Why Johnny's teacher can't read

Take a few minutes and look at this data!

I was directed to that chart during a discussion of America's education problem, and it served to confirm the anecdotal evidence I'd heard regarding our low standards for teachers. (FYI, the chart lists only select majors - the selection intended to support the author's answer to the question, why study philosophy?) Now I'm no statistician, but I think we can safely draw a few conclusions from the data.

What immediately struck me was that students who majored in education and politics - arguably the two most important factors of responsible citizenship - scored so far below average. We can't conclude, from this data alone, that we're graduating teachers and politicians poorly prepared for their jobs. But we can conclude that they're being outperformed by students in other fields.

Another oddity is the wide gap between philisophy and politics majors. America's founders were avid students of philosophy, and bequeathed to us a government forged from the best ideas available at that time. If we have so divorced politics from philosophy as to create the drastic disparity this data reveals, we shouldn't be surprised at the naive and simpleminded political theories proposed and implemented by our public officials.