The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn
Of course, the progressive approach has advantages, not the least of which is that it enables university administrators to boast of the ever-greater numbers of students taking degrees at their institutions. Previously disadvantaged groups have gained access to higher education as never before, and more and more students are being provided with the much-touted credentials believed to guarantee success in the workforce. Thus our universities participate in a happy make-believe. Students get their degrees. Parents are reassured that their money has been well-spent. And compliant professors are, if not exactly satisfied — it corrodes the soul to give unearned grades — at least relieved not to encounter student complaints.
More than a few students know that something fishy is going on. The intelligent ones see their indifferent, mediocre, or inept counterparts receiving grades similar to their own, and the realization offends their sense of justice. Moreover, there is little satisfaction in consciously playing the system. The smart student with his easy “A” knows that he has not been challenged to develop his intellect. I remember once walking in the hallway behind a student who had just picked up her final term essay; as she joined her friends, she flipped to the back of the paper without reading any of the instructor’s comments. “An A,” she said jubilantly, but with a strong undertone of derision. “And I didn’t even read the book!” As the paper thudded into the trash basket, her friends joined in the disdainful laughter.
In contrast, the weak student who believes in his high grades has also had a disservice done him. He has been misled about his abilities, falsely persuaded that career paths and goals are open that may be out of reach. Eventually, the fraud will be revealed: by an employer who finds him inadequate, by his own dawning recognition that he cannot achieve what he hoped. The reckoning will likely be bitter; evidence exists that the pedagogy of false esteem can even cause psychological harm. When students who have always been praised must confront the reality of their low achievement, their tendency is, as researchers James Coté and Anton Allahar report, not to confront the problem directly but to hit back at its perceived source — the teacher who has given them the bad news, the employer who does not renew a contract. Far more than their adequate peers when faced with difficulties, these students experience a range of negative reactions, including anger, anxiety, and depression.
Even more seriously, such students have not only been misled but fundamentally malformed. They have never learned to listen to criticism, to recover from disappointment, or to slog through difficulties with no guarantee of success except commitment. The person who is never challenged is also never refined, never learns to cope with the setbacks that come on the way to high endeavor. And it is not only in the academic realm, of course, that they may be hampered: a full life outside of university also requires the ability to confront one’s weaknesses and recover from defeat. Despite the admittedly important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of them.
Related: Can the Humanities Be Saved?
Education is like a pyramid. If you want to build it to a point you have to have a sound foundation. When I taught high school math, I had students who had to use their fingers to add up numbers. I had to try to teach them Algebra, had no remedial math courses for them. If you want to try to do something really frustrating try to teach Algebra to somebody who can’t add two numbers, doesn’t know how to multiply or divide. Yet this was my task. To top this, we had a whole curriculum based on standards and the students were tested on those standards. If the students did a poor job, it was the teachers fault because those standards were used to judge the teacher. Under rational circumstances, you don’t try to teach Algebra to students who have no idea of what number theory is, don’t know fractions etc. I had many a student try to tell me that adding 1/2 to 1/3 equaled 2/5. I swear to G-d this is true. Yet this type of student is graduated from high school to join the rational thinking masses. This really scares me to death. These idiots out number us 200 to 1. They can be told anything and they will believe it. Yes, they have the right to vote. How can these idiots, who can barely read, are ignorant of basic math, watch television for their ideas of the world, love their sex and drugs, be given such a privilege as to decide the destiny of our country?
“Yet this type of student is graduated from high school to join the rational thinking masses. This really scares me to death. These idiots out number us 200 to 1. They can be told anything and they will believe it. Yes, they have the right to vote. How can these idiots, who can barely read, are ignorant of basic math, watch television for their ideas of the world, love their sex and drugs, be given such a privilege as to decide the destiny of our country?”
It’s the left/liberal strategy for achieving “social justice” here.
Such a simplistic statement makes me think you are also a likely victim of an inferior education. Black, white, left, right. Nuance anyone?
With all due respect, the article about which we are commenting (I’m assuming you read it) is focused on the lack of critical thinking skills being developed by public school students as a result of so-called “progressive” educational theories. That the progressive left is inspired by their ideas of “social justice” is beyond refute and requires no nuance. Should you have a particular point about which you disagree in the previous comment, say so. But criticizing the comment for no reason other than nuance when the statement is factually correct indicates to me a lack of factual contention on your part, and even perhaps a knee jerk reaction to said comment based on your political sensibilities.
We who read PJ Media articles like our articles clear and concise. If you want squishy feel-good stuff with shaded degrees of “truth”, try somewhere else.
How do you feel about Creationist parents teaching their children that the Bible supersedes scientific fact, and that the world is only 6000 years old?
Gee, Derp, what do you think of “teachers” peddling Green nonsense to kids? Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming BS is doing more damage to the intellectual abilities of children than Young Earth Creationists.
Derpwood, what’s the obsession here? It’s a small minority of Evangelicals who believe in the Young Earth. Most judge Genesis to be allegory.
But even if all Christians believed the Earth was only 6K years old, why would that affect you? I’m sure many 19th century statesmen and politicians believed just that – how did it affect their policies?
Man has a need of irrational beliefs. Wacky beliefs like the idea that drilling in ANWR will be disastrous for the world climate are not only irrational, but have a horrid effect on policy.
Mellow out, Derp. Would you rather see kids aborted or taught Creationism?
The former are physically aborted and hte latter are intellectually aborted. Thus, both are of equal value to society at large.
This idea that man has need for irrational beliefs is frightening. Holding such irrational beliefs leads to movements that ultimately expend valueable time, resources and PEOPLE who could have been more frutiful if they actually applied their lives to something realistic, such as the responsible development of the ANWR oilshed.
It is truely frightening to see that peoplehave yet to realize that it is religion that has held us so far back for so long. Our medical technology, both methodology and machinery, have grown astronomically ever since the sectists took medicine out of the hands of monks and clerics. The religious should have been well denounced by now as anythign but a fairy tale, and placed in a museum next to the pharoahs, zeus, and al the rest, and yet, they persist.
Religion is ultimately a bankruptcy of intellect.
Derpwood: At least when they get to college, no one is going to encourage them to hold those views, unlike the situation with global warming and other Gaea-worship forms of faith-based thinking.
Nuance, schmuance. Look at Occupy Wall Street. They all wanted guaranteed jobs, $20/hr wages, free food, free healthcare, free education and no taxes… and vote for left/liberal Democrats who tell them they can have that if they do and agitate for progressive policies until victory comes about. “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs” was written by “some guy” in their understanding. Much could be said about the people lining up for “Obama money” from “his stash” that Ken Regulski interviewed in Chicago. Lenin promised “Peace, Land and Bread”– and peace wasn’t much better, the state collectivized the land and you had to wait in line for lousy bread when it was available at all.
hello joe
After 35 years of teaching at a major university, it is the spoiled rich brat taking up space that is one who tells me that I have to give him/her an A because his dad/mom are paying my salary and they are friends with the president/board. Conversely the students (notice the keyword) who have to work a job to pay for their education or the student who’s parents are sacrificing to keep them in school that are the ones doing their homework, paying attention in class and doing well on tests. The students are the ones who complain to me about the disruptions that the spoiled rich brats are causing. If you missed the point it is the 99%er’s that are the students and the 1%er’s that are the brats
B.S.
I’m with DesertYote – life just doesn’t track so closely to the Marxist narrative you push here, mommy.
Were there any spoiled brats at Zucotti Park or the other Occupy sites? Oh, no! They were the hard-working proletarii, out for social justice against those lazy exploiters in the offices.
Yawn. You’re no teacher.
Lying Troll!
So you’re one of the students the article is talking about. Stick around PJ Media and you might eventually learn something; troll or not.
It’s not completely unbelievable that a professor of 35 years tenure would be so brainless as to posit such a stark divide between “99%” and “1%”. Universities have, sadly, come to be dominated by such foolish, ideological True Believers.
However, most of us understand that leftists are actually paid and trained to pop into forums like this one and lie about their expertise in order to dominate the conversations. Consequently, I simply do not believe you’ve taught 35 years at a major university, or, for that matter, any number of years at any university. I think you’re lying.
If you don’t like that, thank your progressive friends who have made a system out of lying in forums like these, and direct your corrective efforts at them.
I teach high school (really; conservatives don’t pay people to lie in these forums), and I know perfectly well how much entitled attitude there is among hoi polloi. What’s being described in this article comes from college, but even in high school, the destruction wrought by bizarre, progressive education theory is obvious the casual observer, and transcends even imaginary class boundaries.
The West will not recover until progressivism is as deprecated as phrenology.
Oh, you MUST inform these deserving students that they are the proud 99%. I know they will be thrilled when the light goes on. They cant make it on their own, they deserve the 1%’s stuff, and they are working harder than anyone in the history of the universe.bla bla bla. But keep away, far far away from my kids. They have grit and they earn their own way. Much like the deserving students you applaud. One of mine tended bar for 2 years after graduation until she got that real job. The boy, serves in uniform having enlisted AFTER college. Mom and Dad work 7 days a week at their own business and we will never be rich but we will always be proud.
You scratch the surface and you will find that your 1%-spoiled brats also come from middle an upper middle class families, not from the 1%. Look elsewhere for the cause of this slovenly greed.
I went to law school through Georgetown’s “late afternoon classes” so I could work full time. One of the profs told me that the “late afternoon” bunch was head and shoulders above the regulars. I guess a lot of the reason was that we were a bit older and more mature, but IMO it was because we put a lot more effort into it. And we had regular jobs, which taught us to value the prospective degree as a step up.
What is the matter, yourmommy? Not making enough dough to match your obvious intellect? Sheesh. Go back and reread the article and find out whether the author was talking about you or singling out other 99% people. I don’t even think you have the temperament to teach with that attitude, much less to grade your students fairly. So, in my opinion, either you are not a teacher or you are a piss poor one. I believe the former. As to my opinion of this article? It hits the nail on the head and was also very well written. I have had the same experiences with young people who have been subjected to these so called progressive educations and I believe this is one of the fundamental reasons why nothing is made in the USA these days.
I teach at a community college, and I can’t recall ever having a student complain about a poor grade. They know that they are in deep trouble, and accept that they have a lot to learn.
Three decades teaching at the university level, and you don’t know “who’s” from “whose” ?
Aside from the content of your comment:
“..to pay for their education or the student who’s parents are sacrificing..”
It’s your incorrect use of ‘who’s (vs the correct ‘whose’) that’s a dead giveaway. 35 years of teaching? Right. Run away now.
So what is wrong with “social justice”? Can you perhaps define your terms, you know, since you appreciate “clear and concise” speech.
The fact that it implies all deserve equal results without regard to their abilities. Some people easily build skyscrapers, some people barely wait tables.
Last time I checked, the United States was founded on a commitment to equal rights for all citizens.
EvoDiva, I suspect you have never checked. Our Constitution was based on three itemized truths about life. That we are all entitled to our lives, our liberty to live them our own way, and our right to the pursuit of our own happiness. It never guaranteed equal outcomes, just equal opportunity to pursue our own dreams. Try at least reading the preamble and read it several times until the words make sense to you.
Regarding Mr. Baker’s comment: I hate to be a stickler, but the three itemized truths are in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, its preamble or any of its articles.
Stikler or not…he did Say “Based,” and the Constitution is sort of based upon the Declaration of Independence. So points to both parties, for being entirely accurate…
Shahab, What’s wrong with “social justice” is that it is subjective. Who gets to decide what is just?
Any term with the adjective “social” appended to it loses all meaning in the mouth of the Left.
The problem with the phrase ‘social justice’ A) it’s an oxymoron; it doesn’t refer to society or justice, and B) it almost always comes from the mouths of fascist pigs.
“Social Justice” is Marxist code for “guaranteed equality of outcome” , as well as a Tyrant’s battle cry for the complete destuction of the Constitutional Republic/Capitalist System. But then you know this. It’s very interesting that the people that absolutely detest this nation as founded still choose to live here rather than any of the various worker’s paradises around the world such as Cuba, Venezuela, China etc, where they could be one with the proletariat.
No, they choose to live here in abject misery drinking purified, chlorinated, water and suffering another grinding day in air conditioned dehumidified 72 degree torture in a structure built with another’s labor, hoping to wile away their future as a “Social Justice Enforcer”, “Diversity Facilitator” or some other august position ( I’ve allready selected Zampolit, sorry!). And for that extreme ideological dedication, I salute them!
“Social justice” is an oxymoron because there cannot be justice between groups, only between individuala. Between groups, there can only be winners and losers.
