As I’ve recently reported, American school childrens’ basic literacy and numeracy scores have slid dramatically over the past decade. That trend has only been exacerbated by Covid policies such as school closures. Other policies such as mass-mask mandates have been shockingly detrimental to the learning abilities of the very youngest children — a detriment that will only become more apparent as they move into schooling over the next few years.
But Covid is only the tip of a snowball of school failure that has been steadily gathering downhill momentum for a decade and more. Not just in America: even once world-leading countries like New Zealand and Australia are inexorably slipping.
The majority of Australia’s Year 9 students use punctuation at a Year 3 level, according to new analysis showing a dramatic slide in students’ writing ability over the past seven years.
What’s worse is that it’s not just basic punctuation and spelling — in fact, spelling improved slightly. Where students are really failing is “persuasive writing”: that is, the ability to construct a logically coherent written argument.
As Thomas Sowell warned, The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is.
[Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO)] chief executive Jenny Donovan said the reductions were particularly acute in high schools […]
According to the report, 85 per cent of Year 9 students are constructing sentences at or below the level expected of students two years below them.
Ms Donovan said the majority were also using punctuation to a Year 3 standard.
Even more alarming is that the most notable decline is amongst the formerly best and brightest.
Ms Donovan said there had also been a big drop off in scores at the higher end of the spectrum.
“The high-achieving students we had once are not achieving as highly [now],” she said.
The research showed about 18 per cent of Year 9 students were achieving a top score of six out of six in 2011, down to just eight per cent in 2018.
Even with a dumbed-down curriculum, kids are failing to meet benchmarks.
In fact according to the report “most students’ writing skills are not meeting what is expected of them as indicated in curriculum documents”.
This included diminishing higher marks in vocabulary, paragraphing, text structure, ideas, persuasive devices and cohesion.
In other words: logical thinking.
“They can’t convey a complexity of ideas, and we need to be worried.”
What appears to be happening is a knock-on effect of failures of one fashionable, “progressive” educational theory after another. The renewed focus on reading was only necessary because left-wing nonsense like “whole language” crippled the reading ability of a generation.
She said a possible reason was a loss of the systematic teaching of writing, in favour of reading.
“We’ve been focusing a lot on our teaching of reading over the last decade, as we needed to, [as] students weren’t being taught reading very well,” she said.
ABC Australia
Not only are teachers having to trying and fix that breach, kids’ thinking ability is being further crippled by the predominance of Marxist drivel like Critical Race Theory and Gender Theory.
First, they taught kids not to read, now they’re teaching them not to think.
The result is a generation of kids primed for failure and a generation of teachers who are quitting in disgust.
Does anyone really think this is all going to end well?
