ensure adults are able to understand these things, and we are simply FAILING to do tha
Re:The talented ones can (Score:5, Insightful)
Talent, as one talented person put it once, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Nature versus nurture (Score:2, Interesting)
We could give parents actual support in raising their kids but every time anyone suggests that it gets shut down. Always by the think of the children crowd too.
Doesn't matter if you have the potential to be a useful genius if your parents are both working three jobs leaving you with a television set and no
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Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn [wikipedia.org] from a young age, and it made him the man he is today
Never underestimate the brutality that Trump will employ, read more about Roy Cohn to understand more fully
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The one thing education can do for the talented people is quit bogging them down for 12 years in whatever the latest educational flavor of the day is. They don't need the kooky way math is approached now, they need the basics. Teach them addition, subtraction,multiplication, and division the way it was taught in the '70s, then point out a couple mental tricks. They'll then develop their own set of tricks that work for them doing math in their head.
The less talented will at least come out of it knowing how t
This seems evil - accepting tuition from them (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: This seems evil - accepting tuition from them (Score:2)
College is not middle school (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Colleges should screen applicants. If they aren't ready, don't take them.
2. Colleges should fail anyone who can't pass their courses. Fail too many courses, and you are done.
It isn't the college's job to teach anything other than college level courses.
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I think the intro math classes are college level, they just haven't typically been needed for STEM applicants.
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1. Colleges should screen applicants. If they aren't ready, don't take them.
2. Colleges should fail anyone who can't pass their courses. Fail too many courses, and you are done.
It isn't the college's job to teach anything other than college level courses.
In my experience, college was where instructors of all sorts (TAs, lecturers, professors) graded on a curve the most, and in my own personal case, was the only place I directly experienced grading on a curve. Having listened to my extended family of the prior generation, grading on a curve was already prevalent among colleges back in the sixties, and possibly well before that.
So what you propose in your second bullet point has not really ever been the standard, at least during the lifetime of the vast majo
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I never really understood the point of grading on a curve. What difference does it make if some brainiac gets a perfect score? The assessment should be of the individual's understanding of the content and not against the class with some curve that can be set by an outlier.
Maybe to weed folks out I suppose. That would mean only the handful of truly brilliant kids would get 'A's and the rest would fall to 'B's and 'C's. Oh well, 'C's get degrees, as they say.
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A Colleges Job. (Score:2)
1. Colleges should screen applicants. If they aren't ready, don't take them. 2. Colleges should fail anyone who can't pass their courses. Fail too many courses, and you are done.
It isn't the college's job to teach anything other than college level courses.
As we assume to tell a college their job now, lets remember one thing. Those aren’t students anymore. They’re high-paying customers.
A colleges job as a capitalist for-profit institution in America, is to make money. They could honestly give a flying fuck if every graduate took eight years to complete a four year degree. As long as the checks are clearing, they ARE doing their job. If middle-school remedial math courses are what’s needed to lower the bar of high profitability, so be i
People shouldn't get a high school degree (Score:3, Insightful)
until they pass the basics. If they have to take remedial courses, so be it. Graduate at 21 if necessary.
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Then fund education correctly.
To fund education correctly it would probably be around 70% of any given state's annual budget. It's expensive to fund education because to do it right takes a lot of qualified people. Most people don't want to pay so they push to lower the per-capita amount, which leads to education suffering accordingly.
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Common Core Results (Score:5, Informative)
"a full school year behind " (Score:2)
If we're graduating Seniors with Junior level math skills that's hardly "Can't do Math."
I suspect even that claim is wrong and we're also teaching the wrong math for an informed electorate. In undergrad we need people sharp in probability and statistics more than matrix algebra. So they can be numerate against politicians' bullshit. I guess we should ask politicians to work on that.
"education experiment" (Score:5, Interesting)
And who was it that initiated this "education experiment"? Was it the teachers themselves. No. It was the PHDs and administration of course. You know, those who know more than the teachers teaching the subject. I left teaching after 18 years because in that time I went from having the ability to create the curriculum that actually taught the students skills, to being told which objectives must be taught to pass the state mandated tests to ensure the sweet, sweet funding the administration so desperately wanted. Toward the end it was memorize, memorize, memorize ... now take this test. Ok great, forget all that. Now memorize, memorize, memorize for this next test. Good, that's out of the way. People learn very little through rote memorization that is to be regurgitated and then forgotten in favor of the next state test.