“Social justice” is also an oxymoron because its promoters have conflated “justice” and “fairness”. “Justice” is when someone is appropriately compensated for the quality and quantity of their work; “fairness” is when all receive the same money/goods/praise because it is unfair that one should have more than others.
“Social justice” sounds noble when it is anything but. At best, it’s attempted equality of outcome; at worst, its the mob howling for the blood of anyone who dares succeed.
“Social justice” is best illustrated by an old Russian joke (short version): Boris and Ivan were peasant farmers. They both did backbreaking work from dusk to dawn to feed their shrewish wives and their many children. They both work threadbare clothes and falling-apart shoes and ate bland food, of which there never seemed to be quite enough.
There was one difference between them: Ivan had a goat.
So, Ivan’s children had a little bit of milk for breakfast, Ivan had a little bit of cheese with his supper and Ivan’s wife could make the occasional hat or scarf from the goat’s hair.
One day, the Good Fairy appeared to Boris and said, “Boris, you’ve worked hard to care for your family and I will reward you with one wish. Anything in the world. Name it and it is yours.”
Boris thought hard and said, “I wish that Ivan’s goat would die.”
Social justice, baby.
The term “social justice” is a “package deal”. That’s what is wrong with it. Justice is only so when properly defined as to be equally applied to every individual in the same legal circumstances. You can skip the “social” part because it infers a presumed necessity to modulate justice so as to be unequally applied to individuals of a particular class, be that social, economic, racial, ethnic, whichever. Thus “social justice” destroys the very concept of justice.
Which is why the term was invented: to permit Socialist “reformers” to play judicial “wild cards”, corrupting and bending justice to serve their desireable outcome of the hour.
I’ll define my terms, English.
and EvoDiva, success is not a right. wealth is not a right. The chance to work toward wealth and success are rights and even dumb people have those rights.
I had many a student try to tell me that adding 1/2 to 1/3 equaled 2/5. I swear to G-d this is true.
I had many students like that when I taught math.
The answer is 5/6ths; although I am as guilty as some for my lack of math skills, I had to look on a website to figure this problem out. That being said, why in God’s name can’t a student do the same thing to get the same results, they can’t be that stupid, can they? Or maybe the are so insolent that being right is all that matters to them anymore.
You cannot have had to look up on a website how to add fractions. You must have been to the fourth grade.
Please tell me you are not serious…
There is no single answer as to why students are failing. Solutions will come through the identification of individual problems, coming up with alternatives for the issue, making (scientific) predictions on the outcomes, implementing the best solutions, and then assessing the outcomes… and repeat.
Personal Note: I fail the school system in the teaching of foreign languages, it is very difficult (not impossible) as a student studying abroad to learn a foreign language at age 22, I envy students from other countries who were “forced” to learn other languages from grade 5 and on.
Yes, there is.
There has been a purposeful takeover of our educational systems for the purpose of dumbing down our populace so that they are easily manipulated and led into accepting a totalitarian system.
You can read about it in John Dewey’s works (the father of it, in many ways), the Communist Manifesto, and the Humanist Manifestos.
The cause is known, and the cure is not complicated.
I came up with 83.3%. Am I bonkers?
I like your math, Fail Burton. You aren’t bonkers. That was my answer, too.
I remember trying to teach juniors and seniors (they were in remedial math) the difference between area and perimeter. They all had failed the test after completing the unit with their regular teacher (I was substituting). draw a square and a rectangle (grids) on the floor with masking tape, and had students line the outside of them (perimeter) and fill them (area), then sent them back to do problems. If they did not get the answers right, we did it again. I did it three times and still a third of the class did not “get it”. As they argued with me about the importance of knowing geometry (they btw thought they were in geometry because the unit title said so).
I said how will you buy carpet or paint your walls?” I asked.
Some said they weren’t going to have to do that because they were going to be rich.
One student corrected me saying, “Everybody knows paint comes in buckets.”
I like that, “I’m gonna be rich” argument. I have a friend who teaches in one of the worst suburban Houston districts (Passing math scores in her 8th grade classes are usually in the 30% range). She once told me that none of her 8th graders “needed” math because, according to them, all of them were going to be in the NBA or rap stars! She actually pointed the absurdity of that idea to them and turned it into a lesson on statistics and probablity that in a population our size, the odds that the entire NBA would be made up of one class of 8th graders. She also got some lights to turn on when she brought in articles about this or that rapper, performer, athlete, who was dead broke, after making millions because they trusted the wrong people, because THEY didn’t know math!
I once did a lesson where we looked at hand-outs describing “police records” — rape, assault, murder — and then discussed what sentence these “guys” should get. Everybody was all for heavy prison sentences until I revealed the identity of each “case” — each was a well-known rapper. Suddenly, these “guys” were just “in the wrong place at the same time.”
The real pity is that the world needs stupid people, too. There are very many occupations of mind-numbing boredom which most of us would try to avoid. When one of these tasks falls to me, I suffer through it, get it done as quickly as I can, and move on. Someone, though, must do some of these jobs day in and day out, without relief, for years. That’s why God made some people less smart.
Once again, “equality” rears its ugly head. Because that ass Jefferson thought it scanned well, we’ve been living with it forever. At the moment of birth, no two people are equal, and no amount of wishing makes it so. TREATING people equally is not the same as BEING equal. Ol’ Tom was obviously too busy with his cute wife (or maybe his best slave) to notice the difference.
Someone must bust concrete for a living, and thank God there are people who are willing to do it. They also get paid a premium, because the work is so hard, so they are able to support a family doing that. All a college education does to that fellow is ruin him, making him bitter at his lot, instead of happy in his work. It really is far, far better to do something simple really well, than something complicated badly.
Liberals are a cancer on the body of society.
And I still blame Dr. Spock. It just proves some women will buy into any nonsense that sounds nice (like supporting Obama, for instance). Thank goodness I’ve never been married to one of those.
Old Dr. Spock was practically a Roman pater familias compared to the crap young mothers are buying into today. I have two grandsons, 3 and 5, their mother 27, who are practically feral, but, my oh my, they do love their mother! On the rare occassion that she brings them to my house, they start crying and hiding behind mommy’s legs the moment they realize where they are. That’s a good thing; wouldn’t want feral humans to be comfortable in my house.
you sound like a real charmer!
Stay the course! Do not give in to whiners (feral apologists)!
@tom – wouldn’t want an idiot lefty to be comforable in my house either. Civilized human beings find the life and company quite charming however, and the conversation can be scintillating, something you idiot lefties can’t comprehend.
Just replace “liberal” with “jew” here, and you get an idea of what the right wingnut contingent here really wants. They are impossible to reason with, because reason requires that you not have made up your mind already about something. No amount of confusing them with the facts will ever matter.
And there it is! Liberal was played the racist card! Woohoo, the arguments are over, the catch phrase has been mouthed and we can all go home because no argument can trump a catch phrase!
Liberal, thanks for letting me know what the wingnut contingent wants. (I was out of town on business last week and I missed the meeting.)
Heh.
By all means, go on fighting the caricature of the other side to which you’ve obviously subscribed. Because fighting a caricature (which doesn’t exist) as opposed to fighting real opponents (which do) involves a fundamental attribution error and therefore, is doomed to fail.
Please fail some more. You’re doing our work for us.
“They are impossible to reason with, because reason requires that you not have made up your mind already about something. No amount of confusing them with the facts will ever matter.” – Liberal
PS – It’s called ‘projection’, or “that which irritates, offends, or enrages you most in others is the very thing you do not like about yourself”.
Liberal, do you have any idea how stupid your comment was? Sheesh.
Jefferson meant that all people are created equal in the eyes of their creator. The left has corrupted that into everyone is literally equal and that no one is any more capable than anyone else.
That’s right: he was kicking the King of England in the hind end, not making calculations.
Ol’ Tom was well educated and lived in a time when that was true of MOST people, even the poor. He therefore made the reasonable assumption that people reading that statement would understand what it meant.
Leftists, of course, do not, and sadly, even many conservatives such as yourself, being poorly educated, do not understand what he meant.
What he said was true, profound, and extremely important, and nothing at all like what you think he meant.
But don’t worry – after all, it’s the leftists’ fault you are poorly educated.
At least the kid who said, “Paint comes in buckets,” made a salient point. To compute how much paint you need, you need to know not only the area of the walls but also the thickness of the coat of paint, as well as a waste factor to account for spillage, overlap and paint drying on your dispenser.
The coverage of the paint is often printed on the can. Still gotta know the area to be covered though.
Andy, I like your metaphor. I’ve always used the example of scaffolding for a building. All the principals and educrats can talk about is “higher level thinking” and analysis….yadda yadda yadda, but that is impossible without building the scaffold first. At some point the kid has to turn off the tv, log out, put the damn I phone down and memorize: multiplication tables, Supreme Court Cases and presidential administrations, chemical reactions and what an adverb is. Or to be more specific, the parents need to make sure the kids are doing this, which ain’t gonna happen in, sadly, too many households. At some point there is no touchy feely, count up jellybeans, draw a picture way to do many of these things!
Erm, I sing the multiplication tables and the Preamble; for those two things, and parts of speech, there is a fun “watch a movie” way to learn. WHO came up with Schoolhouse Rock?! He/she deserves a medal.
I am not completely dismissing various learning style techniques, such as making up songs or clever visuals. In fact, I actually make my kids do a “Musical (Review) Revue” before the AP economics exam and they have to come up with a song on a specific topic, and some of them have been excellent study guides over the years. But most of the time these projects tend to be style over substance with little educational value, getting back to my point of, whatever method you use, you have to learn the basics before you can move on to higher level thinking.
Oh I do get what you’re saying, but I did not learn the Preamble in school. What I know of it, I learned from Schoolhouse Rock. And if you ask me what 7×12 is, I will mentally begin humming “hey little twelve toes” and I have a MATH degree. If there had been a Schoolhouse Rock episode for Maxwell’s Equation in Point Form, I might not have flunked out of electrical engineering.
While waiting to get out of the USAF, I had a task assigned to me by my boss, which came down from the pentagon. They wanted a scale to determine the effectiveness of range scores for the entire wing of F-16 and F-15E training missions. My LtCol boss gave me the criteria and I went about spending a week compiling data and using a spreadsheet (that I first had to learn) program to tally up sorties and bomb and strafing scores.
So I handed the first prototype over to my boss and he looked it over and called the major in the pentagon who had sent the directive for this scoring process. I sat politely during the discussion process as he transferred the data to the major and in the middle of it I started shaking my head with a dour look, transmitting a “NO! You can’t do that!” look to my boss.
He put his hand over the phone and said, “What is it?”, and I proceeded to explain. The major on the other end had insisted on tallying and overall average from data collected at the bottom of the chart, which they, themselves were averages.
My boss told the major, “Major, my lieutenant tells me that you can’t average averages, that it’s a mathematical no-no, and I believe he’s correct on this.”
Long silence.
Then the phone conversation abruptly ended and the major would have to get back to him.
I knew my boss knew it but I think he wanted to see if the major in the pentagon knew it. I’ve yet to meet a pilot who couldn’t do math. Some are worse than others but most are pretty darn sharp with it. Lots of shortcuts and “tricks” to help out but also lots of memorization involved.
Yet, here was a senior officer who might even have had a master’s degree who was blindly unaware that averaging averages is a non-value. There is a way to get to a weighted average but you can’t do it by just adding up all the averages at the bottom and then dividing by how many there are. That resultant means nothing.
Sort of made me a little disappointed. But then, some people are very good at other things and then, I also made allowances for just plain forgetting that rule of mathematics. But one would think the person who requested such a thing would understand the process. However, I was insufferably pleased with myself for about a day.
This reminds me of a lady who I was working with. She had decided to go back to school and get an education. Her problem was her math abilities. I got her through her college Algebra, no problem. Then she hit statistics. She understood everything I helped her with. The problem was her instructor. It was a simple population density problem. The instructor wanted to know the population density over a given range that varied. I explained that the only way to do this problem was to take the range and average the population. She did the problem right and it was a final exam problem. Her instructor marked it as wrong. His correct answer was the greatest population on the range. I wouldn’t let her concede and had her go to the math chair with this problem and answer. It was the last time that this particular instructor taught statistics. Anybody can be an idiot even with a good education.
wait, 1/3 and 1/2 DOESN’T equal 2/5? That explains a lot…
(why the building collapsed, the plane crashed and idiots rule the world)
It also explains how Democrats win elections….
The partisan comments on here are just remarkable in their stupidity. Are you unaware that most highly educated people in the U.S. are democrats? Every single engineer, mathematician, and scientist I know–and I know a lot of them–is a democrat. In fact, the majority of lawyers and doctors and even bankers are democrats. I agree with everything this article said and have held a firm line against grade inflation everywhere I have taught, no matter how much students have complained, and to read these obnoxious comments from people who don’t understand the range of opinions liberals and progressives hold about education and pedagogy makes me want to kick somebody.
