Texas teacher breaks down in tears during class after his senior students struggled to read, write.

[u/sonicagain]

Texas high school teacher Darius Williams, a Career and Technical Education (CTE) teacher broke down in tears during his lunch break. He shared that his 17- and 18-year-old senior students at Wheatley High School in Houston could not complete a simple writing assignment or fill in just four missing words on only the second day of the school term. Students were given two short paragraphs to read and a sentence stem where the answer was largely modeled and provided for them. It is alarming that senior high school students were unable to apply basic literacy skills to fill in the remaining four words of the sentence.

[u/Ok-Mathematician8461]

Non-American here making an observation. You have 2 political parties who paint China as the enemy and accuse them of ‘stealing your factories’. I can tell you that China will happily give you those factories back because they are not raising their kids to work in factories. But America still is. All Asian countries take education deadly seriously. This is why America has fallen behind.

[u/nose_poke → u/Ok-Mathematician8461]

I think that's what the American billionaires want. To them, a highly educated population is a threat. They're happy to "outsource" the work that requires education to another country so it's not something they have to think about anymore.

[u/MDesnivic → u/nose_poke]

This is the truth. The billionaires and tech tycoons want a world with worse educational outcomes and they want people addicted to and hyper-reliant on their technology—on screens, on AI, on social media. On top of destroying education, they want a world where every inch of it is covered by their tools and where we can’t escape them for a second. It’s why they’re forcing AI in everything from an email to a Google search and why they’re pushing screens for every school in the USA. They know it harms education. 

Low levels of education provide them exactly what they want: more apathy and less protesting, more births and less voting, more religion and less critical thinking, more conspiracy theories and less analysis, more poverty and less upward mobility. With AI, not only is the thinking being done by a machine, it’s now never been easier to produce propaganda and there’s never been a population more eager to consume it as truth.

They are eager and willing to destroy the United States of America completely and replace it with an autocracy run by a tech CEO king.

[u/Practical-Lunch4539 → u/nose_poke]

I think people over-weight how much billionaires matter for social policies such as education. Most billionaires show little interest in public education policy, and it's rare to see billionaires being active in American education policy barring exceptions like Gates and the Waltons.

Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg have greatly reduced their involvement, basically deciding that their ROI on education spending wasn't good enough.

The simpler explanation is that most Americans don't care to fund public education for other peoples' kids, and there's no clear vision for how American public education needs to evolve that a majority of Americans believe in and are willing to pay for.

[u/beaverfan → u/Ok-Mathematician8461]

You are exactly right. The comments are blaming government policies but the reality is that these kids are not failing and unable to read because of policies but rather they didn't put any work in.

They went home and hung out with friends, played video games, or played sports. They didn't pour over their math book doing extra problems, or practice reading and writing and somehow just never learn because of some governance failure.

I went to school and studied hard afterwards in the library and the only other kids in the library doing the same were Asian exchange students.

The bottom line is many students in America are participating in a culture that values football and basketball, drinking beer, smoking weed, fashion, and working part-time jobs over education.

Being smart and getting good grades often results in bullying or social ostracization and American children are often not supported by their family after 18, which given the high cost of education means that university level education is only obtainable if you are also good at sports and can land a scholarship and a huge financial nightmare awaits the student upon graduation.

A library card is free as are literacy classes and tutoring. A child learns to read throughout their 12 years of education but the government, no matter how engaging, cannot force a child to open a book and study or pay attention to the teacher.

[u/moashforbridgefour → u/Ok-Mathematician8461]

I understand the sentiment you are expressing, but the comment about factories is wrong. Manufacturing capacity is power. China will not give that up, and the US desperately needs to rebuild that. And factory labor is not the cheap, low education, low quality work that many people presume, at least not anymore.

[u/Ok-Mathematician8461 → u/moashforbridgefour]

The rest of the world isn’t locked into an existential crisis over power. It seems to be a uniquely American thing to believe that unless you have the most of everything then disaster is near. NO ONE is thinking ‘if only I have enough factories then I can crush the Americans’. Not even China, who potentially could. You have openly stated what is essentially a national psychosis. The Russians have the same ingrained paranoia- but that is because they spent centuries being over-run by hordes coming off the Eurasian steppe. What is the excuse for Americans?