I was born with every advantage known to America in the 1950’s. I had two white parents who created a loving, nurturing environment in a happy suburban home that never saw hunger or want. The fact that both parents were bibliophiles who fostered a love of learning and a reverence for education sets me apart even further from the vast majority of kids from my generation.
But I knew a lot of kids less well off than I who far surpassed me in academic achievement and in knowledge. This was a consequence of being educated at superior schools – private, Catholic schools – where inculcating a hunger for knowledge in students was seen as a teacher’s duty.
I am not an expert in what is wrong with schools today nor do I pretend to have any answers. I just know that the ignorance of our children as revealed in this study by Common Core is not only appalling but has me fearing for the future of American democracy:
A new survey of 17-year-olds reveals that, to many, the paragraph above sounds only slightly strange. Almost 20 percent of 1,200 respondents to a national telephone survey do not know who our enemy was in World War II, and more than a quarter think Columbus sailed after 1750. Half do not know whom Sen. McCarthy investigated or what the Renaissance was.It is easy to make light of such ignorance. In reality, however, a deep lack of knowledge is neither humorous nor trivial. What we know helps to determine how successful we are likely to be in life, and how many career paths we can choose from. It also affects our contribution as democratic citizens.
Unfortunately, too many young Americans do not possess the kind of basic knowledge they need. When asked fundamental questions about U.S. history and culture, they score a D and exhibit stunning knowledge gaps.
“Gaps” is an understatement in the knowledge of these 17 year olds:
• Nearly a quarter of those surveyedcould not identify Adolf Hitler; 10 percent think he was a munitions manufacturer• Fewer than half can place the Civil War in the correct half-century
• Only 45 percent can identify Oedipus
• A third do not know that the Bill of Rights guarantees the freedom of speech and religion
• 44 percent think that The Scarlet Letter was either about a witch trial or a piece of correspondence
Unfortunately, that’s not the half of it. It gets worse:
- 38% knew that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, a poem written in Middle English and containing stories told by people on a pilgrimage.
- 50% knew that In the Bible, Job is known for his patience in suffering.
- 57% knew that Dickens’ novel ATale of Two Cities took place during the French Revolution.
- 50% knew that the controversy surrounding Senator Joseph McCarthy focused on Communism.
- Only 60% knew that the First World War was between 1900 and 1950.
There is a chasm opening up between the old and the young as far as common cultural touchstones that allow us to share national experiences as well as communicate with each other.
If a politician makes the charge that an individual is engaging in “McCarthyism,” how is someone who doesn’t have a clue who Joe McCarthy was figure out what the politician is saying? How is someone who never heard of Oedipus to to understand a host of cultural references that the rest of us acknowledge without thinking?
It isn’t just being ignorant of the Bill of Rights and Constitution that threatens the future. Our national discussions frequently use these shared touchstones as a means of communicating at a deeper level. And, of course, these cultural references are the essence of the shared values of western civilization.
How did this disastrous turn of events come about? The study has some specific causes:
Americans in almost every demographic group are reading less than they were 10 or 20 years ago. The percentage of 17- year-olds who report reading for fun daily declined from one in three in 1984 to one in five in 2004. In 2006, 15- to 24-year olds on the whole reported reading an average of seven minutes a day on weekdays and 10 minutes a day on weekends.7 Meanwhile, in the past decade, the amount of time that teens and preteens devote to television, video games, and computers has increased steadily.8 In a culture suffused by instant messaging and YouTube, leisure reading has increasingly become an anachronism— a bit like polka or bowling leagues.
Another culprit is one of those things in education that is initiated with the very best of intentions and ends up hurting more than helping; standardized testing:
Testing is important, of that we have no doubt. But tests are not the be-all and end-all of education. They are an important indicator, but they are only one indicator of educational progress. Some districts are now spending many weeks of the school year preparing their students to take high-stakes tests. This, we believe, is time that could be better spent reading and discussing exciting historical controversies, scientific discoveries, and literary works. Indeed, reading in content areas, especially if guided by a knowledge-rich, coherent curriculum, would, we expect, produce higher test scores than endless test preparation activities.