Oooh, good one! You really had me going there – a Democrat that ill-informed is oh so plausible – until the part about holding tough against grade inflation.
That’s funny. Most of the democrats I see are whining, unemployed reprobates, unwilling to work for what they have, but relying on the almighty government to take what I have and give it to them. Maybe you could elaborate on the “range of opinions liberals and progressives hold about education and pedagogy” instead of just looking down your nose at everyone who disagrees with you and calling them stupid. Having worked in the public school system for 19 years, what passes as education and pedagogy amounts to indoctrination in liberal viewpoints, hence the whole problem we had at the start of this thread: students who don’t know how to read, write or do basic math, but have tremendous self-esteem.
Interesting. Because I’m a liberal (less so a Democrat, but they’re the closest viable alternative to what I think should be done in most cases). And I’m neither unemployed nor a reprobate (interesting choice of term there, to be certain; a villain, really?). In fact, I serve quite proudly in the USN and aim to become an officer in the aforementioned military branch. Not only that, but I have routinely destroyed any test I have been given by any government entity that has saw fit to give me one. I maxed out the ASVAB, maxed out two of the three portions of the SAT (damn you, writing prompt! *shakes fist ruefully*), and have been through the Nuclear Engineering training pipeline. So tell me again about how stupid, unemployed and villainous I am, please. I do so love hearing fairy tales from people who clearly know all there is to know about all people everywhere!
ROFLMAO
Yeah, most fascist pigs…excuse me ‘liberal Democrats’…are the intellectual elite of the nation.
Oh, wait…they’re not.
Interesting. I’m a software engineer who’s known quite a few engineers from my field, mechanical, nuclear, electrical, etc. and almost every single one of them was either a libertarian or a non-partisan conservative…
Probably the reason that we’re unaware of it is the same reason we’re unaware that the sun sets in the east.
If it were not so damaging, it would be amusing how predictable is the leftist ability to hear only their own voices, to see only their own shadow.
Dr. T – you don’t get outside the echo chamber much, do you?
You sound just like Pauline Kael, LOL. I bet you don’t know *anybody* who voted for George W. Bush, either.
I AM an engineer, and every engineer I know is either a Republican or a libertarian of some stripe or another. I think this is largely because engineers like things that WORK, and very damned little the Democrats support does. Of course, very damned little the Republicans support does either. And libertarians can’t get elected. Regardless, no one I know supports leftist causes.
Ronald Reagan said it best — paraphrased — “It’s not that democrats are ignorant, it’s just that so much of what they know is wrong.”
Dude, you can’t even spell “god” correctly, what would you know about teaching?
“Dude”, the teacher to whom you replied has probably forgotten more than you know. FYI, many observant Jews spell English names for the Creator with a hyphen (e.g., G-d, L-rd), in respect of the Torah commandment not to efface the name of said Creator. If you don’t understand, ask.
Dude, you just got served.
I sympathize and comiserate. I am walking away from 45 years of trying to teach English and Spanish to “students” who have no concept of grammar, structure, syntax, and agreement. Since their knowledge of these things in English is slight or non-existant, they have great difficulty grasping Spanish. I have faced this double whammy for quite some time. I do recall that things were better, though not good, back in the ’60′s, however, they have steadily declined since then. If I were required to place blame, I would blame the “educational theorists” at the university level and the boards of education and administrators presently in place all over the nation. Their anxiousness to jump on the bandwagon of every cockamamie idea coupled with their paranoia about being blamed for existing conditions has rendered them impotent as far as producing real solutions.
So. My prescription is this: Education in this or any other nation will not improve until three things return to the classroom. First, academic rigor MUST be reintroduced. Second, institutional discipline has to be applied. Students who flaunt rules and behavioral dicti must be adequately punished. Third, personal discipline must become, once again, a dominant quality in the character of the student. Obviously this third ingredient must come from more places than the school itself. Only when this triumvirate of virtues returns to the American school can education become legitimate once again, and the 40% of incoming college freshmen can begin their college careers with college level classes, rather than the ‘remedial’ ones in which they now enroll.
Students who flaunt rules and behavioral dicti must be adequately punished.
Excuse me, but you mean “flout.”
My mental image is of a young woman exposing much cleavage, with rules tattooed on her chest.
Score!
If I were required to place blame, I would blame the “educational theorists” at the university level and the boards of education and administrators presently in place all over the nation. Their anxiousness to jump on the bandwagon of every cockamamie idea coupled with their paranoia about being blamed for existing conditions has rendered them impotent as far as producing real solutions.
I’ve long believes this can be traced to the “publish or perish” mindset that exists at so many research universities. It’s hard to get a paper published on “Yep, Phonics Still Works” so they come up with some screwy theory and use kids as their guinea pigs.
As for your three things, the only thing I’d change is the order. Restoring discipline in the classes should be the first priority. One disruptive kid can ruin a class for everyone else. Kick him out and make him stay out. Only when you’ve restored order can you restore academic rigor, assuming any of the teachers themselves know their subjects well enough.
“Only when you’ve restored order can you restore academic rigor, assuming any of the teachers themselves know their subjects well enough.”
A very good point and not one to be taken for granted.
Theodore Dalrymple raised this in one of his essays a few years back. When his father died, Dalrymple went through his father’s belongings, including his old schoolbooks, and was surprised at the difficulty of the material covered. He said he couldn’t imagine students these days doing anything nearly so difficult and doubted that most teachers could do the work today.
I was surprised to hear a few years ago that those math problems where you have to calculate when a train leaving Chicago for New Orleans will cross paths with a train leaving New York for Seattle are now taught at the university level. I remember studying those in the one of the high school middle years. My mother, who got only a Grade 8 education, did that kind of problem within her school career. Clearly, some material is being delayed later and later and later as time marches on. Something a 12 year old child growing up in a rural area could do in the 1930s in a one-room schoolhouse is too hard for a modern city kid to handle until college. I wonder why that is?
I think a lot of it is even more insiduous; the teacher pay system in most districts automatically pays a teacher more as they get more and more “education.” So, you have teachers who’ve piled up all those hours of pedagogy and “underwater basketweaving” classes writing theses and disertations about all sorts of crazy stuff to get the Masters or Ph.D that will get them paid more. Since you run out of subjects for a dissertation pretty quickly when you’re talking about getting six year olds to stay in their seats and learn their ABCs, the dissertations get crazier and crazier, the peers who review the papers and are responsible for publishing them are just as dumb as the teachers taking classes to get paid more.
Jobe, who would have thought this would be rocket science? I started teaching school in the mid-seventies, and I was shocked at the nonsense that had transpired since I got out of school. Geography was GONE, for one thing, but at least we still had times tables and classroom discipline.
BTW, I couldn’t believe this article. Do you really coddle students like this? My profs would have laughed in my face if I pulled these sorts of stunts.
Read the book Starship Troopers. No, not the movie, read the book. In the story only honorably discharged veterans have the right to vote. The idea is that you don’t get to help decide the course of your nation unless you are willing to fight for it.
If it didn’t have such ugly connections to the Jim Crow era, I’d make any potential voter pass the citizenship test immigrants have to take, as well as achieving a certain minimal score on a standardized IQ test. Maybe pass a test showing they understand the Laugher Curve on top of that.
In the novel, Heinlein mentioned that if you wanted to serve, to become a Citizen, and were wheelchair and blind, they’d find something for you to do, even if counting the hairs on a Caterpillar by touch.
Still, that method for enfranchisement appeals to me. As a Veteran, what can I say, I am biased.
Ditto. Hooah! (It’s an Army thing.)
In Colonial times the franchise was tightly restricted—in most instances you had to be a white, male, Church of England, property owner (i.e. a tax payer) to vote–this did have the effect of making it very likely that most voters—being property owners, had some minimum level of achievement (which argued for some minimal level of education and industriousness), and sufficient “skin in the game” to make them pay close attention to politics, candidates, and government policies, spending, and decision making.
Thereafter, these restrictions on the vote were gradually eased, to the point where we now have universal suffrage, with no requirements for voters as to race, sex, religion, property ownership, or tax payer status, and only the requirement that you be a U.S. citizen, and a resident of the State or locality you are voting in.
Today, with a universal franchise, and with approaching 50% of our citizenry not paying any Federal or State taxes (thanks to Federal “Income Tax credits” i.e. disguised welfare checks to frequently not working, low/no income people, to compensate them for any State taxes they may have paid), I would argue that the 50% of “takers” has no skin in the game, except insofar as concerns many of their interests in continuing to pay no taxes, and to, in essence, parasitize the “makers,” who do work and who do pay taxes.
This is a perilous situation for our democratic Republic.
well, laugher curve is probably what it should be called, as it is mathematically naive to the point of absurdity. but you’re correct, as, if someone understands what laffer is claiming is true and what the obvious flaws are with his claim, then they probably have a reasonable modicum of intelligence.
I think you just proved Ms. Fiamengo’s point. Your reply displays a certain mocking attitude, which I’m sure impresses you. It lacks punctuation, grammar, and any sort of evidence to prove your contention that the Laffer curve is false.
Did you know the Laffer curve applies to economics, and not arithmetic? A zero percent tax rate would result in no tax revenue. A one hundred percent tax rate would result in no tax revenue, because nothing would be produced. A rate somewhere in-between produces some revenue. At some point, increasing the rate produces less revenue because less is produced. That’s all the curve tells us, and it is empirically and mathematically true.
The only disagreement is what part of the curve applies to our present tax rates.
Okay. I want you to calm down, control your breathing, and think. Ready? Good.
I’m going to make an assertion now, and what I want you to do is read it. Then I want you to consciously exclude from your mind the automatic, pre-programmed, knee-jerk response that immediately occurs.
Then I want you to read it again, this time thinking deliberately and analytically about the words of the statement. Again, you should exclude all emotion from your mind, focusing your attention entirely upon my claim of fact rather than the feelings it engenders.
Can you do that? Are you ready? Here is the assertion:
Most blacks were better-educated in the segregated schools of the Jim Crow era.
I know, I know: Shock, followed by anger, followed by warm glow of self-righteousness. A muttered curse against “conservatives” who insist on seeing skin color, followed by a prayer of thanks that you are not “one of them”. Brief mental review of conservative celebrities who marched with Dr. King. Visions of dogs, waterhoses, Ku Klux Klansmen. Internal reassurance of the belief that all men are by nature equal, and that skin color is a matter of melanin and nothing more, and that if only “problem students” (carefully avoiding mental image of black students) were raised to believe in free-market economics and the philosophy of John Locke et al there would be no difference between the educational outcomes of
whitemainstream students and students “of color”.Okay. Pre-programmed emotional response over.
Now go back and re-read my assertion, to wit:
Most blacks were better-educated in the segregated schools of the Jim Crow era.
And then read on.
In 1960, among African Americans age 25 – 29, 38.6% had graduated HS.
In 2000, among African Americans age 25 – 29, 86.8% had graduated HS.
See Digest of Educational Statistics, table 8, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_008.asp
The percentage who graduate high school today is more than twice that in the segregated 1950s.
So, what’s the evidence for your claim that Blacks were better educated in the 1950s?
Did you notice the article we’re discussing? A high school education in the ’50s provided a FAR better education than most colleges and universities provide today.
Case in point: Back in the ’50s almost everybody knew it is “graduated from high school”.
Now most people are so ignorant they think it’s correct to day, “graduated high school”.
As a “dataman” one of the first things I would want to do is look at the content, quality, and accuracy of my data.
Thus—observing the realities of everyday life, and the people I bumped into and interacted with—if I saw statistics that said that more than double the percentage of blacks “graduated” high school today then graduated back in, say, the 1960s, my first impulse would be to ask what subjects were required to be taken, and what standards today’s students had to meet to “graduate,” and I’d want to compare that to the subjects and standards used for graduation in the 1960s.
Better yet, I’d really like to see how those 1960s graduates did on a standard test that measured their skills and knowledge across a wide range of subjects–say, English, American and World History, Government and Citizenship, Economics, Geography, and Mathematics for starters–and have that same exact test administered to today’s graduates, to make sure that we were measuring the same thing.
What, we no longer really teach Government and Citizenship, Geography, or Economics, but we do have classes in Multiculturalism and Victim Studies, GLBT Appreciation, Che Guevara the Humanist, America the Guilty, and TV Appreciation.
Well, I guess today’s “modern” 21st century students really don’t need all of those old timey, boring subjects anyway. After all, we’ve got the Cellphone, Sneakers that light up, Pop Tarts, American Idol, WWF, and Jersey Shore. What more could we want or need?
