Talk politics.

This excerpt is taken from Charles' book, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America's Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add

While critics tend to rely on the three-decades long decline of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to document the dumbing down of American education, more alarming is our performance against the students of other industrialized countries. By virtually every measure of achievement, American students lag far behind their counterparts in both Asia and Europe, especially in math and science. Moreover, the evidence suggests that they are falling farther and farther behind. As educational researcher Harold Stevenson notes, although "the U.S. is among the countries expending the highest proportion of their gross national product on education, our elementary school and secondary school students never place above the median in comparative studies of academic achievement."

Part of the reason is that neither our schools nor our students spend very much time at it. The National Education Commission on Time and Learning found that most American students spend less than half their day actually studying academic subjects. The commission's two-year study found that American students spent only about 41 percent of the school day on basic academics. Their schedules jammed with course work in self-esteem, personal safety, AIDS education, family life, consumer training, driver's ed, holistic health, and gym, the typical American high school student spends only 1,460 hours on subjects like math, science, and history during their four years in high schools. Meanwhile, their counterparts in Japan will spend 3,170 hours on basic subjects, students in France will spend 3,280 on academics, while students in Germany will spend 3,528 hours studying such subjects - nearly three times the hours devoted in American schools.

By some estimates, teachers in Japan give elementary students three times as much homework as American children are given by their teachers, while teachers in Taipei give their students seven times as much homework as children in Minneapolis. By fifth grade, children in Minneapolis are getting slightly more than four hours a week in homework, while fifth graders in Japan get six hours and students in Taipei, thirteen hours.

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