April 13th, 2019, 4:49 pm
Perhaps the depth of thinking has shallowed since you hung out with Plato and Socrates in the good old days, but from a very narrow perspective conflating time, place and system, I can say with complete confidence that the level of study undertaken and mastered by my two daughters in high school substantially outstripped what I ever attempted at the same age. And I may well have (wildly unsubstantiated claim to follow) graduated with the highest high school GPA in the country in my year. I know I graduated with the best (it was actually the lowest, but low was good) GPA in my university five years later, and in my year of acceptance that was one of the couple of hardest schools in Norway to get into based on the standardized entrance scoring system used at the time. This is not about me. I'm merely pointing out that these claims of great decay in Western education either happened a couple of generations ago (so that I suck, too), or they do not hold up all that well to scrutiny on the high end.