I could be wrong, but my guess is that a 1960s black high school “graduate” had a far better actual education and the necessary skills and mind –set to get a job, than that same black high school graduate today.
Laffer Curve, perhaps?
The effects on the body politic aside. Not that they are in any way less important. The cost to the economy and therefor the strength of the nation is daunting. I am a Journeyman electrician, and I pick up with these students where you leave off. Only I am still trying to teach them algebra, fractions, ratios, and any number of other mathematical skills. While keeping them from getting themselves killed in an ever changing obstacle course, on the dime of an employer. I have had to stop everything and teach an apprentice the multiplication tables. A grown man, having to be taught 3*3 and 4*4. And then try to take them from that to trigonometry, for pipe bending, and algebraic functions for Ohm’s Law and countless other applications. Not the least of which is code compliance. What is the cost to the employer? $50 an hour for me, $10 for the apprentice, multiplied how many times all over the country. To try and teach grown men remedial skills they should have entered the workforce with. Or, thousands upon thousands when they get it wrong.
I’d like to use your post with your permission, of course. It would be useful to show my students why learning Math is important in real life.
That should be, “try TO teach…” “And” is a conjunctive; it makes NO sense to say, “Try AND…”, unless you are really meaning to say that one tries (whatever) and ALSO does (whatever), which is clearly not what is meant.
Also, that’s a sentence fragment.
Technically, it doesn’t make sense. It’s redundant. However, many things in speech are redundant, and this is a case of spoken English crossing over into written English. That happens, and it’s OK (or “okay”, which is also OK).
A similar idea is “why’d you have to go and do that?!” The “go and” doesn’t really add anything to the CONTENT of the sentence. However, it does add to it. “Go and” indicates emotional shock, discontent, or frustration on the part of the speaker; it adds “flavor” to the sentence even if it contributes nothing to content in the strict sense of the word.
Likewise, “try and” indicates frustration and may imply that the speaker believes the task in question is difficult, or even impossible. So, it likewise performs a rhetorical function even if it adds nothing to content.
And this is why English teachers sometimes need remedial lessons on linguistics: redundancy CAN serve rhetorical functions when used properly.
(These two expressions are informal and as such would not be found in formal writings, but that does not make them bad English.)
Yes, it DOES make them bad English.
You’ve bought into the decontructionism brought to us by the same people that brought us the dumbed-down educational system under discussion.
It’s one of the tools used to dumb America down, which makes YOU a useful idiot for the left.
Years ago I ran across a comment by an unashamed Communist, who was an English professor. After capably destroying the kind of idiocy you espouse, he mused that he had never understood how deconstructionism could be a help to the proletariat.
I’m sure he’s been properly re-educated by now.
I’m not sure what deconstructionism you’re referring to here. My training doesn’t come from English professors. Heh, I learned more about the English language in my high-school German class than I ever did in an English class!
My view on this stems from reading literature from oral cultures — mostly the Greek and Hebrew of the Bible. Back before italics and underlining, an author would underscore his point via repetition. First John does this frequently, for instance. Yet certain stylists today would call this repetition “redundant”, though it is not superfluous. African literature today does this, as well.
Paul, in fact, used a run-on sentence as well as repetition to underscore his point in Ephesians 1:3-14 (the longest sentence in the Bible). Since it is too difficult to understand, the reader would have to reread it, and all his listeners would need to hear again and again that God loves them. Yes, the *deliberate* use of a run-on sentence so people would have to read/hear it several times over. Genius, really.
That’s not to say that I encourage run-on sentences or genuinely redundant style, but once one gets a good grasp of the rules, one can learn how to break the rules well. What distances me from what you call deconstructionism is that I believe there are rules to how you may break the rules. Paradox though that may be.
I’d appreciate it if you would cut out the personal attacks, as well. Ad hominem non bonus est.
The sad part is that the students referred to in this article as idiots might have been able to learn algebra if they hadn’t been just passed on in earlier grades like the kids who graduate but can’t read. I’m not suggesting that the phenomenon in this article didn’t apply at that time (because it is embarrassing to parents to have their precious held back, or because “mainstreaming” and “inclusion” throws g/t kids, average learners and kids who need a slower pace all in one class and expects one teacher to reach them all) but to classify all these students as “idiots” isn’t really fair. Some of them probably are, and some of them don’t care, but some might have unremediated learning disabilities, or just have needed some extra tutoring or coaching to fill gaps. It really is too bad that you didn’t have remedial options available.
Interesting irony. You spell God with a dash in the middle so as to avoid profaning His name (which, while well-intentioned, is simply silly), yet you use His name in a profane manner, merely as a prop for your credibility.
Its good to hear form one of the apostles. Thank you for your input, I will genuflect later.
Oh, that one kinda hurt, did it?
Mark, when you last spoke to G-d, did he mention me? I’m just curious, he never tells me anything.
Would you care to address the issue I raised? Or do you prefer to hurl insults instead of facing the issue of your profanity?
Taking an oath of veracity to G-d is profanity? Go away, troll.
It amazes me how little many college students know these days. I must say I’ve had the good fortune to also know many educated and informed young people. By the time I graduated from high school a working knowledge of English, and math at least through trigonometry was a must. I went all the way through solid geometry, which opened up new mathematical insights, but I must admit calculus did me in. In fifth grade we all learned how to diagram a sentence, and to understand the difference between a direct object and an indirect object. I would say most recent college graduates don’t know the difference. On the other hand high school science is well advanced from what I studied, no such thing as mitochondria back then. In every generate there are plenty of people who are stupid and proud of it.
We shouldn’t blame poor ol’ Dickens. He’s not responsible for the swill that came from Dewey and his ilk.
Anyhow, if anybody actually troubles himself to examine the arithmetic textbooks of old, he’ll see that the students were given a wealth of ways to understand what they were doing, how many shortcuts they might use, and why what they did worked. There was a natural transition from memory-work to numerical facility, so that algebra was but an extension of what they’d been doing for years. The same goes for grammar. When it was taught in a systematic way, the memory-work laid the foundation for a more subtle analysis of the characteristics and the possibilities of one’s native language. We could continue, looking at history and geography….
It’s sad and telling that “self-esteem” is the only thing today’s kids can spell correctly.
And even if they don’t spell it correctly, they still feel very good about themselves.
Harvard Business Review is putting out the touchy-feely line to help CEOs relate more manipulatively with their subordinates. I wrote about the global consultant Peter Bregman’s approach here. It is hilarious. See http://clarespark.com/2012/05/20/kick-me-again/, but I wouldn’t be too dismissive of the problems that many men have in giving up their armor.It is the naivete of Bregman that I object to, and his appalling ignorance of human character and its vicissitudes.
The current geneation redeemed itself when that kid taped the rant of the teacher in the Rowan-Salisbury school district in North Carolina and put it online. Ordinarily, I would be very opposed to that sort of thing but that teacher deserved what she got. The hairy kid reigns victorious. One of Obama’s brainless supporters revealed herself for what she is…..She should be a former teacher but the race card will definitely be pulled.
Among the other sins of the self-esteem movement in education is the demotion of reading to a priority below virtually anything else the student does. Most true learning comes about through reading. But if the point of education is to feel good about oneself, why bother to learn — and so, why bother to read? Thus, the student is deftly turned away from both the richest known source of knowledge and the most constant and reliable pleasure Man has yet to invent: a double tragedy.
There are actually some great studies and statistics out there about the value of having students do “sustained silent reading” of books they themselves have chosen, even for a small part of a class period or day. Steve Gardiner has some excellent articles about this on the internet and so do others. Just reading improves reading, writing, general knowledge, and boosts vocabulary more than any teaching technique.
Conversely, our kids are reading less than ever. Leonard Sax writes about this in his book Boys Adrift, and Mark Bauerlein addresses it in The Dumbest Generation.
Correction: The educational system as it exists today is that “Double Tragedy.” It is twice cursed by he who teaches it and he who is taught by it.
I was told by students in a 8th grade class I subbed for that at 1PM they were to stop and clap.
I said, pray tell for what?
It’s to improve our self esteem.
Indeed, Who came up with that misconception?
Mrs O’Neil, she went to a seminar and and was told this is a way to improve students self esteem for themselves and each other.
Here’s a news flash; We aren’t doing it today.
But Why? Mrs. O’Neil said so.
Because, you haven’t earned it. A concept neither of you apparently learned. Self esteem comes from achievement in what you do, not false praise from another or from your own delusion. Both are deceptions that only cheat you of the genuine satisfaction of a job well done. Consider that the short course in Reality 101, and you tell her I said so.
Now, it’s 1:05 and we have unfinished work to do. Completing a task is part of that satisfaction.
One of the students said, you remind me of my grandmother. She said, this self esteem thing is hog wash.
I said, listen to your grandmother she is a valuable source of wisdom and one of your blessings.
This is what our educational system has been allowed to turn into, Hog Wash. It’s past time we cleaned out the pig pen of the odious condition it has devolved to.
In pursuit of excellence not mediocrity. Our students will rise to the occasion, only if parents and teachers rise to the challenge. We owe them that, it’s our responsibility if we are to teach them to take responsibility for their actions and inaction, the law of cause and effect.
J Emily – Reality shall clean out the hog wash in the coming years. Those full of said hog wash shall starve to death.
Want to know what a real Zombie is? The hungry or hurt and weak coming out of the inner-cities into fly-over country looking for food. They will become targets or fertilizer.
We have 2 or 3 generations with NO skills. Now, there are exceptions, but most of the citizens below the upper 6 sigma limit in intelligence are candidates for destruction.
The Bell curve is inescapable.
the funny thing is, all you disdainful relics are probably not nearly as intelligent or accomplished as you pretend to be.
tom – Way to self-select.
Kinda provides the proof without any effort on my part.
Who’s pretending anything, “tom?” We have opinions. You’re entitled to yours. But I notice that though you’ve denigrated the rest of us, you’ve said nothing about your own levels of intelligence and achievement. Would you care to present your curriculum vitae for general evaluation and commentary?
Tell us about the last book you’ve read.
Tell us about the last book you wrote!
Tell us about your proudest intellectual achievement.
Tell us about your favorite ideas in the humanities and social sciences!
Perhaps we’ll be massively impressed.
And perhaps we won’t.
Take your best shot.
Says the fascist moron who is an uneducated idiot.
But most of us possess excellent marksmanship skills. As you refugees from “civilzation”, much to your dismay, will discover when you flee to flyover country.
R Daneel,
My money’s on Tom to survive WTSHTF rather than you, just form what I’ve read so far. FWIW
Based on what exactly?
Military experience?
Firearms experience?
Farming experience?
Ranching experience?
Know where I live?
Know what I do?
For a living?
For fun?
Thanks Francis P – I read you daily.
Was my post too long for you to read the answer to your question? Did my typo throw you off? Replace “form” with “from”.
The bell curve may be inescapable, but it is not meaningless. Do you have any idea what “the six sigma level of intelligence” is? A sigma is a standard deviation. Six standard deviations is eight nines. Those above the sixth standard deviation in a normal distribution (a “bell curve”) number approximately one in five hundred million.
In other words, through ignorance of mathematics, and the arrogance that leads one to throw around words without first learning their meanings, you’ve just publicly announced a belief that all but around fifteen people in the world are “candidates for destruction” due to their low level of intelligence. Congratulations.
But let’s be generous and assume he picked up the term during Lean Six Sigma training. They seek six sigma reliability at the beginning of the operation so that as things wear out and become less consistent, they will retain 4.5 sigma reliability, which is an error ratio of 3.6 ppm. Using that logic, only about a thousand people in the country would survive, and twenty-fold more worldwide.
jaed – Thank you for the lecture in math. I guess my BofSc in the field is meaningless.
And I manage SFC systems daily.
I found myself also wondering what this guy was talking about concerning six sigma. (A friend applied for and passed the entrance exam for the group Four Sigma…and told me that the people there weren’t dramatically more interesting than the people in Mensa, which is two sigmas.) Even people two sigmas above the average in intelligence are remarkably capable. One sigma is generally sufficient to prevent starvation under all but the most remarkable circumstances.
Clayton, I would also add that even many people who are zero sigma or less are capable of great intellectual things. Intellect is as much, if not more so, about persistence, and study, and thinking about things. You don’t need a high IQ to do that.
Additionally, people who have low IQs and education can still prosper, if they can prove that they are willing to work hard, and willing to help other people. We’re social animals, after all.
When the world ends as we know it, I suspect that the loners who aren’t willing to work will have far more issues with starvation, than those who help each other, and are willing to do things that others would consider “degrading”.
Whadda yu, sum kina robot?
