/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10226537
>Why do you think that happened?
A few things concerning the US's reasons.
1. Government High School diploma mills:
Back during the time of Sputnik, having a High School diploma actually meant something. You might be able to get away with shoving marbles up your ass in grade and middle school, but back then, you actually had to apply to get accepted into a high school. However with a sizable number of adults uncomfortable with putting 13 year olds to work if they could not make the cut, laws were passed that forced mandatory high schooling for all kids younger then 18. The sudden flux of mandatory kids who gave 0 fucks about any kind of learning outside the body of the opposite sex has not only ruined the high school system, but made the degree worthless as they had to dumb down all subjects to meet minimum graduation requirements.

2. Sputnik scared the US government so shitless that it tried to ram down advanced mathematics into elementary school kid's throats in order to compete with the soviets( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math
) . What the US government failed to account for is that you have to be able to count before you can ask what the cardinality of a finite set is. This set kids up for failure, leading to the next section

3. Since the 1960's, advertising has forced the "math is hard and is for gay losers so buy our shit to look cool" meme pretty hard, and given the amount of continued success it has enjoyed, it set up people learning math to think they are just going to fail. In order to try and entice them to continue, we continue to dumb down the content.