I am supporter of testing. But when schools abandon academics in favor of teaching kids how to test well rather than absorb what is being tested, something is amiss. Are so many tests necessary? Would less intrusion by the federal government improve the situation? Those are questions I would ask if I had a kid in public schools today.
Finally, the study makes an eloquent case for establishing “deep knowledge” and “rich curriculum” schools:
Testing is important, of that we have no doubt. But tests are not the be-all and end-all of education. They are an important indicator, but they are only one indicator of educational progress. Some districts are now spending many weeks of the school year preparing their students to take high-stakes tests. This, we believe, is time that could be better spent reading and discussing exciting historical controversies, scientific discoveries, and literary works. Indeed, reading in content areas, especially if guided by a knowledge-rich, coherent curriculum, would, we expect, produce higher test scores than endless test preparation activities.
Thirty years from now those 17 year olds will be in charge of the country. I wonder what it will look like? Some variation of the 26th century in Idiocracy? More likely a less colorful, more conformist society would emerge with little to connect people to a shared past.
One last interesting tidbit from the study; kids who had one parent who attended college scored much better than kids who didn’t. This points up the fact that more than ever, the role of the teacher is vital in inspiring students to move beyond the textbook, beyond the tests and realize that the most rewarding and joyful part of the educational experience is gathering knowledge for knowledge sake; learning for the sheer joy knowing. A teacher who can do that deserves a salary equal to Barry Bonds, Shaq O’Neal, and Tom Brady all rolled into one – a most valuable member of society.
4:31 pm
Kudos to you Mr. Moran. I am a professor at a large NE U.S. University, and in my 6 years of teaching I have seen an apathy for learning that boggles the mind. The majority of my students care more about what is a passing score then what it takes to get an A. Amazingly the students that “always” do well, are those that are full time or near full time students and are working forty hours a week. I seriously don’t even think half of them understand that they are “paying” for their classroom slumber and doodling. Keep up the good fight, I enjoy your objectiveness and patriotism.
5:02 pm
A test is the only way to determine what a child has absorbed, but it is not the end all to beat all. Teachers who only teach the test are failing the “teacher” test. Unfortunately, we live in a society that has been engineered so that “everyone gets a Little League trophy” and children who have a desire to learn are labeled “geeks”.
When I went to school (parochial as well) the most popular kid was always the one with the best grades because they were the ones always getting awards and certificates of achievement in front of the whole class. I could not stand the smartest kid in my class so I worked my tail off to prevent them from getting the awards. But God forbid we should encourage competition between students. Now we put day care centers on campus so they can be close to their babies. Wouldn’t want to instill any shame in irresponsible behavior. It might damage their little egos.
The Catholic school in my area charges $1,800 a school year for the first child, prorated for the second, third, etc. The school tracks its students so that it can report on the percentage that go to college. The rate last year was 89% of former students that had gone on to university level education. Our local ISD claims it takes $8,700 a year to educate a kid and has a 38% former student rate of those who attend a university.
But we do have one hellofa brand new football stadium.
5:08 pm
Personally I think education is a victim of it’s past success. There was a time when an education was a ticket out of poverty. Now, even the American poor are rich by world standards and can maintain a acceptable subsistence lifestyle with minimum or no effort.
Next time you beg you kid to help you with your computer or have them explain to you how to use your cell phone, be sure to tell him how uneducated he is because he does not know who Senator Joseph McCarthy is, especially when much of the accepted liberal dogma taught about McCarthy is so wrong.
5:33 pm
Mr.Moran,please continue to write on this subject.We can not expect a socialist education system to generate a quality product because it robs incentive just as it does economically.We have adopted a policy of equality thru mediocrity,and we will all pay the price!Check out the sad statistics at http://www.americancivicliteracy.org. Freedom dies and socialism thrives when ignorance prevails!As an old paratrooper and as a school board member it makes me sick to see the path ahead.
