Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

What in the world has happened to us?

Once upon a time, America had the greatest system of education on the entire planet, and our people were sharp, capable and extremely well informed. Sadly, none of those things are true anymore. In 2006, Mike Judge made a movie entitled “Idiocracy” in which an individual of below average intelligence wakes up after being asleep for 500 years thanks to a military hibernation experiment. When he wakes up, he quickly realizes that he is now the smartest man in America, and that is not a good thing. The film became an instant classic, but when I originally watched it I thought that such a thing could never actually happen in this country. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Since 2006 our nation has been “dumbed down” at a pace that is absolutely staggering, and it is difficult to see a positive future for America if this trend continues.

The following are 18 statistics that prove that America has become an “idiocracy”…

Sometimes it helps to go into the past to get some much needed perspective on the present.

A few years ago, an eighth grade exam from 1912 was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum. To me, it is absolutely amazing what kids living in rural Kentucky were expected to know a little over 100 years ago.

You can find a copy of the exam right here, and as I looked it over I quickly realized that most college students would have an exceedingly difficult time trying to pass such a test today.

In fact, I think that I would have a very hard time getting a passing grade. Here are just a few of the questions on the exam…

-Through which waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila? -How does the liver compare in size with other glands in the human body? -How long of a rope is required to reach from the top of a building 40 feet high to the ground 30 feet from the base of a building? -Compare arteries and veins as to function. Where is the blood carried to be purified? -During which wars were the following battles fought: Brandywine, Great Meadows, Lundy’s Lane, Antietam, Buena Vista?

If you would like to know the answers to all of the questions on the exam, you can find them right here.

In contrast, our system of education today is a total joke. Most of our students have never learned how to communicate effectively, they are fed an endless stream of “tests” that consist of multiple choice, true/false and fill-in-the-blank questions, and when they get out of school most of them have absolutely no idea how to succeed in the real world.

Perhaps that helps to explain why our kids are in the bottom half of all industrialized nations when it comes to math and science literacy.

If we do not educate our children well, we will continue to fall behind the rest of the world, and it will be just a matter of time before we lose our status as a global power.

Of course that assumes that we actually have enough time left to turn things around. At that rate that we are currently degenerating, we might not.