It's tough being a millennial. It seems that the group
that's now between 18 and 34 doesn't get a break. Having taught a lot of them,
and liking a lot of them, I hate to bring more bad news. The problem is it's
easy to blame a generation, if one refuses to look at the teachers union and
how they failed to teach that generation.
The Educational Testing Service took a look at the Programme
for the International Assessments of Adult Competencies. This showed that the
millennials badly lag those in other countries in numeracy, literacy and
problem solving skills.
In fact the scariest figure is that out of 22 countries, the
United States was 21st in numeracy. In other words they don't know crap about
how to use numbers to solve problems.
The Democratic Party has an Achilles' heel. While there's so
many things you can blame the
Republicans for, the Democratic Party loves teachers unions. Teachers unions
pay for the Democratic Party to compete against Republicans in elections. If
you want me to feel glad about that, I refuse. I never vote for Republicans but
the teachers unions have so dumbed down education in America as to make K-12 a
pointless exercise.
Only the Spanish (in Spain) had lower numeracy rates than
Americans. As a college professor I would find seniors who had trouble reading.
I had to cancel an exercise in a journalism class, because no one knew how to
do a percentage.
How are you supposed to compete with students from Shanghai,
Singapore, Korea and all the other 17 countries that got a better education than
you did. The simple fact is, you can't. Blaming a generation for being cheated
by the teachers union seems disingenuous. Millennials, you could only deal with
the material you were being taught. So let's stop kicking a generation, and
make sure this degradation of pedagogy stops immediately
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