Well, no.
And framing the problem as one of college preparedness doesn’t help.
Dr. Steven Mintz, Professor Emeritus at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, (aka”The Ethics Sage”,””) posted a depressing essay about the decline of US ACT scores on his blog. He begins, “By now you’ve probably heard that ACT test scores for the class of 2023 were the worst in at least 32 years.” Actually I hadn’t heard, but it’s not surprising: the U.S. education system, as I’m sick of writing and you must be sick of reading, has rotted through. That chart above is one of several alarming graphics the professor’s article features, supposedly listing the top mentioned goals “when I grow up” for Chinese, British and U.S. students.
Unlike the Sage, I don’t think wanting to be an astronaut is a lot more realistic or admirable than wanting to be a “YouTuber”—in fact, I think the chart shows that Chinese students have been pretty much sucked into the same cultural muck that ours have. “When I was a lad,” kids wanted to be lawyers, doctors, and President of the United States. Twenty years ago, my son wanted to be exactly what he is today, an auto mechanic. Today’s culture doesn’t encourage or respect learning, knowledge, or quality thinking. The emphasis is on empty credentials that are believed to lead to fame, wealth and power, and among those credentials are degrees, which Mintz, as an old school academic, naively reveres as the equivalent of education, intellectual enrichment, and broadening perspectives. For most graduates, they haven’t signified those for a long, long time.
“It is a sad day, indeed, as the ability to learn complex material continues its downward path with no end in sight for American kids. What can be done to reverse, or at least stem the rising tide of failure in education?” Mintz sighs. Among his nostrums:
- Parents must must demand that “extra time be spent on Reading, Math, Science, and critical thinking skills.”
- School districts must take the declining test scores seriously and demand that the education system get tougher, eliminating the current fad of passing failed students along to the next grade. “Worse yet,” Mintz writes, “is the tendency in some places to ‘dumb down’ the curriculum because so many kids can’t keep up.
- “Congress needs to hold hearings because our schools are failing. We have a national crisis!”
Ya think?
Mintz is relentlessly apolitical, which can be admirable, but in this setting, it just makes his analysis look willfully blind. He writes, “What’s lacking is a weak work ethic. These kids don’t have it drummed into them at an early age as, Asian students do, that learning and achieving good grades are the most important priorities in their young lives….Another problem with our educational system is that teachers are not respected like they once were, and they must deal with rudeness, emotional problems, and violence in the schools like never before.”
All true, but has the professor really missed the gigantic Woolly Mammoth in the classroom? “Racial justice” and sexual liberty have become the primart focus of “education” in 2023. The former accounts for much of the discipline and lenient promotion developments, and spending “extra time” on core skills is impossible and not even understood as important to teachers intent on ideological and political indoctrination rather than teaching critical thinking.
Prof. Mintz, a smart and analytical guy (he’s commented on Ethics Alarms in the past)seems to be completely isolated from reality, making his commentary, with all due respect, and I say this with love, useless. In truth, our educational system perfectly prepares students for a college experience that will also substantially focus on ideological indoctrination.
Ethics Alarms 
One thing to point out: the differences between the US and China could be explained partially by the fact that there are so few Vlogger/You Tuber positions in China, what with the absence of free speech/freedom in general. The comparison might be more meaningful if you did not make the comparison with an authoritarian regime.
-Jut
I was going to write the same. Like, who wants to be a youtube vlogger in China if it could potentially result in an incorrect opinion, a decreased social credit score, and potentially a death penalty.
My wife is a middle school teacher in a conservative district not yet affected by the nonsense of “equity”, too much focus on LGBTQ+, etc. The district has great demographics, covering the primary middle class to rich neighborhoods with 80% of the kids in stable two parent households. They are generally well behaved kids.
As a humble brag, my kids are high achievers in the school – our 6th grader has maxed out the reading test (reading above 12th grade level) and has the highest math score ever seen at our small school in standardized testing. Our 8th grader leads the academic team and both a straight A students. We don’t demand that they do well in school, but we want them to do their best and we encourage education. We try to instill in them the view that learning is not just a means to an end but a good in itself.
However, in the school there are a few interrelated issues that seem to circle around parents. This is obviously not all parents, but from my wife’s perspective it’s a majority of parents at the school where she teaches.
– Parents don’t seem to encourage education. This is plain from what the kids say and what the parents say to my wife. School is seen as something to “get through” instead of something to enrich lives and empower and equip students for the future. Learning isn’t seen as a good thing. There’s no encouragement to put in effort, which leads to….
– Parents want the reward without the work for their kids. They act like their kids deserve an A regardless of the quality of work or even how much work they’ve done; one kid was taken out of school for 2 weeks to go on vacation to Florida / Disney World, did almost no make-up work, and the mom demanded to know why the kid had a C instead of an A.
– Parents put all the responsibility for education on the school and teachers. Parents feel it’s not their job to help their own child with homework if they are struggling in a subject. They don’t want to seek out resources if their child has learning issues, dyslexia, etc. They don’t want to know what they can do to help their child. This relates to…
– No child left behind has had a major negative impact on schools. The big thing now is “mainstreaming” which is putting students with learning disabilities and difficulties in regular classes with all the other students. All this does is drag the class down to the lowest common denominator and the teacher spends way too much time focusing on them. If the teacher doesn’t, the parents of the kids with disabilities and difficulties complain that their child isn’t getting enough dedicated attention (to the detriment of the other kids). To be a bit crass, some children need to be left behind.
These issues, along with too much government involvement in schools (a post for another time, but all the government does is make more work, regulations, and complications for schools) is leading my wife to consider quitting teaching after this year. We don’t need the income and it would simplify our lives if she was a stay at home mom. But she feels like she can be a positive influence and encouragement for the kids that they aren’t getting at home.
I don’t understand the charts. Each country’s chart clearly adds up to more than 100%. Were respondents invited to select some/all professions that they “would want to be when [they’ grow up”? That materially changes things.