6:49 pm
I would argue that the lack of basic knowledge by today’s students is more a function of an ever-expanding curriculum in the name of diversity and multiculturalism. We hear here what they don’t know, but I think we’d be equally shocked by what they DO know. I have a high school-age daughter. She wouldn’t know a thing about the American Civil War if we didn’t teach it to her at home, but she knows that “we killed all the Indians with small pox-infected blankets” and she knows that “Che Guevera was a freedom fighter” and she knows that “Cuba has the best medical care in the world because they really care about their people” and she knows that “we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed tons of kids” but she doesn’t know when that was, what war was going on, or why we did it. She hasn’t been taught a thing about American politics except that Democrats and Republicans had “the great switch a long, long time ago” when the Republicans became the racist party instead of the Democrats. I kid you not. She has been taught that in school each of the past 4 years. She once asked me, “Mom, when did ‘the great switch’ happen? I have a quiz tomorrow.” Believe me, these students are being taught something….
7:00 pm
I can’t resist this reaction to one of your sentences:
“Me, I love to read while I’m listening to polka at the bowling alley.”
I suggest that the loss of esteem for learning is part of an overall anti-rational trend in American culture. The most obvious manifestation of this trend is the rejection of scientific results for political reasons. Both left and right have sinned in this regard: the right for its response to evolution and global warming, the left for its reaction to GM foods, nuclear power, and evolutionary psychology.
The focal point of our efforts should be to rebuild respect for rationalism.
9:03 pm
Let’s acknowledge one of the killer problems with education: there’s no reliable evaluation system. We all know a good teacher years after our contact with the teacher, but nobody can really tell how good any given teacher or educational program is until long after it has done its job. So how can any approach, market or government, yield good education? We do it by the seat of our pants. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s hit or miss.
Even worse is the fact that the educational achievement of any single student cannot readily be ascribed to any individual. Moreover, some schools have to work with poorly motivated students while others get highly motivated students. It’s not fair to reward the latter schools when their students go on to educational successes.
It should be possible to come up with comparative ratings of schools based on some complex statistical methodology, but to make it work you have to insure that all the schools competing with each other have the same mix of students. In other words, you’d have to bus students all over creation to insure that every school gets a fair mix of students. If you did so, you could come up with statistical measures of each school’s performance and even each teacher’s performance—but those measures wouldn’t be available for perhaps a decade after a teacher starts working at a school.
1:06 am
Steve,
The public school system was created by capitalists FOR capitalists. It’s a direct product of the industrial revolution.
Unfortunately, most people don’t really grasp why the public education system even exists in the first place. People don’t question why high school kids aren’t taught basic finance and investing. People don’t question why entrepreneurship is barely mentioned in high school, let alone encouraged. The list goes on and on and the result is exactly as the creators of the system expected. Kids graduate with the hope of finding some kind of job, then doing some pathetic version of that for the rest of their lives. It fills the factories and service jobs. Rarely is the mold broken, and that is 100% by design.
The public education system is designed specifically to churn out worker drones. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. If you want to make it to middle management, you go to college. Beyond that, there is little unless you are truly motivated.
The most successful (and happiest) people I know are those who either jumped ship early on and started their own businesses, or those who refused to let the system destroy their creativity and used that to either create or demand a job of their choosing.
It may be a socialist system, but it was created for capitalism.
1:49 am
Our own President wouldn’t fair any better in that survey, and people ask what’s wrong with education?
Because stupid is “cool” and fancy book learnin’ is for the “elite”.
2:39 am
Daily Quick Hits 2/26/08…
Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Pro-Military Rally Trumps Leftist Hooligans in DC
WhereÂ’s The Warming, Al? Video
Lieberman Joins Conservatives on Terror Surveillance– Nutroots Go Batty
Mother Sheehan: “My Family Was Treated Lik…
5:28 am
tHePeOPle is so right
!
8:37 am
I don’t know. I was a history major and am 37 years old. But, I am not sure that this poll couldn’t have been conducted 20-30 years ago and substituted “Palmer Raids” for “McCarythism”, Kaiser Wilheilm for Adolf Hitler, kept everything else consistent and come away with the exact same results.
Americans have never been good with history – which has been both a strength and a weakness. IMHO, schools need to focus much more on math and science rather than humanities (and I hated math and science). But, you can learn the humanities on your own, math and science require a lot more interaction to learn.
Anyway, you also need to remember something else – only about 25% of people have college diplomas. There aren’t too many jobs that a knowledge of ANY of the above facts would make even the slightest difference. Not to say that an informed citizenry isn’t important, it is, but the ENTIRE citizenry – or even a majority – doesn’t actually need to be informed for the society to move forward productively.