Fascinating and erudite article — one of the best I’ve ever read on the subject. I am a professor of history at a major university and the problem of student motivation is obvious to behold. The majority (or at least a strong plurality if one is feeling gracious) not only lack the capacity to learn but are, as the author states, arrogantly resentful of the entire process, no doubt feeling you have nothing “useful” to teach them.
Now my feeling is that, at least in its basic outlines, this has always been the case in education. What has changed recently, however, (since the sixties I believe) is the collusion of institutional forces (administrators, academic counselors, parents and, embarrassingly, most faculty) in the entire sordid process of “empowering” students rather than educating them. The so-called “progressive” mentality of entitlement is certainly to blame (I would actually point out that, from a historical perspective, the true intellectual lodestone for this “movement” was Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and has now combined with the desire for taxpayer money to create a perfect storm of abuse.
I often tell my students that they have many more goals in common with the invisible (to them) army of university administrators than they do with me. The administrator wants their tuition money (I’m a part-timer so I assure all that those funds do NOT go to pad my salary but in all likelihood are devoted to purchasing a better cable package at the local dorm room) and so is motivated to push for diluting academic standards in order to put butts in the seats. They want their easy A in order to get their fake degree to show their parents and give themselves a chance in the tight job market — a fleeting chance since failure is inevitable with so little preparation. I am the only one who actually wants to educate them. A tragic state of affairs.
“Eventually, the fraud will be revealed: by an employer who finds him inadequate”. Replace that ‘him’ with a ‘her’. Does she have a name? Julia? Nah, Julia is a fiction. How about Michelle? Her law firm employers discovered the fraud and quietly, but smoothly, eased her out. Today, she can no longer practise law.
She became an “angry black woman” who only found pride in her country after her husband (who was born in Hawaii before he was born in Kenya) became POTUS.
Grade inflation is a clear and present and growing danger.
“When students who have always been praised must confront the reality of their low achievement, their tendency is, as researchers James Coté and Anton Allahar report, not to confront the problem directly but to hit back at its perceived source — the teacher who has given them the bad news, the employer who does not renew a contract.”
Michelle? Hmmm, I had’t thought of that. I was thinking a little higher up on the food chain to another student who had always been praised. Maybe by “the constituent who does not renew an administration”.
Way to shoehorn your racism into the conversation, dick
You can always count on idiot lefty children to shoehorn racism into any facts they find inconvenient and to call people names.
Fact: Obama produced a valid long for birth certificate.
Fact: The only people left claiming he wasn’t born in the US are bigoted assholes like you.
Fact: For 16 years, across multiple revisions, Obama’s author biography said he was born in Kenya. The policy of his publisher is to have the authors submit at least the first draft of their biography.
Conclusion: By “Liberal”s standards, Barak Hussein Obama is a bigoted asshole.
Hey, lefty idiot, I’ve never claimed he wasn’t born in Hawaii. I’m confident that he’s the Red Diaper Baby of the daughter of a card-carrying communist or fellow traveller who was carefully nurtured in Harry Bridges’ towns, Seattle and Honolulu. Since you’re an ignorant lefty, you probably don’t know that Harry was last seen with his comrades on the Kremlin Balcony. After that nurturing and a fraudulently acquired education paid for by God only knows who, and probably with the advantage of being considered a foreign student from either Kenya or Indonesia, he was plugged into the machine in Saul Alinsky’s old town, Chicago. But, then, you’re a stupid lefty who doesn’t let facts get in your way. Fact: lefty and smart are no synonyms, no matter what your perfesser told you.
Ding ding ding! Liberal has fired off the “racist” catch phrase again!!! Apparently these silly conservatives don’t know that that unsupported charge ends any discussion in his favor!
Okay, I’ve got it now. You had me fooled for a while.
Folks “Liberal” is a parody. He’s not really liberal – even real liberals aren’t this consistently idiotic.
This is someone doing a parody of common liberal traits. In this case, inserting a completely unrelated subject into a discussion in order to divert attention from the fact that they cannot answer an argument, or simply because their tiny brains have shorted out and they can’t think of anything else.
Well done, “Liberal”.
Go look in a mirror to see the racist bigot, nazi filth.
Godwin invoked.
You lose.
It is nothing short of astonishing that someone on the far extreme right would call someone on the left a Nazi. I’m guessing you didn’t actually pass history, or you managed to argue that you were a big idea person, and the details weren’t your strong suit.
Sorry to inform you, but Nazis were indeed lefties. Nazi is short for National Socialism. To claim the Nazis were rightwing anything is to show historical ignorance.
Use a shoehorn on the Congressional Black Caucus and then we can have a nice conversation about forests and trees.
The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability.
Sounds precisely like the current President of the United States.
It’s always so wonderful when the correction creates a new problem worse than the original, as the pendulum swings from on extreme to another. Rote learning is not usually a good idea, because it does not extend beyond the facts learned, and it runs up against the way most people process knowledge into memories. If you can name basic facts about the civil war, it doesn’t mean you can draw conclusions about the civil war. Denigrating students breaks down the student’s interest in the subject, just like giving a student a long, boring lecture. Thus the progressive trend in education, with the unintended consequences you mention, such as students not knowing anything about the civil war or students haggling with me for a grade. (One student even wanted to bribe me – I think I replied $100 million in unmarked bills, which convinced student to try more traditional methods of improving her grade, such as studying)
It’s always good to keep in mind the Law of Unintended Consequences, and only fix what’s actually broken.
OmegaPaladin “Rote learning is not usually a good idea, because it does not extend beyond the facts learned, and it runs up against the way most people process knowledge into memories. If you can name basic facts about the civil war, it doesn’t mean you can draw conclusions about the civil war. ”
Rote learning is the most effective way to learn facts. Worry about extending beyond that once the basic facts are learned. While your assertion about knowing Civil War facts may be correct one thing is absolutely certain… without a knowledge of the basic facts of the Civil War, one will NEVER be able to draw any conclusions about the war that are worth entertaining.
Well put. You saved me from having to type in a reply.
Roger that. If you don’t have some of the basic facts memorized, you can’t analyze them, because you don’t even know they’re there.
We have raised a generation who doesn’t know the facts are there.
“Rote learning” is what is missing from math education today. That’s why kids don’t know math facts and can’t perform simple arithmetic operations once they get to high school.
I’m not a teacher, but I do know that rote learning is the most beneficial (and perhaps the only effective method) for certain subjects. If you need the answer to “what is 6 x 9?” and you’re trying to mentally sort six rows with nine apples, you’re done. You have to know 6 x 9 = 54 without thinking. Just try pulling out your calculator in the business meeting for that one.
Same for dates in history. If you want to understand the Civil War, for example, you need to know which battle came first, Antietam or Gettysburg? Did Gettysburg come before or after The Emancipation Proclamation? Was Lincoln’s re-election before or after the Battle of the Wilderness? The only way to hold them all in context to each other is by memorizing the dates for each.
I tend to lean against rote memorisation, myself. On the one hand, it would seem that you need to learn basics like addition and multiplication, or the rules of derivatives and integrals, or the axioms for a group or a ring, in order to pursue mathematics…on the other hand, if you go into the depths of a given subject, you are going to absorb a lot of facts you need, and if you need to know something but don’t have it memorised, you’ll know where to look for it.
To pass my topology, real analysis, and complex analysis prelims, I had to sit down and memorise a lot of things…now that it’s been several years, I cannot remember those things. For my algebra exam (which should have been the most difficult), I passed it without studying. For all of these subjects, I have worked on problem after problem, proved theorem after theorem, and absorbed many ideas and techniques.
For something like history, you could *kill* an interest by studying a long series of dates and places. History is more about the stories that have happened, and how they affected things at the time, and how their effects last to this day. One radio host even talked about how his children, who hated history because of the dates and places memorisation, are now majoring in history, because he told them the stories of this country.
If we want our children to succeed in a given subject, we need to instil an interest in it–if rote memorisation is called for, to improve in proficiency, it will then happen naturally. Schools have traditionally have destroyed interest in things, by focusing on rote memorisation. Now that they have done all they can to destroy interest in things that way, they are now moving on to destroy the self-satisfaction that comes with achieving something, by focusing on self-esteem.
And this is why I home-school my children.
(Oh, and for the record, I added using my fingers on the calculator-free portion of the AP Calculus test; to this day, I sometimes have to use my fingers to add…but if you give me a chance to review the details, I could also explain Urysohm’s Theorem and how to prove it.)
Some of the most “denigrating” teachers I had, in public school and college, were the ones who berated me for giving correct answers. Why? because I was making the other students “feel bad”.
I was fortunate in that my history profs rarely had that viewpoint, but then I went through college before Howard Zinn became the guru of American history, too. The fact that I not only knew who James Ohio Pattie was, but exactly what effect he had on relations between the Native American groups in the American West and white trappers, etc., impressed one teacher considerably.
In more “nebulous” areas it was a different story. One of my psych profs (who shall remain nameless) repeatedly took me aside and told me to stop answering questions even when nobody else could- because it made me appear “too smart”, and that was hurting the “self-esteem” of the rest of the class.
It was rather pointless to observe to this prof that since this was part of a criminology syllabus (applied and criminal psych), the majority of the students were likely to end up in a position (on the streets, in uniform) where the person they were trying “talk therapy” on was unlikely to give two cents’ worth about the student’s self-esteem. And that, in fact, they would be more likely to register their opinion on the student’s ability, or lack thereof, with a 2×4 upside the head.
No, this prof was locked into the “my job is to make students feel good about themselves” methodology. He handed out A’s and B’s profusely, constantly complimented everyone (except, ahem, me) on “what a good job!” they did, and frequently said, “How do you feel about (fill in the blank)?”
BTW, I finished the class with an A+, and a good bit of extra credit. Based on how my course work reflected the curriculum. I still suspect the prof would rather have walked over hot coals, on his bare hands, than pass me even with a D.
Myself, I was pretty disappointed with the course. The ability to correctly assess somebody’s mental state, in the equivalent of what phony “psychics” call a “cold read”, is a very important skill set for police officers. The students were supposed to get at least a part of it from that class.
They absolutely did not.
clear ether
eon
I had a problem with an English teacher while in college. I had started college late, having served in the military for six years then getting an early-out to earn my commission. I had done some technical writing while active duty and my strong-suit actually happened to be writing. I had been told many times by many different people from youth through adulthood and while active duty.
So, in Technical Report Writing class, a core curriculum class, things started out great. My first two assignments came back with A’s. I was pleased. But then, my next assignment was a C. I asked the prof what happened? And she explained that I hadn’t done X and did too much Y, etc etc.
Short version: Things changed after she saw me in my Air Force ROTC uniform. She was a card-carrying flaming liberal from San Francisco and I was never able to get above C-level in her class. Indeed, I had made it my mission in life to follow her instructions to the letter and write exactly as she had told me. I even prepared, on occasion, three different samples to show her if the one I handed in was unacceptable.
The showdown came when I told her that I had been writing technical reports for years and had been highly praised for my attention to detail, lack of emotional phrasing and clear, direct explanation of things. Indeed, even after this class, I continued to receive praise for my writing in my professional life. So, I have to conclude that the problem wasn’t me, but with her hatred of everything military.
Epilogue: After I graduated, she was fired with extreme prejudice for doing it to all ROTC students. It was a small campus and such behavior became very obvious to the dean’s office. I just happened to be the lucky one to be one of her first students in her brand new job. I suppose I should be glad I simply passed her class but there was no way I was going to earn an A from her.
I am highlighting a problem that exists in all levels of education, the prejudice of the teacher. When they decide they don’t like a student, there is little that student can do if the teacher is going to apply the subjectivity of their personal proclivities upon said student. It’s a very bad thing. Some classes, like those that involve writing can be very subjective and don’t have a simple measuring system for simply getting the right answer. Spelling a word correctly is not the same thing as writing well-presented essay.
Obviously, this anecdote is loaded with errors for the reasons of rushing and failing to preview it. I see them, I see them. I am guilty. Though I do believe writing is a strength of mine, this latest wouldn’t prove it in any way.
I know your pain quite well. I am graduating tomorrow with an engineering degree and had to deal with a certain type of professor all too often in the English department. Add in my double crime of being a former enlist machinist that worked with nuclear power…and well frankly I was treated like a war criminal.
Whatever…I had to spend far too much money, taking far too many classes, that had nothing to do with my field of study. College is a massive racket.
My son at UCLA was taking a course titled Jerusalem Studies which was to examine the politics of the Middle-East. On the first day the instructor asked “Who in this class is Jewish?” He didn’t ask about any other ethnic group. The Jewish students in the class were so offended that they complained to the administration. As a consequence this instructor had to face a disciplinary committee. Needless to say by the time this happened most of the Jewish students had bailed out of the course.
