A friend started a conversation over on Google+ about standardized testing in education. What prompted her to do so was a Washington Post Local blog post about when an adult took the standardized tests and failed miserably. Her point is that nobody should be surprised at this – on several fronts. To me, the most important of the four points she delineated was that “Teaching methods have changed dramatically in the last decades, and it’s entirely possible he [the adult who took the test] was NEVER previously exposed to questions such as those on this test.”

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My father insisted that if I didn’t get a college education I would suffer in life. I got the message. Dad also was quick to shake his head and mutter, “More college, more dumb,” when I did something he felt demonstrated a lack of common sense. He seemed to hold this duality of admiration for people with higher education (he was not able to attend college himself), and at the same time a bit of disdain for those same folks because they often had no “practical experience” or “common sense.”

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Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist, commentator and book author. Some dozen years ago he wrote in one of his commentaries that, “The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origin of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.” He recently noted that things “seem to have only gotten worse in the years since I first wrote those words.”

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I was listening to a podcast discussing higher education around the world. The statistic I heard quoted from the experts on this topic was that 60% of the 26,000 PhD’s awarded to students in a given year from US Institutions are foreign nationals.

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