8:54 am
For Steve: If the the “socialist public school system” is so terribly wrong, how do you explain that other countries with “socialized” education systems—I’m thinking Europe, Japan and in some cases, India—are kicking America’s butt when it comes to educating their young? I think it has less to do with the “socialist” aspect of public education and more to do with national priorities, or lack thereof on America’s part. Upward mobility and future business success are clearly linked to educational achievement in other cultures, yet in this country our schools are merely worried about passing achievement tests this year in order to maintain funding. Those other cultures have their eyes on the prize; we don’t. American teens rank, like, 24th or 25th in math when compared to other Western nations—countries with socialized education systems. Until education becomes a serious national priority in America, it won’t matter what type of education system we’ve got.
9:31 am
Rick if you are interested in how test taking is wrecking our schools watch the last season of the Wire that deals with No Child Left Behind. I graduated from a back-water redneck High School in Southern Maryland in 1994 and at the time the ONLY thing the school was concerned with was the MD requirements that each student have 4 years of civics, 2 math, 2 science and 4 years of English – if you could get a D (passing) in each of those classes you got your diploma. Making students take classes just for the sake of getting a D is no better than the current NCLB in my opinion – at my HS we had part-time students (they would let you attend until you were 20) that would come in once a day just to take that final English or civics class so they could graduate.
The above comments have everything – McCarthy apologists (#3), the liberals are brain-washing our children (#6) and of course The Capitalist just want to make us slaves! (#8). All that is missing is a comment on how Ron Paul will fix everything!
9:36 am
Rick,
One of my daughters teaches middle school, 7th and 8th grades, math. Currently she is preparing the students to take the first of several statewide tests to determine these children’s futures and to determine if my daughter has complied with the “No Child Left Behind” crap from Washington. If a certain percentage of the children fail to achieve a certain score, she gets a failing score on her evaluation and will affect her ability to be re-hired next year. She has been tutoring the math classes for about 3 weeks and has another 2 weeks before the test. She comes home almost every night and expresses her frustration with the kids in the ‘top class’ being held back and the kids in the ‘slow group’ telling her that they don’t have to do any better because they are in the ‘slow group’.
I think there is either going to be a national epiphany regarding federal interference in the education system or we are going to have a nation of uneducated adults that can’t make any informed decisions and the country of the United States of America will disappear into the dregs of forgotten history.
I was born a few years before you and we were taught to read using phonics. Today if you want to learn to read using phonics you have to buy it because the public school system doesn’t us it. People don’t read because they haven’t been made to read or encouraged to read. They have been coddled and told that its not their lack of work or effort that is the reason they are failing, its someone else’s fault they are playing video games or watching TV or out stealing cars for fun.
Politicians have only one thing in mind, gaining power and staying in power. We, who put them in office, are to blame for what we get. No amount of feel good legislation is going to fix the problems in our so called education system. The only thing that is going to fix it is to get the federal experimenting in public education.
Have a good day.
9:41 am
#13
I meant to end with the following:
The only thing that is going to fix it is to get the federal experimenting out of public education.
Thank you.
9:42 am
As a life long right winger, I hate to say it but it’s the right wing that has caused the precipitous collapse of the US public School systems. It is church groups crowding into school board meetings and promoting creationism and denying the plain factual science of global warming and pushing other flat earth theories down our kids throats.
We spend upwards of 40% of the GDP on weaponry and defense and about one percent on education. As one iof my favorite bloggerswrites: we have smart bombs and dumb kids. In fact the European and Indian kids who used to come here to get a great university level education are now back in Europe. Our Visa tightening did little to make us safer while it made it harder for students to get into the country. This is also one of the results of this disasterously prosecuted war on terror.
It also doesn’t help that conservative children generally test a lot lower on apptitude tests than the children of liberal families. It’s sad but true.
I have being reading comments here and hate to say it guys, but there are not too many geniuses here
10:00 am
You know it doesn’t help when Bush administration officials tell government scientists what to publish and what not to.
This entire administration has conducted a fullscale assault on reason and logic.
What does it tell our kids when we teach them that the world is 6000 years old?
