I have decided that it is time for me to talk about problems we young people are creating for ourselves. Sometimes, people need a metaphorical boot to the loins from someone who knows their struggles, and I believe I am an appropriate person to kick some youths' butts due to the fact that I am young. The Millenials and Gen Z'ers need to get their acts together in terms of one of the largest problems facing us as a nation: our abysmally large high school dropout rate and the general apathy of high school students. If our young people fail to wake up academically, the long-term consequences for our futures could be catastrophic.
Approximately 25% of all high school students in the USA will drop out at some point before graduation (see: http://www.americaspromise.org/Our-Work/Grad-Nation/Building-a-Grad-Nation.aspx). The current graduation rate of 75% is about 10 points lower than the OECD average. Nations with promising futures (such as Korea) have graduation rates almost 20 percentage points above our fair nation's rate.
What really bothers me about that high drop out rate is that, in general, high school today is not hard as measured by national standardized tests (like the SAT). The SAT is designed to measure college readiness (or how much students learned in high school). Let's look at what should have been learned in high school as assessed by the SAT: http://www.universitylanguage.com/quiz/SAT/. Compare those questions to the questions a high school graduate and prospective student at Harvard in 1899 would have had to deal with: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf. Quite a difference in difficulty and expectations, eh? If you are a high school student and you are planning on dropping out because "classes are hard", just remember what you would've dealt with in 1899. That should put any ideas of dropping out to rest.
Even more troubling than the low graduation rate is the fact that high school students do not seem to be learning anything. In terms of reading and scientific comprehension, American high schoolers are mediocre compared to other OECD countries. As for mathematical knowledge, the USA's students are far behind their counterparts in countries like China and Korea (see: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/54/12/46643496.pdf).
This trend of illiteracy in mathematics is discouraging. Mathematics is one of the languages in our reality (I have not figured out yet if math can completely describe reality) and it is unreasonably good at describing our universe. Our future ability to compete in the world economy will be directly related to today's youths being able to succeed in mathematics and math-based disciplines (such as engineering, physics, and computer science). So far, it looks like our competitors are winning the battle for mathematical and technological superiority.
However, I have some encouraging news for you high schoolers struggling with math: Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Leonard Euler all spent hours every day studying math (Google those names if you do not recognize them). If it took those geniuses hours of diligent study to understand mathematical topics, it is no surprise that it takes you a lot of time as well. So, do not be discouraged if you can't figure out a problem; the giants of math I just mentioned struggled at times, too. Just keep trying.
In sum, high schoolers, it is time to stop screwing around. Get off your computers, turn off your iPhones, open up your trigonometry books, and get working on using that unit circle to derive the tangent function's graph. You will be at it for a while, just like the great mathematicians of the past were.
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