To add some context:
I am a high school senior reflecting on the appallingly low standards of education in public (and some private) schools. I am a private school student but I spent my early education in public schools.
This year over 50% of the country's high school students failed to meet the SAT benchmark of "achievement". The benchmark is at least a 500 on all three academic cores: Critical Reading, Writing (which is unfortunately ignored by many colleges, or de-emphasized), and Math. This would mean the cumulative score would be a 1500 (2400 scale) or a 1600 (excluding writing). Yes, OVER HALF OF THE COUNTRY didn't reach a standard which, in my opinion, is already too low. (For reference, I had a 2120/1380, and a 3.2 GPA in very difficult AP classes, yet I've talked with many statistically "average" kids that attend public school. They have far superior grades: 3.7+, some 4.0, yet some didn't even meet this SAT benchmark and the others were all in the 1600-1700s. They were all societally ignorant and followed pop culture norms to the letter, often without any reason other than that they saw it on television or they saw everyone else wearing/saying/doing it. They all used trendy phrases and buzzwords, they all had Apple iPhones and Macbooks, they all wore name brand clothing, they all talked about sex, alcohol and drug use obsessively and none of them cared about actually learning anything from what I saw. I can't help but question the validity of the schools, and our culture)
Moreover, I'm judged and compared with these types on a daily basis, and assumed by my age to be some vagrant with no regard for learning or ethics. This annoys me.
Why is this ignorance so common, when we are repeatedly led to believe we live in an "Age of Information" and that we are supposedly learning things which previous generations never learned?
The answer is that, clearly, the majority is not learning them. We live in an Age of Ignorance. All of this information is available at our fingertips, but the vast majority of Americans do not care enough to learn it.
We've been led to believe throughout our childhood and thus into adulthood that "majority rules". Whatever is the most common is the most right. But this is simply not true.
More than ever before we are living in a time where it is increasingly difficult to reject societal norms.To be "different" is to be an outcast. We are abandoning the intellectual ideals of individualism and expressionism through, ironically, the very same mediums we used to use to express those crucial ideals: what we wear, what music we listen to, what brands we buy, what kind of phone we use, what laptop we have.
We hear words like "swag", phrases like "dat *** cray" day in and day out yet if you asked most people what the word "collectivism" meant, or asked them what Congress does, they'd have no clue. Why are we so readily brainwashed by pop culture? Why does my generation judge someone's success by how many times he has gotten some unconfident girl drunk so he could have his way with her and then ditch her, instead of how much he has contributed to society? Why are nerds and intellectuals frowned upon? Could this have a connection to our low academic standards? Are we being made to be apathetic towards learning? And could the system of education itself contribute to this? Who do you blame, and how can this problem be fixed? How do we convince people to "care" about things like this again? What will our future be in 20 years as a country, as far as what we know as citizens?
>>> Why is the public education system failing? Cultural issues?