Why Are Chinese Schools Open and American Schools Closed?
By Carole Hornsby Haynes November 29, 2020
In China, public schools are open for K-12 students who are are learning in-person while many American schools are closed, despite the science that shows students and teachers are not infecting each other. American teacher unions are the most vociferous of voices to continue the shutdown of publicly funded schools.
Lawmakers must share the guilt as well. Vermont Gov. Phil Scott is threatening students with more home lockdowns and online learning. He is demanding that schools interrogate students about their Thanksgiving activities following the break. Students or parents who admit they violated the state’s holiday travel and gathering rules will be forced to stay at home with online learning for two weeks. The penalty will be reduced to one week if the students take a COVID-19 test.
Scott is a Republican yet he is behaving like a Democrat. It seems he prefers to follow the politically correct Cancel Culture crowd that is complicit in the Marxist coup to take down America.
If America still had the best educated students in the world, there might not be great cause for worry about students losing an entire year of learning. But those days are long past. American workers are now the worst educated in the industrial world. Public education and economy are at high risk with the protracted shutdown and online learning.
In 2018, 15-year-olds in dozens of countries participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) that’s given every 3 years. The test measures reading ability, math and science literacy, and other key skills. American students score in the middle for all categories with reading ability only at a basic level. Communist China beats the United States in every category with the gap widening each time the PISA is given.
Blaming low economic circumstances is a popular excuse for poor academic achievement in the U.S., yet we were soundly beaten by poor students in four provinces of China – Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
Critics claim that we can’t compare the U.S. with China because they don’t educated or test every child. When we compare our affluent and middle class students against theirs, China still outperforms us. In developed nations that educate every child, such as Singapore, our students still trail their peers.
Americans are allowing lawmakers to control our schools and our economy by their mandates that they themselves continually violate. We allow them to tell us how and where our children will be educated – or not educated.
We have a value issue here. Education – true learning – is not a high priority in our nation any longer, despite the enormous sums we expend for it. We place more value on expensive school plants and athletic stadiums than on the value of what is being taught to our children. We ignore that an educated population is key to global economic dominance while China places supreme value on it.
China is bullying its way into world dominance. With American schools remaining closed and the downward spiral of academic learning among our students, we can count on China gaining an ever more rapid economic advantage over the United States. When we lose our economic advantage, we are ripe for an overthrow of our government.