I had the experience of being told to stop answering questions by the students in a class for firefighting. So… I went along, for about half an hour. It became evident that even when being educated in life and death matters (For example, how to get out of a burning building when your air-pack is empty…)my fellow students weren’t going to break the bad habits learned in the local schools. Later, in the field, when all hell was breaking loose…. well you can figure the rest out yourself.
Out of morbid curiosity, how many died?
As an aspiring priest, I ask this because I want to get a feel for the kinds of funerals I might be called in to oversee.
I’m not following your anecdote at all. What bad habit were the students on your firefighting course following? It sounds as if they were asking questions, which sounds like a good thing to me. Who was it that told you to stop answering questions and what reason did they give? Why did you stop for only half an hour?
You’ve left some critical details out of your story so I can’t make head nor tails out of it. I really don’t know what point you are making except that someone, somehow, persuaded you not to answer some questions.
Rote learning of the rules of grammar and the multiplication tables served me very well in life.
On a second semester calculus test I reduced a very complex integral to a trivial one because I had trig formulas memorized cold.
Rote learning is the foundation, and wonderful things happen because of it. Here’s my example:
When I tell kids (and adults!) that we went from the Wright Brothers’ canvas and wood Flyer to Neil & Buzz walking on the moon in the space of 66 years, they are stunned. They’ve never thought about it, and it really brings to life the greatest leap in technology that has ever happened.
I had a guy telling me that if we let Christians run our country, then science is dead. “Really?” I asked. “But weren’t Christians in control for the entire first half of the 20th Century?” “Yeah.” Then I explained to him that when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the X-1 one of the Wright Brothers was still alive!
Knowing dates is important – damned important.
“…we went from the Wright Brothers’ canvas and wood Flyer to Neil & Buzz walking on the moon in the space of 66 years….”
Thanks for that pearl. It’ll come in handy…if I can remember it. In criticizing America’s Constitutional Capitalism, the Progressive Communists don’t seem to have any concept at all of a changing “standard of living” and its massive increase in America, occurring right under their noses. Imo, that’s why their Totalitarian Meme Masters, for whom America’s Constitutional Capitalism is a gigantic threat, keep moaning about “equality” of outcome instead. If the focus was on America’s increased and increasing standards of living, they’d have no case – for killing the Goose That Laid he Golden Egg.
For example, essentially everyone in America is massively richer than George Washington was, in many basic ways.
Christians, specifically Catholics, invented science.
Later, Protestants joined in. Isaac Newton wrote more Bible study notes than ones about gravity, optics or calculus.
That “guy” you mentioned risks becoming an ignorant bigot.
“Then I explained to him that when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the X-1 one of the Wright Brothers was still alive!”
And Charles Lindbergh was still alive when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. He sent a congratulatory telegram, which is cited in From The Earth To the Moon, the HBO miniseries.
And look what’s happened since. Robert A. Heinlein, who inspired a great many young people to look at math and science as careers, including a great many NASA scientists, made a startling remark not too long before his death in 1988 (paraphrased because I don’t recall the original wording): “I always knew I’d live to see the first moon landing. I never imagined I’d live to see the last one!” In case that isn’t clear, Heinlein was in a state of some despair that the successful Apollo landings hadn’t been followed up in subsequent years. Now, almost 25 years after his death and nearly 40 years after the last moon landing, we still haven’t been back there….
Luckily, Obama has his priorities straight: he wants NASA to focus on outreach to Muslims and telling them how wonderful their contributions were to mathematics and science! Actual space travel though, well, not really that important….
Well, that’s only because we haven’t had any real reason to, other than romanticism.
I devoured Heinlein (and Azimov, et al) for most of my young life. I doubt there’s anything he wrote that I have not read at least a dozen times. I’m an engineer. I LOVE science.
There’s no real reason to go to the moon. Sorry.
Rote learning no good, eh? Tell that to any accomplished musician. You have to know the rudiments, the “facts”, before you can go off and explore the subject in depth. God save us from the Education majors…
A couple years ago, I watched a TV program where the blues great BB King was conducting a class in Europe. Someone from the class asked him how he practices. Mr King described how he practiced every day starting with the basics, the scales. He then elaborated on the scales to more advanced techniques. Here’s a man who mastered the guitar decades ago who still goes back to the basics and rote learning. I’ve heard the same thing about the great cello player Yo Yo Ma.
Excellent example.
B.B. may be a consummate bluesmaster with the finest vibrato ever but he’ll admit that he can’t play rhythm guitar to save his life.
How come athletes are willing to do “rote memory” drills for dribbling, passing, layups, blocking, etc. all day long in order to have these abilities down cold in the big game? Because their coaches have convinced them that perfect practice makes perfect performance in the clutch.
Teachers don’t like “drill and kill” because it is boring for them to administrate it. However, that is how you build a good foundation. BTW I teach physics and math on the HS/CC level. I’d drag my students literally kicking and screaming through particular problem solving techniques because they work; those who refused to do them regularly did poorly or failed. Those who listened, even those whose incoming skills were poor, did very well.
When I was in 2nd Grade, my math teacher made “drill and kill” both fun and fast for us. It was simple: the goal was to complete a sheet of at least sixty arithmetic problems flawlessly in under a minute. It was a challenge even for the best of us, but we managed to do it after a few weeks them.
Because the athletes see an immediate payoff the next week.
In one of my education classes years ago, the professor was talking about higher-order thinking. He said repetition and memorization were low-level and had no place in the classroom, or words to that effect.
I asked, “What about learning to play the guitar? You have to memorize and repeat and repeat and repeat…,” or words to that effect.
He pause for a moment then said, “Ah, but that’s different, because that’s music!” or words to that effect. Go figure.
I have but one criticism for this otherwise excellent article. Janice Fiamengo wrote:
“…and in some form all the way back to William Wordsworth’s divinely anointed child “trailing clouds of glory” — has stressed the development of self-esteem and a sense of achievement.”
I would contend that Wordsworth did not at all reference self-esteem, and what he stressed was a struggle to live in the world while remembering our Maker. He did not say, a child. He said, “our birth,” ergo, referencing we human beings, who come into life “trailing clouds of glory.” In this he was refers to the idea that each soul prior to being born came directly from God, whom Wordsworth further stated, “is his home.” Further, he sadly states that we are born “not in utter forgetfulness, but when the boy becomes a man he may forget entirely from whence he came. The title of this wonderful poem is, after all, “Intimations of Immortality.”
Excellent article. It dovetails nicely to this one I encountered a few years back.
http://freedomtorch.com/blogs/19738/4336/unwarranted-self-esteem-grade
Sounds like these students are guilty of something that my mother used to admonish me for. “Son, you work harder at not doing the work than you would if you just did it.”
These students are prepared to write endless besieging emails, but aren’t willing to just get better at writing. It’s very sad.
It is unfair to single out just the students, as they are performing as they were taught! The problem is systemic.
I believe the systemic nature of the problem is the part that was being addressed in the article. The unteachable students are not the cause. They are the result. Don’t get those panties all in a wad, Robert.
Not just are so many of today’s “educators” turning out “graduates” who are ill prepared for the job market and the challenges of life in general, but they are creating something far worse.
Just like Barack Obama’s Harvard University Prof. Derrick Bell who as a minority affirmative action hire discovered that he was way in over his head and clearly over-matched by the rest of the law faculty, many people coming out of our schools have made and will continue to make the same choice that he did.
Angry, envious and bitter about their difficulty or even inability to compete and suceed all while retaining a strong and continuing sense of entitlement, these people will do everything they can to hide and camoflauge their lack by becoming progressives… and even radicals.
These are the people who will then support a growing, over-reaching and destructive government to gain both power and security… but most of all, to get back at the achievers and the difference-makers who make them look bad and “keep” them from succeeding.
Until, of course, they run out of other people’s money that pays for it all.
What a racket.
At the risk of preaching to the choir, it can be objectively shown that liberalism and all it’s politically correct platitudes is at the root of just about every problem in our society, beginning at the fundamental level with education.
We once had an education system and national work ethic that was the envy of the world. Then liberalism took hold with the axion: “If it’s not broken, work on it until it is. Then raise taxes to pay for more of it.”
My daughter started learning Suzuki violin at 3 1/2. We started her, because everything (reading, counting, singing, vocabulary) seemed to come easily to her. While many people would just be thankful and move on, I saw trouble. I saw the problem described in this article. The problem of never having to work for an “A” before college. I saw exactly what this article was talking about, at 3 1/2.
Violin seemed logical, because it is a skill that cannot be mastered without effort. We never demanded long practices, in fact I have to assist her in her practice. Sometimes she played 5 minutes (at 3), sometimes an hour (at 7). Right now, at 10, her music is very difficult, and 20 minutes may be very good.
Violin is not about music, its about learning, attitude and reality. We just went through a period of her not having a very good attitude about practice, although she still likes being a good musician. As a parent, I had to just keep talking to her about WHY this is important. Skills purchase freedom and choices. In college, she can teach violin at $50/hr. She can play weddings for extra money. She needs to learn how to focus on the things she doesn’t care about (having a good bow hold) to get the things she does care about (the ability to play difficult music). It’s better to do something consistently, every day than to try to play catch-up twice a week. You have to learn how to make something interesting, once it becomes boring. When you are tired of a piece, but it is not “finished” (smooth and up to tempo), how do you mentally help yourself keep going?
Even at 10, she is learning that all I can do is help her define the problem, but she, herself has to want a solution. She has to find the solution.
She will learn NONE of these things in any school, even in the private ones she has attended. She has to learn it at home. I am so glad we have done this, even though people have thought it was crazy. Because she is very good, musically, people assume that we have not let her be “normal” and that she practices hours every day, but really most of her life, it has been 20-40 minutes of good practice. The results are from the focus on practice being “good” not being “long”.
As parents, we have to understand, I think, that NOTHING in culture supports are children. Culture, including school, doesn’t care what’s good for the children, they care about what’s easy for the adults. To raise a competent, compassionate human being must completely be done at home. Anything the school provides is just a bonus.
Also, just like violin practice, parenting must happen daily, consistently, kindly and patiently. Children don’t “get it” the first time, whatever it is, any more than we do. I never expect my daughter to just accept what I say, just because I say it. She is kind, but not a pushover. I am imperfect, and she is very aware of that. She will have imperfect teachers, bosses, and all kinds of other people in her life. Mom is just imperfect person #1.
Your daughter is a very lucky girl. It is entirely likely that she will grow up to be a successful, productive and contributing adult. Keep up the good work.
Kudos for understanding how smart kids can get tripped up, and intervening early. All kids are different, we have three from the same DNA set and all are gifted, but all are different. My experience as a GAT student was that everything was effortless until about 8th grade, when I found that I actually needed to do homework to retain portions of algebra and geometry. Even then, it took moving to another school district where process in math was emphasized over the final result for me to become a disciplined math student. It may have been “rote”, but the discipline of attacking math problems and showing my work has stuck with me to this day, and it’s the discipline of learning to play violin that will be the foundation of your child’s success. Not the violin per se, but the discipline.
I do not want my children to have “self-esteem” of the kind that is passed out in school like so much Halloween candy in neighborhoods. I want them to have the self-confidence that comes from competence, and competence is something they must develop on their own. I will help them succeed to the best of my ability but I cannot take the tests for them. My kids all take piano, I don’t play any instruments. Their successes at piano competitions and their increasing competence at piano is all their own doing, and when things get difficult in class work they have a core knowledge that they will improve if they have discipline and keep working. Their new piano teacher is considerably more demanding than their last one, they griped and complained until they started winning competitions. It is amazing how their attitude changed.
Keep it up. Self-discipline is its own reward, that character trait probably bodes well for your child more than her IQ or her academic success. In a world where people are increasingly credentialed rather than educated, it will be a (sadly unique) positive differentiator.
I was struck by this comment on learning to play the violin. As a nine-year old in boarding school, I one day plucked up enough courage to go to our orchestra teacher, a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, East German refugee teaching classical western music to us Indian neophytes, that I wanted to play the violin for the school orchestrs.
I was not prepared for what came. First, he put me on the piano for a whole year. Then he pronounced me incapable of any sense of music. Besides, he said, my fingers were not only too short but also too weak. He then took me off the piano and asked the school basketball coach to teach me how to shoot hoops, to build fingers, he said. I was only able to hold a violin two years after my request.
It was worth the wait. In my final school year, I made First Violin. And the German still scowled at me and said I was better at basketball than violin. I took his advice. In college, I sold my violin and became college b’ball captain instead.
