Where It All Went Wrong

I talked with three professional mathematicians who didn't know Math is real. There's English Majors--which that's all they do--who can't read Charles Dickens. There's people graduating High School with 4.0s and have taken calculus who can't do simple 1st grade math. 54% of Americans read below a fourth grade level. There are experts on Husserl who work at McDonald's and men who barely passed college tenured at Yale.

A perfect example of what's wrong with our world, is we have CAD and Dynamometers, but physicists don't use them. Instead, they erase data points, and use basic calculus and well behaved curves to do their math. That and people with College Majors in Math believe Math is subjective, and people who are explicitly studying to read English, cannot read Dickens. That's what's wrong. And people in the leading edges of science are actually pontificating on whether a whale is a fish. They really don't know what a fish is. It's that bad.

There's also students who get perfect SAT scores, 4.0 GPAs, juggle three tasks at a time for 12 hours a day, have glowing recommendations from teachers and professionals, but because their college admissions paper doesn't sound like a blog post, they get denied at every school. Despite the essay being written lucidly, with perfect structure, no purple passages, good grammar and spelling, in simple and plain enough language, as they talk about something like a Non Profit that they started and how they're leaps ahead of other students their age.

Another thing, an actual school faculty told one of the best and most professional teachers in their school, that Reading and Writing are not a Twenty-First Century skill.