They’re dumb enough without this mishigoss.
10:17 am
tHePeOPle, seems to know little of history with the “public schools were created by capitalist FOR capitalists.”
Regarding the Northwest Ordinance:
“lands were devided into townships six miles square, nd subdivided into thirty-six sections of 640 acres each. One of these sections was to be donated for the purposes of public education.
“RELIGION, morality and knowledge being necessary to government and happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged,” said Congress.
And to think that such an uneducated person posts on a thread about education.
10:32 am
[...] Right Wing Nut House, “Still At Risk: The Shocking Ignorance of Our Young” [...]
11:20 am
Excellent post, Rick. Much of this goes back to the 70s, when the educational elite decided that rote learning was much less important than ‘learning how to think’, as if those propositions were mutually exclusive. The result? A generation of otherwise bright kids who are empty vessels. My daughter, who is now a college senior, did not have her first post-1700 US history class in high school until her sophomore year. Before that, she was inundated with Indian folklore, making teepees- you know the drill.
11:43 am
tHePeOPle offers us a conspiratorial model of the history of our educational system. I’d like to ask a few questions about that conspiratorial model:
1. Who were the conspirators?
2. How did this cabal manage to impose their evil design upon the many different school systems of the United States?
3. How have they managed to foil the system of elected school board members?
4. Why have they failed to achieve uniformity of school systems across the country?
I’d also like to point out the embarrassing fact that there are a lot of misspellings scattered through the comments. I’m not going to nitpick so far as to point out any particular misspellings. There are also some inappropriately used words and I think there were also several grammatical errors. And let’s not forget the anti-intellectual comment on global warming by Neocon News.
I don’t mean to denigrate any individual here or the group as a whole. My point is a variation on “Physician, heal thyself”. Respect for learning is something each and every one of us advances or retards by our own actions.
1:28 pm
Oecolampadius,
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a rationalist who does his homework.
“1. Who were the conspirators?”
The so called conspirators were the industrialists of the early 1900’s. The people who stood to gain the most from having a workforce with enough knowledge to run the factories, etc. For example, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller spent enormous quantities of money through various organizations to put forth a model of schooling what would become mandatory for most everyone.
“2. How did this cabal manage to impose their evil design upon the many different school systems of the United States?”
I didn’t say that the design was evil. The design makes perfect sense to those who benefit most from it. The variations in school systems are minimal at best. An average public education in Chicago is virtually the same as one in Los Angeles.
“3. How have they managed to foil the system of elected school board members?”
School board members work within a predefined set of boundaries to effect minimal changes in the local school(s) that hey have a small degree of control over. They aren’t being ‘foiled’ at all. They have a job to do. They make sure that schools operate within the guidelines. Their job isn’t to care about why public schools exist. They make sure that the right people get hired or fired, or the curriculum meets certain standards, or finding the right football coach, etc.
“4. Why have they failed to achieve uniformity of school systems across the country?”
I’m not sure how you would define uniformity. From what I have seen and read, the system is very uniform. The styles might vary from place to place, but the public system is the public system. Sure, property tax driven systems have more resources for wealthier communities, but the underlying system still functions the same.
I understand your concern for better spelling and grammatical errors. Sometimes debate around here gets heated, and the tiny comment box is more designed for hasty commenting than editing. I would like to apologise to you for my pour grammer and spelling. I blame pubic skooling, not myself.
2:01 pm
I think every school should have a course in cultural knowledge, basic facts that everybody should know. I mentioned this to my college student kids and their response was that in my day, you know, like a thousand years ago, students had to memorize facts. Now, they explained, the key is knowing how to find those facts. That is, because the internet is so handy, it substitutes for basic memorization. I don’t know, I think they should still have those basic facts in their heads, but at least they have a defense.
Joe5348
6:11 pm
Johnno, you’re as much as a lifelong rightwinger as I am a lifelong rabbit.
The Fed govt. spends about 5% of GDP on defense, and nearly twice that on education.
But wait, there’s more:
“In fact the European and Indian kids who used to come here to get a great university level education are now back in Europe.”
Uh, lifelong rightwinger, are you telling me that religious parents of GRADE and HIGH school kids are having an effect on COLLEGE curriculum? Who knew?
