China is eating our lunch
China is eating our lunch
While our kids mug for TicTok, Chinese children are preparing for a future that doesn't include us.
The contrast couldn’t be more stark.
Each weekday morning my niece gets up at dawn and begins remotely teaching Chinese children ages five and up English as a second language. Many of the older students are seriously fluent in English before she gets them and are already sweating getting admitted to the best universities, a determinant of their lot in life in a rigid communist society.
The Chinese Communist Party is deadly serious about indoctrinating and training their youth in the sciences, languages, and CCP dogma. These children will make up the cadres charged with administering Chinese law to we conquered Americans in the future the CCP visualizes.
Contrast that with American schoolchildren. Just this week came a report that 2023 student scores on the ACT college admissions test were the lowest in 32 years. Some of this is a result of the criminally negligent Covid lockdowns perpetrated by the government with the full support of the teachers’ unions. Some of it is the result of incompetent teachers and disengaged parents who don’t care as long as little Johnny stays out of their way.
In Baltimore, it was recently revealed that not one student in 23 schools was proficient in math at their grade level. Two thousand students in 150 Baltimore schools were tested. Another 20 schools had no more than two students proficient in math. Seven percent of third through eighth graders at Baltimore City Schools met grade-level math expectations in 2022. Per-student spending in Baltimore schools exceeds $20,000 per student.
While Baltimore may be an outlier, it isn’t much of one. Learning loss nationwide has been accelerating, thanks largely to covid lockdown policies. The damage these lockdowns did to children is staggering and you can bet no one will be held accountable.
Schools are churning out kids who can’t read, can’t solve simple math problems, and can’t find their own houses on a map if their lives depended on it. While in China much of TikTok is dedicated to educational subjects, in America kids mug in front of their iPhones and generally act like idiots. On a quiet night you can almost hear the CCP laughing. Pundits have labeled Millenials and Gen Z our dumbest generations. Wait’ll they get a load of this one in a few years.
How this can be fixed is the question. One solution is to crush the teachers’ unions and get them out of our schools. Their priorities are money, electing Democrats to get money, spending money to elect more Democrats, and getting more money. Somewhere near the bottom are the students.
Incompetent teachers must be fired, which will be the next step after crushing the unions. Perhaps one solution is that used by charter schools, where people who are not graduates of teaching, but with plenty of practical life experience, are given opportunities to teach.
Charter schools must be expanded. Most of them produce better results than government schools and those that do not will close, unlike zombie public schools that go on for years, ruining generation after generation of children.
Universal school choice is gaining ground, particularly in red states. School choice introduces competition, which the teachers’ unions absolutely hate. Allowing parents to take their school tax monies to the school of their choice is a warning to government schools to shape up or else.
Any way you slice it, America’s young people are in trouble and the country will pay the price in a few years when these kids become adults and enter a technological economy they are unprepared for and can’t comprehend. Add to that the dumbing down of our military, half our submarine fleet unable to put to sea, Democrats proposing more cuts to defense to buy votes with welfare, not enough ships, planes, sailors, or pilots, and the CCP must be licking its chops. With the current state of our government officials, particularly the drooling meat puppet-in-chief, it’s just a matter of time before the Russians and Chinese decide the time is ripe to strike.
When that happens, my niece may get to meet some of her students in person