Christina Villegas has written an excellent and very important article but the problems she cites go way deeper into the present and more importantly the future of America and the world.
The dumbing down of America's schools and our students has created several generations of progressively less well educated Americans.
Once America recovers the political will to reverse this horrible trend where will the necessary well-educated people come from to initiate and carry out the reversal? We will need many thousands of great teachers. Where will we find them?
America has been the gravitational center of world freedom for a couple of hundred years. That center has now lost a large portion of its mass. What is going to replace this crucial centering mass? China and Russia? Their core education is way ahead of ours.
So while "the plan" has dawdled along waiting for the normies to realize what's going on, a generation of American children has been sacrificed to leftist, radical progressive ideology. That generation will be seen to be very important to the preservation of America's role at the center of world freedom. And it is gone.
The learning years are a physiological reality. You can't get them back once they've been squandered. Mathematics is taught to young eager minds for the reason that those minds are able to absorb mathematics. We don't teach maths to middle aged folks, do we?
So we need to get the damn plan moving. Even a crash program with a complete reversal of teaching priorities will not suffice to replace what we've allowed to slip away. Time does not come back. Youth does not return.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-purposeful-degradation-of-americas-schools/
It's very well known. You could look it up. This is just from google:
At what age does learning become more difficult? At what age is it harder to learn? It initially becomes harder to learn around the age of 12 because the chemicals in your brain change during puberty. Around the age of 25, your brain patterns solidify, and they will become harder to change.
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This.
I began a serious study of advanced mathematics 20 years ago at 60.
Nine years later I gave a paper at a major physics conference in Prague.
Five years after that I published a peer reviewed article on the foundations of mathematics.
Now finishing another major paper.
So not too ossified, I guess.
And, no, these events of my life do not contradict the age/learning argument of my post. The optimum learning years are simply matters of physiology - of brain function. What i have done on my own has been done out of intense love for what I am doing.
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u/#wildwest