“It also doesn’t help that conservative children generally test a lot lower on apptitude tests than the children of liberal families. It’s sad but true.”
Care to site the study, please.
“I have being reading comments here and hate to say it guys, but there are not too many geniuses here.”
Yes, you have being reading comments here, and yes, you are spot on, there are not too many geniuses here, genius.
7:42 pm
Rick:
Excellent post. IMHO, reading is the key to all learning. Show me a child who can read well, and I will generally show you an excellent student. (Generally, I said.) If you can read, education is just a matter of application.
Any time you want to do another post about this subject, I will read it eagerly.
Johnno:
Dude, you need to learn to proof-read. And if you are going to post comments as facts, how about supplying a link when you do so. I am specifically referring to your assertions regarding “the plain factual science of global warming”, and “conservative children generally test a lot lower on apptitude (sic.) tests than the children of liberal families.”
Having read your entire comment, I doubt seriously that you are a “life long right winger”, however, you are certainly a prime example of your statement that “there (sic.) are not too many geniuses here.”
Nutter:
Huh? It’s the Bush Presidency that is to blame for children’s ignorance? Why not blame the President, after all, he creats hurricanes, global warming, wars, warm beer, cars that won’t start, and bad teeth. Get a life, pal.
8:58 pm
“Our own President wouldn’t fair any better in that survey, and people ask what’s wrong with education?”
Melanie, I think you meant “fare”; I ordinarily wouldn’t point that out but when you’re trying to make cheap points on the President being stupid you’re getting nailed. Are you aware that Bush regularly reads history and, under the media radar, invites history profs from Yale and elsewhere to discuss historical topics. Of course the MSM wouldn’t report this because it doesn’t fit into their Chimpy template which evidently you buy into.
Regarding the topic, who doesn’t know that public schools are a national disgrace?
1:00 am
I’d like to offer an observation regarding joe5348’s comment regarding the attitude of modern children that they don’t need to know the facts, they just need to know where to find the facts. There is some truth to this, as joe5348 acknowledges. And the concept is not new. Caesar, in his Gallic Wars, notes that the Celtic learned men (whom we now refer to as Druids) disdained reading because they felt that all knowledge was useless unless it was memorized. They felt that using books to learn from would weaken the memory and lead to less understanding.
The final score: Books 1, Druids 0.
2:28 am
My $0.02:
When on my second year of college in 1991, I became friends with a classmate who was originally from Bulgaria. She and her fellow classmates in high school had to endure three cutthroat-and-jugular elimination tests, in order to determine their potential to study abroad. Once the final group was selected based upon each students’ overall scores, the whole group had to take the SAT. Yes, the test every American high school senior loses sleep about.
Do you know what her verdict of the SAT (circa 1990) was? I’ll tell you. She called it “a joke.” I repeat: “A JOKE.”
That conversation was an eye-opener for me. Now that I have a 14-month-old daughter, I don’t want to take chances with her education. I don’t want to take her to a public school, no matter how many “Blue Ribbons” it has. Too much of my education (and my husband’s) has been self-taught. Public schools don’t offer the love of learning: that has to come from the learner. I really didn’t have a social life while in high school or college, but back then I preferred to read a good book than to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”
This is yet another reason to homeschool your child, IMHO.
2:39 am
“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream”- George W. Bush in LaCrosse Wisconsin Oct. 18, 2000
11:10 am
I just quit teaching after 30 years. I quit not because I had to but because I cannot take it anymore. There is not one Republicans in Congress in either house who cares a lick about education. And no one rally talks about it except in the most snotty and predictable ways.
I think it’s funny how you point out that our kids aren’t getting educated but you never mention where it breaks down. It breaks down at the School board. And yes, as a Conservative and a teacher I can tell you that it is the right wing that packs school boards with idiots who want the Bible taught as historical fact. It is Conservatives who show up at board meetings and demand that we teach kids that evolution is just a theory. It is conservatives at school board meetings that don’t want anything taught but math and a little science and business. It is conservatives who who up and tell me not to teach the BILL OF RIGHTS
!
The reason our kids are dumb is because conservatives have rammed their uneducated, ill informed ideological views on everyone in the school districts.
