why are our children getting less education now than we got 40 years ago?

Answer 1

good one
part of it is that parents aren't as involved anymore
part of it is the placidness of our lives - allowing our children to veg in front of TV, video games etc
part of it is apathy of discipline of the younger generation
part of it is the amount of regurgitated information that our government(s) want to cram down the throats of our students

indeed, it is a huge issue - not nearly enough room here to discuss it.

Answer 2

They're not getting less education, they are just being educated in a different way. The world is a very different place now than it was 40 years ago, and the teaching that goes on reflects this in order to prepare children for the world as it is now.

Answer 3

This is due to a number of reasons:
- Lessons are dumbed down now, the things children learn are completely different (except for maths????) to what was taught 40 years ago
- There is little incentive to learn - study hard, get a degree and be the same as a million other children
- There is no discipline in school and pupils can play on this. They know they can get away with more now
- Exams are dumbed down so what would have been an 'E' grade, even when I was doing my GCSE's (1998) would now probably be an A* grade now

Education in this country is practically non-existant. Children learn too many social and cultural things in my opinion and while this is not a bad thing, there are far more important things such as spelling, grammar, French, German, mathematics, history and geography.

Answer 4

I'm not sure that's true. I guess it depends on where you live and what the public schools are like. The schools where I live are really good and the kids are learning more than I learned in school. In fact, my school just won the blue ribbon award, a prestigeous award given by the president as part of the No Child Left Behind legislation. If education is your top priority, maybe it's time to move to a state with good schools, or get moving within your community and help to cause a change instead of just complaining about it.

Answer 5

I can answer that with one fact: what age group has the highest level of illiteracy in the UK? It is the age bracket 40-60 years; the very group who had this supposed 'excellent' education. 20% of them cannot read properly- hence all those 'gremlin' adverts last year.

40 years ago, education was in a state of crisis. The smart kids are what we remember; grammar schools with perfect behaviour etc'. What we forget is that 2/3 of kids went to run down Sec-Mod schools which did their government-directed job of lowering aspirations (there were guidelines to DISCOURAGE girls/ethnic minorities from wanting 'skilled' jobs, and DISCOURAGE working class kids from wanting 6th form/university education - they even had pictures of female doctors selected to look ugly so women would be indoctrinated that brains=spinster) and filling the factories and mines with people trapped by 'just enough' literacy to do their jobs but aim no higher.

I collect old school books. 'Primers' are full of parrot-like comprehension, requiring the ability to find and copy quotes well. Yes, the words are longer, but you don't actually have to understand them to do the task. For example, if the question was 'what did Johnny play?' the student need only scan through to 'Johnny played the pianoforte' - they need not know what one is to write down 'pianoforte' in their copy book. A child learning from these primers would never pass their SATS.

Having seen exercise books including Churchill's and our Royal family's ancestors, I can tell you spelling and grammar was just as hard for kids then as it is now.

I'm going by statistics ... not the media. Unfortunately most 'knowledge' about education comes from people's rose-tinted-specs (I know they are because I've looked over incident reports and school books for the last 100 years and things were never perfect) and the rants of the Daily Mail (which you need a reading age of 9 to understand).

Don't believe everything you read in the press.

Answer 6

You certainly did get many answers to your question. Some were very valid. I would say in our systom here where I live it is because the administration takes a very large part of the school budget. In fact it is twice as much as any other district of our size in this state. Sad but true the big guys are getting the biggest slice of the pie and the budget only go so far. In order to pay those high salaries they have to lay off support staff and teachers. The class sizes have swelled very large. The kids today do seem dumber.

Answer 7

They are getting DIFFERENT not less education. Primary schools in particular are fantastic - teachers work harder than ever in 21st century...ask a 50 + year old teacher how much more work is involved these days... No I'm not a teacher, I'm a practice nurse and I see how many come in to the surgery stressed out, I'm also mum to 2 primary school kids.

Answer 8

Because liberals have turned our education system into a mockery. Everything has been feminized.

Bars are lowered to the level of the children so nobody's "feelings are hurt", rather than the children pushed to excel. The children themselves have bad examples at home and are poorly disciplined. Our diet today lack the nutrients required for proper brain function. There are no incentives for teachers to be good teachers. Unions have made it more attractive to be a teacher, leading to greater numbers of teachers, but lower teaching quality. There are any number of reasons.

One thing we could do to solve it is to introduce the voucher system. It would result in competition among schools to truly educate your children by giving you a chance to choose the school you like best.

Have you ever seen a first grade primer from 100 years ago? There are some college students who would be puzzled by those books!

Answer 9

Because there is no discipline and teachers spend three quarters of the time trying to control the class. Also, often in the case of Britain, because the classes are so multi cultural that 2 thirds of the class don't speak English as a first language and everything has to be slowed down for the non English speakers.

Answer 10

It may not be less but it is certainly worse since the fifties. Politicians have meddled too much and introduced silly unimportant subjects into the curriculum at the expense of the basic underpinning subjects of our society being Maths, physics, chemistry, biology and English language and English Literature. Early history too seems to be on the way out. Religious education seems to have abandoned its Christian heritage and is teaching about all sorts of other false religions.

Answer 11

Discipline!!!!!!!!!! Childrens' rights are out of control, after all if I was a teacher and had received such disrespect my heart would not be in the job anymore- because it is good to receive respect, gratefulness & so on... in any job- they r horrific ( not all, these few make it bad for the kids who do respect, etc...) By the way!!! It is not the parents job to do the teachers job (make sense?)- but the parents should teach their kids respect!!!!! I blame them , it starts at home