Just a quick post before I head out to a couple of classes. An interesting op/ed piece from the New York Times’ columnist Bob Herbert that I saw on reddit earlier today. Totally coincidentally, my roommate earlier mentioned that there are dumb people everywhere and that the American ones are just magnified in the media nowadays. Point well taken. Another sarcastically remarked “dude, the dumb kids make me look good, don’t ruin it.” You can take that for what it’s worth.
I’ll share a small piece of it below, but the link is provided above.
An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.
Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.