The College Students Who Can’t Do Elementary Math
December 1st, 2025This is ending. pic.twitter.com/iZwltSmXr0
— Made by Jimbob (@ByJimbob) May 14, 2025
Via: Wall Street Journal:
Kids in elementary school learn—or are supposed to learn—how to add fractions and round numbers. But many students at the University of California, San Diego—a top public university ranked sixth nationally by U.S. News & World Report—can’t do either, according to a new analysis from the university.
Related: Why Are 38 Percent of Stanford Students Saying They’re Disabled?
Everything I hear about how public schooling is being conducted these days has me convinced someone is deliberately endeavoring to reduce the USA to the status of a “third world” country.
It’s definitely being done on purpose. The same thing has happened in New Zealand.
The high school situation is particularly dire in NZ. A new online charter school recently started accepting enrollments. It blew out the initial limit for the students in the first class in minutes. They managed to get approval to accept double the number of students and that has now filled up.
Why?
Many public/government schools have collapsed and parents are desperate to try anything else.
Another homeschooling father/friend of mine told me an astonishing story. I need to keep this somewhat vague because NZ is a small village…
His daughter is dropping out of high school because she has been offered an executive role at a large corporation in NZ. She was told something like, “We no longer consider formal education during the hiring process. It’s not a useful metric.”
WOW!
This girl is extremely intelligent and could easily have gotten into any university in this country. What’s the point, if, when one goes to get a job, “It’s not a useful metric”???
That’s all fine if you have a genius IQ and a feral drive to succeed, like my friend’s daughter. But what’s going to happen to the vast majority of students who are wasting time in these public schools???
I saw a video short on YouTube where a teacher was expressing her frustration with the lack of basic writing ability of Gen-Z students. She said she would give them an assignment where they were to just write five sentence paragraphs about anything under the sun, similar to the way we Cryptogon readers do in these comments. These students felt extremely put-upon by what would have been “easy peasey” busywork for Gen-X students back in the eighties. Hearing of things such as this is infinitely disturbing. These kids are supposed to be tomorrow’s workers and professionals, after all!