who's driving this train?

The other day, at work in the Admissions office of a large public university, a clerical staff worker remarked, "I've never seen so many low SATs come in before this year...these poor kids, what's going on...have they made the test harder?" At the time I joked that it was just our school, which could be simultaneously true, but the fact simply stands that America is getting dumber.

In discussion with a friend about the untextbooked, untaught truths in American history, covered by this book, I realized that the more time that goes by, the more history accumulates, and so many things will have to be glossed over, an unfortunate and inevitable truth of time perhaps, but still scary.

Yet things keep chugging along the status quo railroad with not enough of us realizing how outdated this form of transportation really is, and how we're on our way to derailing ourselves and our progress as individuals and as an advanced, prosperous country.

"But the one idea with the potential to really shake things up and deliver the best results over the long term is not so much practical as it is philosophical: re-establishing excellence as the primary goal of our educational institutions. This is not just a mission statement or a simplistic, meaningless platitude. It basically requires a generational shift in attitudes and policies in education and child development that have come to predominate in American society. These are permissiveness, a persistent diluting of standards and content, and the embrace of egalitarian education, rather than excellence, as the foundation and informing philosophy of schooling. Making the pursuit of excellence the norm will require grass-roots buy-in from teachers, government, and parents.
If the country is to reach this consensus about the philosophical aims of education, we first need to debunk the myth that striving for excellence means leaving kids behind or limiting access..."
-Th!nk, Michael R LeGault

more about testing:

"What kind of objective evidence should one look for to establish the superiority of any curriculum? One thinks almost immediately of tests. But one must be wary of the significance of mathematics tests. Presumably the mathematics courses have taught students to think through problems, to discover results for themselves, and to acquire insight into the concepts and proofs they have learned. Actually tests do not and to a large extent cannot measure such values. The usual tests require that a student answer a fair number of questions in a limited amount of time. If a question really called for thinking through a new type of problem or discovering a new result it would require so much time that average students would not be able to do well in the time allowed. Even if the student made intelligent and significant attempts to answer such questions his failure to reach a positive result would probably mean that he would receive little or no credit.

Hence, mathematics tests usually and almost perforce call for handing back information that has been learned and is merely being reproduced. The ability to memorize is the major faculty that is actually tested. While the acquisition of information is one objective of mathematics education, it is not supposed to be the sole or most important goal. Though most teachers would deny that they are testing memorization, their behavior belies their words. In Chapter 2 we noted that teachers do not permit their students to use their books during tests. But if the tests call for thinking on the part of the student, what vitiation of the tests would result from the use of books?" -this website