Today, as I look back, the lesson I learnt was that there are no free lunches. Just because you want something, it maynot happen. Instead, something better may happen, if only you were prepared to put in the hours at things that may seem pointless at first, but not in the end.
God bless the only German I ever knew in my life.
I think you have touched on a very important matter – the parents’ contribution. I was a classic gifted kid in my school years – in fact, looking back, I must have been pretty insufferable, and feel rather sympathetic to those teachers who couldn’t stand the sight of me – but my basic deficiency came not from my teachers, but from my parents. And I don’t want to say any ill of them, but I guess that they imagined that having three children (I was the oldest) who, one after the other, all did well at school, all showed gifts and attitude and all learned fast, they did not actually have to bother following us too much. Big mistake! The thing is, children spend a lot more time at home (unless they are at boarding school), and they can pick up bad habits there even faster than at school. Take the matter of books. To write any history essay – history is my thing and always has been – one has to get out several books from their shelves. And because my mother did not make me put them back, it took me forty more years to develop the discipline to put back every book, every time, as soon as I was done with it. And I spent a good deal of the intervening forty years frustrated because I could not find a book without a lot of searching when I needed it. The same goes for taking notes and underlining important passages: even now, I am going to have to read the whole Iliad through because I can’t remember where an important passage is, and I did not take the required note when I first noticed its importance. And then there is the matter of unsupervised reading. I actually ploughed through my mother’s senior high school history and literature textbooks while I was barely starting junior high, but without once getting her advice or supervision. The amount of half-baked notions and crass repetition this caused can be imagined. I was basically allowed to read anything around the house, suitable or not, with less than desultory attention from my parents. And then take maths. My father has a mathematics degree, got when Italian university degrees were no joke. I had difficulties with maths all my childhood, and yet I only recall one occasion when he sat down and asked me what I was doing. And I recall it because it was so illuminating, it just shows what could have happened if he had done it regularly. Once when I was eleven he looked at my homework and went through what I was doing. I showed him that a certain problem could not have a certain result, because “you would have to subtract a bigger number from a smaller one, and that’s just not possible, right?” He said thoughtfully: “You haven’t done negative numbers yet, have you?” I hadn’t, but just because he mentioned them in that context I suddenly had an instinctive idea of what they could be, and next year, when we got to them, I had the advantage of having as good as figured out their existence in advance, thanks to my father.
Understand, I am not blaming my parents. They were overburdened people, and they had a touching faith in us that led them to expect us to teach ourselves. But the thing is that some of the simplest things in the world have taken me decades to learn, because I did not learn them at home as a child.
Yeah, the system is a wreck, but the internet is saving us. We really are more lucky than rational.
I hire labourers and small time tradesmen for various building projects. Most of them are as ignorant as dirt. I force mine to become minimally computer literate, so they can use our web based systems to sign in and out, to post time, to do simple accounting entries and to requisition tools and material. About 2 years ago one of my carpenters, a crew foreman, wanted my advice on how to do something. I didn’t know the answer and told him to google it. He didn’t know what google was, much less how to use it.
I taught him that and neither I nor he have looked back. He, and many of my labourers, have taken real strides in self education. Finding online span tables leads to learning about allowable deflection, loads, stress and strain and the maths thereof and on and on.
A lot of young men fail to learn in school because the teachers are ignorant of the material and because they take forever to teach what little they know. My high carpenter taught himself the basics of engineering beam theory on one Saturday afternoon after failing out of high school.
A lot of young men fail to learn in school because the teachers are ignorant of the material and because they take forever to teach what little they know. My high carpenter taught himself the basics of engineering beam theory on one Saturday afternoon after failing out of high school.
There’s a lot of truth in that. I had my education in the 60s and 70s so I can’t say how things are today but I remember spending a solid month on subjects like logarithms when I was in high school. When I took first year math in university, we would cover a topic like logarithms in a single day. I don’t recall feeling quite as confident that I understood logarithms as well after a single day but I was sure a lot less bored!
I still remember the frequent frustration of being told I had to learn X or Y without any real attempt being made to tell me how X and Y would be useful in some way in the future. The teachers either didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered to tell me. Or maybe X and Y weren’t actually EVER going to be useful except for a few specialized technical people but they just didn’t want to admit that. Pretty much the only answer we ever got to questions like “Why are we studying this?” was, essentially, “Trust me, you’ll need this some day. Maybe.”
To go back to the example of logarithms, of which I have only the faintest of memories, I never did figure out a real use for them or have any need for them in my later education or career so that STILL seems like a waste of a month of classroom time all these years later….
When I was in high school math, our family took a vacation of one week at a time when the class was learning a table about sines, co-sines, and tangents—trigonometry. I had promised my teacher I would learn the assigned table while on vacation. I didn’t, of course. As a result, I was left behind in a cloud of ignorance as the remainder of the class progressed without me. It was a very humbling experience.
Logarithms show up all the time in calculus. If they show up *there*, then they will show up in solid dynamics and other aspects of engineering.
A long time ago, in college, I tutored people in a subject called “Musical Acoustics.” It was a required course for music majors.
Most of them could struggle through just fine – it was mostly just plain math, with a little bit of geometry thrown in. Some, however, hit a brick wall when it came to the third or fourth week of classes.
One girl came to me, in sheer panic. The math in this course was going to kill her. She had no idea what to do, and someone had given her my number. We sat down for the first of what was supposed to be a whole semester’s worth of tutoring, and I mentioned scientific notation, which was used extensively for the second half of the course.
She freaked out. FREAKED. “Oh, no! I can’t do that at all! I tried in high school, but flunked every time! I’m STUPID!” It took me almost ten minutes to calm her to the point where she’d talk about it.
After she stopped panicking, I gave her a quick lesson – using the “just move the zeroes around” method I’d always used. Write the numbers, multiply them, then mush the zeroes around and go from there. She repeated what I’d told her, and came up with the correct answer. I gave her another problem, and she got it with a little prompting. The third and subsequent problems were a piece of cake.
We finished the session, and I commented on how quickly she’d picked it up. “But it’s so EASY!” I said something about her high school teacher, and she got mad. Spitting mad. I think she went back to her home town and confronted the guy for making something so easy so blindingly hard.
I never had to tutor her again.
I had a nearly identical experience tutoring math in high school. It was the bit where you graph inequalities and highlight the regions and use either a dashed or solid line.
Something needs to be said for the fact that the curricula are often terrible, and the teachers are unlikely to have any idea of how concepts are applied, because they never have to apply them.
I still remember the frequent frustration of being told I had to learn X or Y without any real attempt being made to tell me how X and Y would be useful in some way in the future. The teachers either didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered to tell me. Or maybe X and Y weren’t actually EVER going to be useful except for a few specialized technical people but they just didn’t want to admit that. Pretty much the only answer we ever got to questions like “Why are we studying this?” was, essentially, “Trust me, you’ll need this some day. Maybe.”
I graduated in 1975 and had the same problem. A year later, I was enrolled in class to become an electronics technician. Suddenly, I found myself using a great deal of the math that I learned in high school and it all made sense.
Perhaps a big part of the problem is that few teachers have any real work experience outside of school. They were students and now they’re teachers. Oh, they may’ve had the odd job while in school but it’s doubtful that many of them actually worked in a job that required their college major. As a result, they probably don’t know of many firsthand examples of how things are used in the real world. For advanced math and science classes, a high percentage of them aren’t science or math majors. Their knowledge of the subjects is often quite limited.
The “all I’ve ever known is school” limitation is, IMO, part of the reason why they push so many kids to go to college. It worked for them so they think that’s the best road for everyone regardless of their talents or abilities. That’s why we have so many college graduates working in places like Starbucks – they lack the real world skills to do anything else. We used to joke that high school graduates were qualified to ask, “Would you like fried with that?” Now, college graduates are qualified to ask, “Would you like a muffin with your latte?” In the meantime, many employers are reporting that it’s very difficult to find skilled workers for jobs like welder, machinist, mechanic, etc.
The problem with X and Y type of education doesn’t lie in the subject matter. Rather it lies in how you want to apply it. Here are a few of examples: My wife wanted me to build a semicircular patio in our back yard. Her problem was how much sand to order to fill the elevated portion of the patio. After asking me, I calculated the volume and consequently she ordered that much sand. It worked beautifully. Another time we were on vacation and our cocker spaniel was pregnant. As we were rolling along she read me a description of a whelping box, which is used to keep the mother from crushing her pups. In my mind, I could see every dimension and every cut of the lumber and inside rail. When we got home, I bought the lumber and picked up my Skill-saw. Without hesitating I made my cuts. At seeing the first cut, she let out a scream, “What are you doing? You don’t have any plans. You can’t just start cutting.” I continued on without even blinking. Everything fit perfectly. Since then, I’ve made my own doors, windows, and custom bookcases. All were done without any written plans. All fit perfectly together. Believe me, in my mind I am applying all kinds of math. If you want to apply X and Y, plan something such as an arch. Figure out its design. Figure out its volume so that you can order the correct amount of materials to build it. I garuntee you that not only will you have fun doing the entire project, you will have an enormous amount of satisfaction from completing the task. Wait and see the admiration your family and friends will have at seeing your completed project. It will be worth all the figuring and work.
“Of course, the progressive approach has advantages, not the least of which is that it enables university administrators to boast of the ever-greater numbers of students taking degrees at their institutions. Previously disadvantaged groups have gained access to higher education as never before, and more and more students are being provided with the much-touted credentials believed to guarantee success in the workforce. Thus our universities participate in a happy make-believe. Students get their degrees. Parents are reassured that their money has been well-spent.”
And it really stinks when the kid gets out of college and finds out that his or her degree is almost worthless. Actually, you could probably say that you went to some obscure university even though you never attended the place and people would believe you. For the most part in private business, nobody checks your degree or asks to see a transcript, so you could say you did just about anything in some small school somewhere in the United States and people would believe it.
Too many kids graduate from school today unable to write a decent report or form a reasonable argument when discussing a topic, any topic. This only shows that colleges are a big business and have turned into assembly lines for graduates. Get them in and get them out as fast as possible. Universities seem to be everywhere, cranking out literally thousands of graduates each year in some of the worst majors you can think of. If I hear one more graduate say that he or she has a degree in “Marketing,” I think I will throw up. Those same “Marketing” majors are now working for minimum wage at the local Starbucks, learning how to “market” more coffee to people during rush hour. That degree sure was worth the $100,000 investment, right?
There will always be a place for colleges for certain careers, such as in medicine, architecture, law, science, or engineering. But it seems that many colleges today specialize in giving out worthless degrees in the humanities and then tell the students that “They can be whatever they want to be” with a flexible degree like that. What a lie, and they keep telling that lie so that they can keep the classrooms full of stupid students willing to spend more money for even more worthless degrees in areas like Anthropology or “Black Studies,” (yup, you’re going far with that one, folks).
Today you will never bring reality to universities because that would mean ending the big business of universities, and as long as you have the far-left and liberals running these institutions that will never happen. Do I want my kids to go to college? Depends on what they want to do with their lives. But I know one thing. If any of them want to major in history or “Contemporary Literature” or “Film Studies,” they can do it on their own dime. The world is very harsh on graduates that don’t embrace reality very quickly. Better for them to learn about it bofore they go to college rather than after they graduate.
I check ALL the obscure college/university names on the resumes on the Internet. If they don’t exist or are known sheepskin mills, I don’t waste my time on an interview. If they do exist and truly are a small college, I will confirm that the person graduated with a degree.
I work in a technical field, and do consultation on hiring decisions. Some of the people we hire are engineers, and some are sales people. I do a short read of the resume, including the educational details, but I ALWAYs discount the school and degree. Keep in mind people with Gender studies or advanced basket weaving don’t make it far enough in the process to get to me. I generally get the part of the interview that is conversational and centers around what they’ve done at various jobs. I have been doing this a long time and have a pretty wide background in my field. Within 2-3 questions and follow-ups you can generally tell who is competant and who isn’t.
With so many people padding their resume’s with things they don’t know, and listing degrees, that may or may not be worthless, it always comes down to what do you really know and is it enough for you to be useful. Those that don’t know enough are self-identified pretty quickly in interviews. My interviews are for the most part not even seen as such by the interviewee, and more often than not they are completly oblivious of the gaping holes in their knowledge. This group never get’s hired at my company.
Chain Vara:
I thought school information, any information, was confidential and that the school is not allowed to give out any information at all, even if it is to see if a person graduated. Maybe things have changed since I got out of college in this high-tech world, but when I got out of school the school could not give out ANY information on ANY student unless you got written permission from the student. Maybe things have changed since then.
It’s a rare job app form these days that doesn’t include a basic authorization to the employer to obtain verification from the applicant’s claimed schools and previous employers. The legal language is usually right above where the applicant signs. On-line application forms generally have some kind of equivalent.
