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WHY JOHNNY CAN’T THINK: Progressive Education’s Toll on Millennial Minds

When confronted with their shocking ignorance of basic information, the Millennials always reply with “We can just Google it.” But the problem is not that they can’t find the answers. The problem is they don’t know what questions to ask.

When confronted with their shocking ignorance of basic information, the Millennials always reply with “We can just Google it.” But the problem is not that they can’t find the answers. The problem is they don’t know what questions to ask.

15 replies on “WHY JOHNNY CAN’T THINK: Progressive Education’s Toll on Millennial Minds”

Wow. Disturbing video.
I just returned from Columbia, South America. (Bird-watching/photography)
When Bill ends the video with “The best question is why?” (our next generations are being taught so poorly), I am immediately back in that incredibly beautiful, corrupt, socialist country. We would pull in to a small village or “suburb” of a larger town passing a gaggle of youth dressed for Catholic school. Once out of our van and walking towards our birding destination, we would pass a whole lot larger population of children not attending school. Some would come up to us and ask for money. None appeared to be involved in anything remotely productive.
Why? Because the graft-ridden, bribe requiring, essentially evil politicians want to make sure that the next generation is too dumb to think for themselves and will continue to believe the garbage answers spewed from the Left in Columbia. It is in every totalitarian system that they have to keep them uninformed to keep them in line.
When talking to a cabbie on the way to the airport, the question that he had for me was “what can we do to keep capitalism and consumerism from ruining our planet?” Besides “Trump is responsible for cutting down the rainforest!”, this is the latest cr*p that passes for a topic for an intellectual discussion down there. I reminded him that he was getting paid from a consumer, the high-end bird lodge that he picked us up from relied on consumerism, the best chance that his country has to actually protect their ecology has its nascent root in this budding branch of ecotourism, and the socialist politicians are the ones auctioning off the ancient hardwoods to the Chinese. (Just like in Tanzania, the politicians selling the rhinocerous horns were the very ones leading the effort to save the rhinos.)
The Left in America is thrilled that the young are clueless and easily swayed. If they could think and do they wouldn’t vote for them.

Any chance at all that there may be a tiny connection between Why Johnny can’t Think, and Bill’s Firewall from years ago called Five Alarm Fire?

So after 32 years teaching children to read, my wife is retiring at the end of this school year. Her main reason is the ever changing “methods” that she is being forced to use. She has taught two generations at that school to read phonetically. And I do mean two generations as she has the kids of kids she taught years ago.
She actually got downgraded in her last evaluation because she was teaching the “old” way. She was the first person to tell me that you can’t teach every kid the same way. People are different and they learn differently. Each child needs different. Now teachers are being forced to teach one way, from the manual. So she is out.
I am hopeful that after a year off she may go to our local church preschool and do her thing there.

You’re wrong about something, Bill. Phonics IS taught in public schools. It is taught….in special education. Programs costing schools thousands of dollars use direct instruction–a carefully scripted curriculum, where teachers are told what to say, and students are told how to respond. A totally controlled curriculum, you see, because teachers cannot be trusted to teach using their own devices.

Regular education uses what you call look-see, but is called “whole language” in the education community. An actual strategy that teachers are told to help students learn this method is to have them ask a classmate. Yes. That is true. This has led to a generation of early readers who have difficulty transposing words from one medium to another. A child who knows the typewritten word “cat” will not be able to recognize it if it is handwritten, without some instruction. They are taught to memorize the imprint, not how to break down the letters, as you have said.

Further down their educational career, students struggle with answering questions from a passage that is not directly spelled out in the passage. If there is inference involved, they don’t even try, and demand (yes, demand) questions that have word-for-word answers in the text. Because their brains weren’t made to process information when they were young, those pathways aren’t well-worn, so it’s a struggle as children become older.

I often tell my students to “get on the struggle bus” when trying to answer a question. They hate it, but more often then not, they come up with the correct answer. Consequently, when some of my higher students are mainstreamed into a regular class, they perform better than a majority of the regular ed students. Not because they have a higher IQ, but because I teach them to *think*.

Friday – to my wife, “whole-language” is a four-letter word.

When young people who are interested in engineering ask me what type of engineer they should be, my response is usually along the lines of it doesn’t matter. The most important thing a good engineering school will teach is how to think and process data and set up a problem.

I would be interested to see what percentage of millennial’s can tell you what the abbreviation U.S.A. stands for OR better yet, how many stars and stripes are on the flag and why are there that many. I think you might be shocked at the answers. An we believe they could ever understand the electoral college and why it exists.

Great to see a new Firewall! But what a sad commentary on our (progressive) educational system.

America’s generation that bore and raised these special snowflakes have no one to blame but themselves. They delivered their children and grandchildren into the hands of unionized public schools run by Progressive administrators, with their dumbed-down, biased curricula. They sat them in front of TVs and computer screens, without paying attention to the nonstop message of civilizational self-loathing they imbibed from the mainstream media. Is it any surprise that the millennial generation sees socialism as an answer to all of the world’s shortcomings? After all, its Utopian ideals of total equality and an end to human want are appealing to young people. And since they have been shielded from learning the history of failed socialist regimes stretching back into time, they can’t understand that Socialism will never work. Ever.

Far from learning the truth — that America has been the greatest force for freedom in the history of humankind, while creating unparalleled wealth for its citizens — students today are relentlessly drilled with a progressive catechism of guilt over America’s long-admitted shortcomings. The result: a generation raised on moral equivalency, “diversity” and a complete ignorance of their nation’s own past. So we now have a generation of Americans that hate their own culture, even as hundreds of millions around the world dream of coming to this land of opportunity and freedom.

One can hope that the dumbing down of the Millennial generation will backfire on them. I’m not sure many of these people will even be able to find a voting booth come election time.

I think its the millenials (but might be another gen) that (at least for the wiser among them) see the failures of their parents and how much they’ve been let town that they’re skewing cynical and conservative. They won’t be fans of socialism or larger government because autocracy and authority is what they’ve seen in schools and other parts of their lives. They’ve seen how bureaucrats are never held to account and nothing really seems to change.

I was taught phonics in the 80s, so either my teachers were part of a movement back to sensible teaching, or I’m just lucky I had a good, private school.

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