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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The US is one of the most educated countries in the world! Only Korea and Canada are materially ahead of us in college attainment: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/with...

We’re way ahead of Germany or Italy.

The America that sent a man to the moon had around 5% of people with a college degree.

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Overeducation may itself be a problem:

Elite overproduction, and especially overproduction of the youth with advanced degrees, continues unabated. Our institutions of higher education have been churning out law, MBA, and PhD degrees, many more than could be absorbed by the economy. In a Bloomberg View article published just a few days ago Noah Smith provides the numbers for the overproduction of PhDs (America Is Pumping Out Too Many Ph.D.s https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-04/americ...).

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-storming-of-the-u-s...

Sure, but as someone not from the US it looks like that education ain't worth much in the US as you deliberately undermine peoples ability to learn critical thinking by teaching creationism in schools.

This is a really funny accusation since:

1) We don’t teach any religion in schools.

2) Many highly advanced EU countries are required to teach religion in schools e.g. many German states: https://eftre.weebly.com/deutschland-germany.html

I didn't accuse the US of teaching religion, I accused it of teaching creationism and undermining peoples ability to learn critical thinking.

I know that religion is taught in the EU, I went to school in Denmark. And no one pushed it as reality, it was more of a learn this fiction because it has historically been important and some people still believe it. Not once was it presented as reality or something we should believe in.

> I didn't accuse the US of teaching religion, I accused it of teaching creationism and undermining peoples ability to learn critical thinking.

We don't, and we legally cannot.

> I know that religion is taught in the EU, I went to school in Denmark. And no one pushed it as reality, it was more of a learn this fiction because it has historically been important and some people still believe it. Not once was it presented as reality or something we should believe in.

That is more than is legally permissible in the U.S. And even if people don't perceive the education as saying "this is true" it still socializes kids in a shared religious history and helps them understand the people who still believe it. There is nothing comparable to this in the U.S.

You're right that religion isn't taught in US schools, however, it is promoted when schools and states work as hard as they can to exclude evolution from public school curriculums. This is effectively teaching the population religion in areas where religion is common and evolution is purged from the school books.

Serious question: can you show evidence where this has actually taken place in the school curriculum in recent times?

Anybody can advocate for anything, from wanting to teach Satanism and anti-vaxx science to GMOs cause cancer and "New Math", but the curriculum doesn't bend so easily since there are federal standards. Beyond fear mongering and "leftist memes", any real examples?

In the late 1990s/early 2000s some folks got textbooks to put stickers saying “evolution is just a theory.”

All this comment demonstrates is that some bizarre narratives about the U.S. have taken hold. I went to a public high school in rural Missouri. We weren't taught creationism, for crying out loud. In fact, it would have been illegal for them to do so.

This is not a very meaningful measure, given that the standards of a "college education" today are way lower than even a high-school education in e.g. the 19th century. Anti-intellectualism is not a new development or a result of the Internet; it has been somewhat common for quite some time, even among the self-proclaimed intellectual elite.

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