The Dumbing Down Of America

When I was born in 1971, we were just two years removed from the first manned moon landing. There would be a total of six manned landings, all by Americans, from July of 1969 to a a few weeks before my first birthday. I was born at the peak of the age of space exploration. As a kid I remember watching the shuttle launches and I recall pretty vividly the Challenger disaster in 1986 while I was at school. Growing up we watched Star Trek on TV and saw Star Wars, E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Time in the theater. It seemed to us that we were on the cusp of exploring space, a new age of discovery where humankind would escape the bonds of earth, conquer the stars and perhaps even make contact with aliens! The future was bright.

As a child in the 1970s and 80s, 2020 seemed like a long way into the distant future and while we couldn’t predict what that would bring, it was assumed it would bring a progressively better society and that space exploration and great technological achievement would make life immeasurably better. Colonies on the moon and even Mars were just assumed to be the natural near-future next steps.

Now look around. Do you see a plausible scenario where the U.S. could return to the moon in any capacity, much less a manned mission to Mars or anywhere even further away? N-word please. The American nation is on the tipping point where we will no longer have enough people to maintain the existing technological infrastructure, much less create new and innovative technological wonders. You see this in places like South Africa where racially based hiring is leading to an inability to maintain the city water supply. The more likely scenario is that things start slowly shutting down as the AI isn’t developed fast enough to replace the tech workers. The cold stone truth is that we are further away from manned missions to Mars today than we were on the eve of the first moon landing.

Sure we have incredible technology at the personal level. I can correspond with people in virtually any country instantaneously. I can watch movies on demand and access the sum total of human knowledge while sitting on the toilet. If I lived closer to a city, I could get everything I need delivered to my front door by tapping the screen of my phone a few times. What is the point of technology if I can’t use it to order Taco Bell delivery? A nice visual of this comes courtesy of daily timewaster. This is a 5 megabyte hard drive in 1956, requiring a cargo plane to move….

And this is a 128 gigabyte flash drive. It is a couple of inches long, weighs next to nothing, costs less than $20 including tax and I can order it from my desk and have it delivered for free to my house in 2 days. Also, I like that it comes with “free Amazon tech support”. How much of a Boomer do you have to be to need “tech support” for a flash drive?

On the other hand, even with computing power unimaginable during the lead-up to the moon landing and access to the cumulative total of human knowledge without leaving my chair, we have a population that is rapidly losing any ability to think critically, read and understand modestly challenging books or essays or even engage at a rudimentary level with ideas that are more complex than the pablum they have been spoon-fed in America’s public school and university systems.

So how can it be that we have never gone back to the moon?

There are two possible reasons that we have never returned to the moon.

One, we never went to the moon in the first place which explains why we haven’t gone back.

Second, something else happened that changed the course we were on.

Not being a moon-landing-hoax believer, that leaves me with option 2. Something has happened in America from the days of the space race, harnessing the atom into both energy and the most terrifying weapon ever made and the dawn of the computer age that has landed us where we are today. Whatever could it be?

It is not coincidental that at about the same time as the first moon landing, two other major efforts were going on in America.

First was the passage the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, often referred to as the Hart–Celler Act after the co-sponsors of the bill. This act changed the immigration system away from favoring people from Europe and opened the floodgates of migrants from Africa, South America and Asia. Over the last 50 years it has helped to accelerate the demographic change in America from a super-majority white population to a rapidly browning population.

At around the same time, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program was launched including the “War On Poverty” which succeeded mostly in creating a bunch of bureaucratic jobs in D.C. and legions of sullen Federal paper pushers. This shifted an enormous amount of capital away from productive citizens and into the hands of those same grouchy bureaucrats and poor people, most of whom if we are being honest, are poor largely because of God-awful decision making skills.