I quite 4 months short of thirty years and as I look back, I think that the truth has to be spoken.
4:00 pm
All your tests are nothing more than trivia. Knowing that the USA had a civil war and why is all you need. It is utterly useless to know what year it happened! I am more concerned about our lack of computer and finacial skills. How many of you OLD Farts know who Neo is? There is more depth and meaning and social value in one Wachowski brother script than all of the tales from Giovanni Boccaccio. YOUR TEST ARE THE (your) PROBLEM NOT THE KIDS.
11:12 am
Whoa, Joe! I think you’re showing some serious cultural narrowness here. I agree that there’s artistic merit to The Matrix, but your low opinion of The Decameron (relative to The Matrix) is truly narrow-minded. And let’s not make this a young-versus-old battle, especially at a personal level. Yes, the times, they are a-changin, and the Internet especially is changing a great deal. But some things are perennial. Shakespeare is still the greatest dramatist in the English language, and you really wouldn’t want to put yourself in the position of elevating the Wachowskis over Shakespeare.
I agree that the teaching of history is plagued by testing. I agree that the exact dates of the Civil War are meaningless. Unfortunately, coming to understand the eternal human truths that generated the Civil War (and still apply today) requires a broad understanding of many historical events. History is not a collection of individual facts; it is a gigantic painting of human triumphs and foibles, all interrelated. You just can’t understand the Civil War until you’ve seen a goodly portion of that canvas.
And the Civil War is only relevant to us today because many of the same social, political, and economic forces that led to that catastrophe are still at work today. The thought processes that stampeded us into a disastrous war in Iraq share elements with the thought processes that stampeded the North and the South into war. Indeed, I am absolutely certain that a solid understanding of history would have saved us from that blunder. Our lack of education has now cost us about 4,000 lives and at least a trillion dollars in expenses and liabilities. What would it have cost us to educate our citizenry to a level sufficient to have saved us from that mistake? Certainly a great deal less than a trillion dollars. If ever you needed a justification for more education, you can find it scattered all over the cemeteries of America.
11:51 am
That study is crap. See here.
9:29 pm
Mr. Moran-
While what you right is totally true, perhaps the real essence of the problem is the attitude of our society.
As a member of the genaration in question, I was appalled by this study – no one likes their generation being targeted negatively. However, I wasn’t shocked in the least. While I can answer all the questions that ‘shockingly’ only a sole minority could, I understand the predicament of Generation Yers. Our entire educational career has been dominated by new ideas: new math, new response styles, and new tests. The latter, most dominately influenced by Bush’s NCLB standards has perhaps had the most negative inluence in conjunction with the trend (at the state level)of individualized standardized tests. All these lead to the practice of “teaching-to-the-test”. While this practice may limit the overall raw knowledge that we (our generation)individually has (such as the ability to identify Oedipus Rex), I believe it has only furthered our abilities to analyze and synthesis information on a deeper level than that of previous generation. When questioning this generation, one must keep reality in mind through self-questioning. Assuming you’re not an English professor, when was the last time you identified Oedipus, King of Thebes. Probably never. And if you can’t identify it, how can you expect us too? Instead of passing blame, maybe one should take some initiative and recify this problem. Or else.
9:37 pm
While this practice may limit the overall raw knowledge that we (our generation)individually has (such as the ability to identify Oedipus Rex), I believe it has only furthered our abilities to analyze and synthesis information on a deeper level than that of previous generation.
Edu-babble. Nonsense. Proof, please. What do you mean by “deeper level?” How do you “analyze” information on a “deeper level?”
It’s double-speak. The reality is any education shallow enough to neglect Oedipus (I was in the play in college and had read the play in high school)isn’t going to give you a “deep” anything – except perhaps the ability to bullsh*t your way through tests.
12:52 am
bab, your argument suffers from a fatal weakness. You assert:
“I believe it [teaching to the test] has only furthered our abilities to analyze and synthesis information on a deeper level than that of previous generation.”
Tests don’t do a good job of measuring a student’s ability to analyze and synthesize information, because the measurement of such skills is unavoidably subjective. Tests are best at measuring a student’s accumulation of facts. Thus, teaching to the test has exactly the opposite effect you posit.
2:34 pm
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