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I feel the same about discipline (or rather the lack thereof) in the classroom, "studies show" being coerced is bad for them, but now o
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I'm seeing how using computers to teach elementary math isn't working. It needs to be taught with paper and pencil. There needs to be a certain amount of simple rote memorization for the basics like multiplication and division but that doesn't seem to be the point of emphasis.
Anecdotally (Score:2)
Just an anecdote, but my 10-year-old daughter knows her times tables far better than I did at her age. That's entirely from her public schooling, not something I was even aware of until I saw her homework. And she's fairly middle of the curve in her class, so it's not like she's some exception to the rule or anything.
Then again, my boomer mother even in her declining age has always been extremely swift at mental arithmetic, in a way I've never been. It was more required of them at a time when pocket calcula
Not only in the USA. (Score:3)
Where i come from (French -speaking Belgium) it was even worse already 20 years ago. Every moron and his dog had to decide how math is taught except actual mathematicians. So save a few "elite schools" our standards were very low.
Factor in political correctness ( A huge problem for the ghetto kids who happen to be serious and want a future: their educational standards are even more lowered than the ones of the other kids. In the name of antiracism. As if they had not enough problems already.) and a misunderstood egalitarianism. When the gov noticed the huge discrepancies in the academic level of high schools it paid inspectors to forbid teachers to grade on anything else than the minimalist official program so the teachers were afraid to do their jobs. And the good schools aligned with the bad ones.
So basically the math education is partially privatised by autodestruction of the public system.
Now, if you want a serious STEM education there you need to either have a STEM parent who will take your instruction out of the hands of the public system or be of very superior abilities.
"New math" teaching methods may have a role (Score:2)
This is why we homeschool. (Score:2)
How to get good (Score:2)
Nobody is going to like this, but the secret to doing arithmetic: repetition.
You're not going to get it right the first time. And you're not going to remember it long-term unless you've been drilled on it so much that you've been in tears over it.
Math isn't natural for our brains, so it's rather difficult to learn at first, but everyone needs some basic grasp of arithmetic in this society. We're not hunter-gathers anymore, we have bills, taxes, and far more complex lives than we did 1000's of years ago. And
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That is correct, but you do not need to be very good at arithmetic to study serious math. Mathematicians are usually quite bad at it because they don't bother with it since a long time. They tell you: "I have done a degree in mathematics, not calculations". In science/applied science you need to train enough as not to be slowed down when you move on to the rest that uses arithmetic.
After all the article is about the proficiency of entering university students, after all.
Bu i agree, you learn by doing. A lot
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For the most part, when the media talks about "math" in primary and lower secondary school we're talking about arithmetic. I remember learning Calculus as a teenager, and it was confusing and not intuitive, but once I got it there was very little more I needed to do. That was a completely different experience compared to multiplication, where I had to drill with flash cards before I had enough of the fundamentals in order to do arbitrarily large multiplication problems, and later it proved to be a vital pre
I work at a university (Score:2)
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2013? (Score:2)
Cashlessness! (Score:3)
I wonder if cashlessness is part of the problem. Counting physical money and counting/checking change helps develop elementary arithmetic skills.
The solution for universities is to force them to learn - give paper exams, no calculator, but with "simple" numbers to have them practice basic math like 0.05mol / 0.5L = 0.1M solution. Make them develop a sense of numbers if they want to pass.
Curriculum structure (Score:2)
Some years ago, I ran into a very interesting paper in a mathematics education journal. Unfortunately, I don't have the reference readily available. The paper broke K-12 mathematics into a set of topics organized by essential order of exposition and development. It then compared this model sequence to actual curriculum structures in a number of US districts, and I believe also a couple of European examples.
The US curricula were not correlated well, in longer segments, to the model. A particular finding was
Just kids? (Score:2)
American Kids Can't Do Math Anymore
The current president has stated several times he / his administration will bring down the price of prescriptions 500%, 1000%, 1500% and people go, "Cool".