The result has been a rapidly changing nation and a desperate arms race to spend money faster than student performance can drop. Again, my favorite chart when it comes to education:

Costs have skyrocketed as have staffing levels while performance has stagnated or gotten worse. The problem here is clearly not an issue of funding as schools get more money now per student than they ever have but performance is lagging. This is at the same time we have more technology than ever before and more and more teachers are getting advanced degrees. So why are scores so low when everything we are told is that we need to spend more on education? While not the only factor, the primary reason is demographic changes in the student body. Thanks to incentivized fecundity in non-white populations and mass migration coupled with decades of frightening white couples away from having large families, we are at a significant crossroads in America:

Census: Minority youth over take whites in 2020, 50% under 18

This is a widely reported reality but at the same time talk of demographic changes via “The Great Replacement” are mocked as scare-mongering and conspiracy theories. The dirty secret of public education is that the problem with test performance has a lot more to do with the changing of the student body than with any perceived lack of funding.

Back in the day, we saw a national problem as something we should band together to solve. Today? Not so much.

The response to the lower performance from students has been the opposite of what it should be. Rather than redoubling our efforts to encourage students to achieve targets and goals, we lowered the standards. Some recent examples:

Report: Montgomery Co. efforts to close student achievement gaps ineffective

Black and mestizo kids are falling further behind, white and Asian kids are still doing OK in the same schools. Maybe the problem is not funding?

As Colleges Move To Do Away With The SAT In The Name Of Diversity, Detroit High School Valedictorian Struggles With Low-Level Math

The valedictorian of a Detroit high school is reportedly struggling with basic math in college.

The development comes as colleges have increasingly rejected objective admissions criteria in the name of “equity,” with University of California poised to no longer require the SAT because of the racial impact it has on admissions.

“Marqell McClendon has struggled in the low-level math class she’s taking during her first semester at Michigan State University,” the news outlet Chalkbeat reported Nov. 15. McClendon, the valedictorian of her graduating class at Detroit’s Cody High School, was used to getting all A’s, but found herself asking strangers to help her with her college coursework, it said.

MSU has pushed for admitting more racial minorities in the name of diversity. Its “incoming freshman class is predicted to be the largest and most diverse in the school’s history, with more than 8,400 anticipated students,” the school stated in May 2018, noting that black enrollment was up 24%.

But nearly half of graduates from Detroit’s main school district must take remedial courses when they get to college, Chalkbeat reported.

According to the Detroit public school website, Cody High School is very diverse:

By my calculations, that means that Cody is over 98.5% black. Also from the same report, around 70% of students are “chronically absent”. Just showing up on a regular basis means you are ahead of almost 3/4 of students but it doesn’t mean that being the top of your class means you are academically or intellectually qualified for college. Being the best player on a team of one-legged kickball players doesn’t mean you are ready for the major leagues.

Here is the kicker:

Bob Murphy, the director or university relations and policy for the Michigan Association of State Universities, told Inside Higher Ed that not requiring math will ideally “lead to more successful graduation outcomes.”

“More successful graduation outcomes” is edu-bureaucrat speak for “lowering standards by letting more minorities graduate without any rigorous coursework”. The outcome is what is important, and not in the sense of having well rounded, highly educated graduates but rather that your graduating class includes an adequate number of non-white/Asian members.

What that ends up meaning is that people who graduated when college sort of required a certain level of academic proficiency now have degrees that are barely more meaningful than a GED.

This is not just a Michigan thing. Here in conservative Indiana, led by our super “conservative Republican” State Superintendent of Public Education Jennifer McCormick, we are doing the same thing:

Indiana University could make SAT, ACT tests optional

Indiana University could soon stop requiring students to submit ACT or SAT scores with their college applications.

A university spokesman says students applying for fall 2021 could have the option not to submit college standardized testing.

The (Northwest Indiana) Times reports that the university’s Board of Trustees recently approved the policy change.

That means more unqualified students in our universities, meaning that we will need to keep lowering standards so at least some of them graduate. Having the proper “diversity” mix in commencement photos is more important than academic excellence.

As our nation and schools change demographically, this is causing the school systems to come under increasing pressure from unruly students. Never fear, our elected leaders have a “solution” to school disciple problems! Just stop disciplining students!

