Increasing Standards in Schools

How do we increase our nations intelligence in reading, math, and science to keep up with the rest of the world? What are the Finnish doing that we are not? These are questions that several educators are asking these days. We have fallen so far in math and reading. We now rank around 25th in math and 15th in reading. This is poor for the nation that we are. We are the land of hope, freedom, prosperity, and excellence. Or so we use to be. We have fallen from the top and allowed other countries to pass us on the academic world, business market, and so on. In business we have shipped many of our factories to over seas countries leaving many of our people jobless. On the education field we have allowed ourselves to stay on the same level and let the world pass us. We need to work to improve our schools. The teachers need to be able to prepare students for the 21st century world and not the 19th century world. We need to set standards higher at all levels from 1st grade through graduate students. Does this mean giving our hours and hours of homework? No I do not believe so. I believe homework should be short sweet and to the point. I think we need to find ways to make reading fun for kids to do so that way they will read instead of play video games for 8 hours a day. Video games are fine as long as they are kept in moderation. I believe if we make reading fun for kids and they start to do it more it will only help increase reading scores allowing them to have active full functioning brains. This will also help with the math scores due to the students having active brains that are ready to be filled with knowledge just like a car is ready to be filled with gas and a person is ready to be filled with food.