Noting that 100% mean free and +100% means they pay you. (Sorry, but the premise here means I had to include that.)
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Re:Would Pablo Escobar pass these tests? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can guarantee you that Escobar knew how much product you could stick in a plane and how much money he was expecting in return on that
I would even go so far as to speculate he had adequate understanding of application of loan rates to debt owed and how to instantly calculate the amount of money or product needed to buy a person's cooperation
I am not sure where you are going with this, but Escobar was a business man, a brutal businessman, but one all the same
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His "business acumen" didn't account for cops firing bullets into his skull
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While his criminal activities were brutal and caused immense suffering, the operational strategies and market dominance he achieved are often studied to illustrate various business principles
While his (business) activities were brutal and caused immense suffering, the operational strategies and market dominance he achieved are often studied to illustrate various business principles
A more general description that could be applied to a lot of business people. The difference being largely that he did not have access to a criminal justice system to provide the brutality required.
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To American kids the ability to do math is completely irrelevant, they'll be able to ask the AI and get an answer right away.
Re:Would Pablo Escobar pass these tests? (Score:4, Insightful)
To American kids the ability to do math is completely irrelevant, they'll be able to ask the AI and get an answer right away.
To American oligarchs the kids' ability to do math is undesirable, because that ability would give them a) an appreciation of how badly they're being screwed over and b) the beginning of the means to do something about it.
IMO anyone who thinks that the dumbing down of society and the sabotaging of education aren't part of a plan, simply hasn't been paying attention. Or they've already fallen for the propaganda coming from the would-be architects of neo-feudalism...
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anyone who thinks that the dumbing down of society and the sabotaging of education aren't part of a plan,
Of course they are, and they've always been. I heard a proverb once somewhere in Europe that went something like "an unlearned populace makes a weak country that is so easy to govern".
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anyone who thinks that the dumbing down of society and the sabotaging of education aren't part of a plan,
Of course they are, and they've always been.
Of course you're right - what was I thinking? But at least when we were kids, the barrier between the plebeians and the ruling class was thinner and more permeable. Also, middle-class education was a lot closer in quality and content to upper class education, the primary difference being in degree and type of indoctrination.
I heard a proverb once somewhere in Europe that went something like "an unlearned populace makes a weak country that is so easy to govern".
Whispered in a Catholic church, perhaps? ;-)
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But at least when we were kids, the barrier between the plebeians and the ruling class was thinner and more permeable.
Yes, it was closer to that war and that deal before it. But elsewhere people may not have been so lucky. Sad that it was lost where it happened, really.
Whispered in a Catholic church, perhaps? ;-)
No, but there was an Eastern Orthodox one nearby.
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IMO anyone who thinks that the dumbing down of society and the sabotaging of education aren't part of a plan, simply hasn't been paying attention
Anyone who thinks there are a bunch of people in some room somewhere conspiring to sabotage education is delusional. More importantly they are ignoring their own responsibility for the problem. There is no doubt that COVID restrictions and closing schools had a catastrophic impact on kids' education. But it wasn't deliberate, it was just failed leadership making bad decisions in a state of panic and with no accountability.
That kids aren't as prepared and need remedial courses in college is to be expected.
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On the contrary, New York City has a new mayor.
There are plans afoot to indoctrinate young children with base-10 :)
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-... [newsweek.com]
Re: Americans are stupid. (Score:2)
Even worse: Arabic numerals!
Re: Americans are stupid. (Score:2)
I needed to understand math for that. These days? Just download an app to do it for you.
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These days? Just download an app to do it for you.
Or just ask an AI to do it wrong for you.
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Nope.
1 048 575.
But you need excellent individual control of your finger and toes.
Re:Learning with fun and enjoyment doesn't work (Score:5, Informative)
To learn maths properly, you have to enjoy it, love it even.
Horseshit.
To learn maths properly - enough to do middle school math - you need to be taught it. You don't have to love it. You don't have to enjoy it, even. You just have to be taught.
Sure - it helps if you love it. But we're not talking calculus, here; we're talking algebra. Geometry. Not even trig. You don't need to love math to learn that.