Black Congresswoman: School Discipline Is Racist

Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley wants to end the “school-to-confinement-pathway” by making it harder to punish non-white students…..

…Rep. Pressley claims the bill is necessary because “schools have become a place that criminalizes and harms girls of color.” Rep. Pressley’s website says that black girls are 54 percent of all preschoolers who are suspended. Schools suspend black girls seven times more often than whites, Hispanics twice as often, and American Indians three times as often. Her website is silent on suspension rates for Asians, which are consistently lower than those for whites….

….The black congresswoman says racism is the problem. “Across our country, black and brown girls are pushed out of school not because they pose any sort of threat, but for simply being who they are,” she wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed. “Society too often deems our hair too distracting and our bodies too provocative, our voices too loud, and our attitudes too mean — demeaning our very existence before we even reach adulthood.”…

….New Jersey Rep. Bonnie Coleman, another black supporter, claims non-white girls may appear violent because of their “trauma” and “unaddressed mental illnesses.” At the same time, “They’re being disciplined for hairstyles deemed disruptive,” she said. “They’re being disciplined for the energy, independent thinking and strength that would earn their white, male peers the label, ‘future leader.’”

Preventing teachers from maintaining a little discipline in their classroom means that the classroom will become unmanageable, which mostly punishes the handful of students who actually are trying to learn. These “youths” won’t see the elimination of discipline as an incentive to behave in school, they will see it as a weakness to be exploited.

This is not an isolated proposal. The same thing is happening in California.

Starting in 2020 Public Schools Across California Will No Longer Suspend Students for Disobeying Teachers, Because Too Many Students of Color (Non-Whites) Get Suspended

First data point you need to know: white students represent just 23 percent of public school enrollment in the state of California.

Second data point you need to know: though black students make up just 5 percent of the public school enrollment in the state of California, they represent the majority of students suspended (even though the state banned suspensions based on “defiance and disruption” in 2014… to try and stop too many non-white students from being suspended).

Unfortunately, too many students of color are being suspended still in California for failing to abide by the rules governing proper behavior in public schools, so the concept of suspensions are being retired.

Why would you want to “teach” in a zoo where the students know they can do anything they want without repercussions? Why would you want to live somewhere with schools full of kids that are out of control? I can only imagine what it would have been like in my almost entirely white, middle class high school in the 1980s without the threat of getting suspended but in an inner-city where discipline issues are far more severe than juvenile shenanigans? Chaos and certainly not an environment where an average student can learn.

Add in dysgenic breeding and you end up with the opening scene from Idiocracy. It was once the case that women wouldn’t willingly get involved with men who were losers, violent or just plain stupid but now it seems the worse a human being a man is, the more action he gets.

The Cousin Eddie types have always been with us but now it seems we all have a single female relative with several kids, often from different men, all of whom are idiots and losers.

America is getting dumber because Americans are less intelligent. Both of those are by design. You can quibble about the symptoms all you want but America today is not a nation that could accomplish what we did last century in splitting the atom, landing men on the moon and launching the Information Age. It is only thanks to the structures put in place last century that we haven’t been reduced to subsistence level living yet but that is coming.

Practically speaking, other than never going back to the moon, that means that a shrinking pool of above-average intelligent people are going to have to carry the intellectual burden for a rapidly expanding mass of imbeciles. In turn that also means that we will have a functional aristocracy that holds the genetic means to perpetuate their primacy. When we had a hereditary monarchical system, marriages were carefully arranged to benefit both aristocratic families and I can see that happening here as well, as the most intelligent and powerful see reproduction as their legacy. Meanwhile, the Clevon’s of the world will continue to spread their seed far and wide.

So, in review:

You can have a technologically advanced nation.

– or –

You can have a pluralistic nation made up of competing ethnic and racial groups that subsidizes and rewards irresponsibility.

But you can’t have both.

Our future doesn’t have much hope of dancing green alien babes. But at least we will be diverse while we all slowly starve to death!