I understand your theory but let me tell you my experience. Last year I decided to return to college at 62 yrs. old. I already had a degree from 1970 but wanted to do something different so I enrolled in English/Journalism. This is at a small community college in southern California. Half way through the first term an instructor had to have surgery and was going to be unavailable for about a month. She asked me if I would take over that class until she returned and I agreed to do so. On the first day I wanted to evaluate the class for myself (it was a reading/vocabulary class) so I had each student stand and read a paragraph out loud. These students ranged from 18 to about 30 yrs. old. I was shocked ! The best of the lot was reading at about a 6th grade level, they didn’t know phonics, pronunciation sucked and after a quick quiz on vocabulary, I realized they not only didn’t know most words, they also had no idea of their meaning. How in holy hell did they get a high school diploma? And how did they gain admittance to any college? For the next 5 weeks I drilled these students till they probably hated my guts. During breaks I’d ask questions only to find out that they are no longer taught geography, writing, any goverment studies and little or no emphesis on spelling. But I bet they all got a trophy!! They were just herded through the grades like cattle…..no teacher ever challenged them to work harder. Eventually the instructor returned and was amazed at how much progress the whole class had made in her absence. But she wasn’t too happy with my methods…..said they were old-fashioned and not the way the state wanted things done. Too bad. I continued tutoring many of those kids and they have made great progress. Many are actually reading books because they want to now and enjoying it. But, here’s the kicker…..this week our local newspaper printed an article about how the state of California is ranked #49 in education. So, guess what their solution is….wait for it….they’re going to make the tests EASIER for the students. This state has taken leave of their senses.
So, here’s my point…..just because you google a college and know it exists and that they did graduate from there, that doesn’t mean they are educated. If you’re wise you create an entry level exam to determine if they actually were taught anything or just paid for a diploma
I only disagree with this one sentence: “Get them in and get them out as fast as possible.”
No, it’s “Get them in and keep them as long as possible.”
They want to milk the students for everything they can, all the way to Ph.D. if possible. Can’t find a job after graduating with a BA in Angry Studies? Go to graduate school! Graduate school is even more expensive than undergraduate school. Who cares if they have very low job prospects upon graduation or that they’re massively in debt? They’re marks to be fleeced and the more you get from them, the better as far as the school administrators are concerned.
It’s a pyramid scheme. Out of ten undergraduate students, one can graduate AND get a position as a TA in the department. Out of ten graduate students with TA positions, one can finish a Ph.D. AND get hired as a professor by that department or its counterpart at another university. 90% of the students are out of luck, and an additional 9% are only able to support themselves for a few years based off of that degree. Besides which, manual labor pays better than being a TA in a lot of places. I was one of the better paid ones- a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan helping to teach Quantum and Nuclear Physics. I still didn’t break $20,000/year doing that.
““Black Studies,” (yup, you’re going far with that one, folks). ”
Well, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you may well go far further than you deserve to with that one. If the HR or legal people decide at a corporation or a government doesn’t have enough blacks in some job classification or another, that “Black Studies” degree and being black will get you a job in that classification even if you can’t pour pee out of a boot with the instructions on the heel. Then once you’re in, you can get promoted by threatening to sue if you don’t get the job, and before long you can be on top of the World with a whole army of honky dogs doing your job for you while you rake in the salary, perks, and pretty women.
“If the HR or legal people decide at a corporation or a government doesn’t have enough blacks in some job classification or another, that “Black Studies” degree and being black will get you a job in that classification….”
I wonder if being black is even a true requirement of these jobs. Isn’t it enough to “feel” black? Or claim to have some black ancestry? I’m thinking of people like Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill who claimed native American status on little or no evidence.
Didn’t Nobel Prize winning writer Toni Morrison declare Bill Clinton to be the first black president although he has no known African or African-American heritage? According to the Wikipedia article, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison#Politics) she pointed out that he’d led a life that was very close to that of many black people in that he’d grown up poor in a single-parent home, loved junk food, etc. and that was close enough for her to qualify him as a black….
“Far more than their adequate peers when faced with difficulties, these students experience a range of negative reactions, including anger, anxiety, and depression.”
And the Left has guaranteed those results by giving the student the universal excuse: “Because you’re a RAAAAACIST / homophobe / bigot!!!!eleventy!!!”, and a mechanism to profit from their own failure.
The only real answer of course is to have lots of children and raise them right, then carefully choose universities and majors.
If the educational system was fixed, where would the government workers come from?
News flash: this has been more than obvious for at least a decade.
What are the critics suggesting we DO about it?
I agree, it has been obvious. One thing we can do–just throwing this out there–is to take a serious look at Montessori education. Maria Montessori got an awful lot right, and there are some fantastic Montessori preschools, good elementary schools, and interesting high schools out there. Maria Montessori understood that kids are learning machines and devised approaches that give them a great foundation in math and language by age 6 and a wealth of knowledge about science by age 9. In addition, students who have come through a good Montessori preschool (age 3 to 5) are marvelously socialized to interact with courtesy and confidence with other students and with adults.
Exactly. My daughter was Montessori educated from day care through preschool. It gave her a great foundation in problem-solving, but also encouraged her creativity, curiosity, and love for learning.
Montessori developed her method to help children with mental disabilities, and they became successful learners.
I find it ironic that we call it “self” esteem when so much outside help is needed to build it.
Speaking of writing, why do you change pronouns referring to students in general mid-way through your article?
It seems to be a modern writing device to give each gender a fair shake. Pretty harmless, and only grammar dinosaurs like us would notice. In a way, it can prevent the article, as a whole, from being abused as a stick with which to beat one side.
Several years ago, when I was teaching a course in computer programming, I was talking to a student in the class at lunch one day. He was a recent university graduate and told me that if anyone at his university ever wrote a paper that failed to explicitly say “he/she” (or some equivalent), the paper would get a reduced grade. I asked how big the reduction would be, assuming it would be one or two points out of 100. He assured me that the paper would be an automatic FAILURE if even one instance of “he/she” was omitted. I was – and continue to be – astonished at that. It smacks of political correctness run amuck.
The he/she phenomena is the result of uneducated politically correct bullies ignorantly mixing up physical gender with grammatical gender. Physical and grammatical genders are not the same. Trying to force physical gender on the English language is an exercise in futility, basically destroying the language. Doing so creates things which make no sense whatsoever.
For example, JKB (below) wrote, “It should be noted, a CHILD who thinks, … will soon find THEMselves …” HOW can ONE child be MANY children as this implies? Noun/pronoun agreement is IMPORTANT for comprehension, yet there is NO agreement here. So, which is correct in this instance? Is JKB talking about ONE child as stated, or MANY childREN as implied by “THEMselves?”
The only possible solution to dilemmas like this is to totally expunge the language of ANYTHING related to gender. But then, the resulting language would no longer be the English language. Maybe we could name it the Policorrect language?
The problem is judgement. Students are not allowed to judge the value of statements, opinions, answers, etc. Each is as good or worthy as the next. Thank you, postmodernism. Of course, if you do not apply judgement, you cannot think. You cannot discern between things, order your thoughts nor is it useful to supplement your thought with other information.
A primary emphasis on memorization as a teaching technique is bad, beyond first or second grade. But neither can the student be left to their own devices. They must be taught to study, to order facts according to their specific purpose, to judge their soundness and general worth, to supplement the immediate facts without prior or outside knowledge. They must be taught not how to think but to think. Then, if still necessary, they can memorize what has not already been absorbed through their thinking. In this way, the memorized facts have context in the student’s mind and are more likely to be assimilated into other areas of the student’s work and life.
The flaw in this plan is that the student must develop a tentative rather than fixed attitude toward knowledge, a skepticism toward “experts,” and consider their own thoughts before incorporating the input from others. This promotes freedom of thought. A rare freedom that is directly opposed by the hierarchy, desire of “betters” to dominate, and the needs of “community.” It also removes the teacher as oracle of knowledge, making her coach and guide, which damages their self esteem. It should be noted, a child who thinks, who reads ahead, considers outside sources, questions assumptions, will soon find themselves admonished as being disruptive to the programmed curriculum and learn to quit trying.
lol. Ah, how much time do you spend per day with children, and what ages are they?
Can you provide some context to your amusement? Is it because I believe children should be taught to think? Or perhaps you feel I believe children can’t think, which is decidedly not true. Children are born with the ability to think, it is how we survive in the world. However, in regards to “school subjects,” there is educated into them a “school helplessness” by about 3rd grade.
This is not my theory. The earliest I’ve come across it is from a book published in 1886. The quote below is from a professor of elementary education in 1909:
“In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar “school helplessness”; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks.”
“A primary emphasis on memorization as a teaching technique is bad, beyond first or second grade.” is the primary source of my amusement. Are you going to answer my question now?
In order to have what you advocate, first, that has to be the goal of the instruction. It is not. The modern education system is not interested in developing minds that challenge. Second, mastery of the primary language is a must. The higher the level of reading, the bigger the vocabulary, the more capable a student is to do their own research and to articulate a particular point of view. Again, this is not the goal of the education system. Just so long as you can read remedial instruction material similar to Julia you have the necessary traits needed for a lifelong adherence to the tyranny of the powerful.
I think the whole business of demonizing memorization and drill is the product of people too stupid to memorize and too lazy to do their drills. You can’t engage in critical thinking or problem solving unless you actually know something. You neither have the need nor the ability to multiply or divide unless you actually can multiply and divide. Only my oldest, now 40, can do any significant math in her head, my youngest can’t do even the most rudimentary math without a calculator – and it wasn’t for our lack of trying to get him to learn math facts; the school said he could use a calculator and he, by God, wasn’t doing all that silly paper and pencil stuff.
I’m from an educational tradition that emphasized memorization starting with the Bible verse you had to recite at Sunday School and going on through high school with all sorts of memorization of passages from literature; I’m very good at it, and can retain anything I memorize for awhile if I use it. When I was a practicing advocate, it was great fun to be able to quote the contract, the rule, or the law like a Baptist minister could quote the New Testament while my adversary was stumbling around trying to find the rule or law. I knew better than to trust myself absolutely, but if you’re confident enough and have a reputation for being able to do, you can be dead wrong and get away with it.
They simply don’t teach any memory or speaking skills any more. The teachers have all been fed the “drill and kill” mantra so the graduates are pig ignorant of facts and rules. Nobody is asked to memorize anything because it would damage the self-esteem of those who are shown to be able to do it less well. Likewise, no one is asked to read aloud or to answer questions orally because doing it less well would damage self-esteem. Consequently, you have a couple of generations now that cannot think for themselves and cannot articulate what meager thinking they have done.
In the last decade or so of my career, I had to set the minimum qualification for a no experience hire at my journeyman level at a law degree so I could have a reasonable chance of getting a semi-coherent English paragraph out of a new subordinate. A BA would hardly guarantee a proper English sentence. My oldest stepson is living proof that you can get a college degree without ever reading a whole book. If he needs to refer to a book for something, rarely, he’ll just thumb through until he finds it – or something like it – while complaining that it should be electronic so he can just search. I made a lot of profitable arguments off attornies who would use West or some other search system and then cite of their reading of the headnotes without reading the underlying case. A huge percentage of the time, the case didn’t say what they were trying to use it for authority over, and you could just bludgeon them with that. That’s just one example of not knowing the underlying material and relying on key word searches and the like. Even the more able students that go into fields that do require some endeavor beyond paying and showing up ocassionally are being taught all sorts of laziness and bad habits; learning the underlying material is gone, fact checking is gone, superficial and often improperly framed searches are used as a substitute for actual research, spelling is optional, grammar and proper word usage are both lost arts. But, they really, really, really feel good about themselves and on their first day at work want to know when you’re retiring so they can have your job. I sometimes miss my old work as an advocate and representative, but I sure don’t miss hiring and supervising arrogant young punks.
The problem is rote memorization without context or thought geared toward blind reproduction. Memorizing the Gettysburg Address without thinking of its meaning and context is fine for 7 yr olds but it provides little more than a proud performance for parents.
“The way pupils study, depends on what is emphasized. The methods that are best to develop a sound knowledge of geography in pupils, will, as a rule, be the best to teach them how to study geography. The reason that mechanical memorizing is the main part of study in the elementary school, high school and university, is that reproduction is the primary thing required. If boys and girls find that the teachers’ questions ask for a reproduction of the text, they will memorize before thinking and without thinking. If, however, there is a thought question, it will cause them to organize and analyze the subject matter of the book, and then mechanical memorizing can not occupy such a prominent part.”
Here is a description from 1919 that contrasts the value of education to citizenship. The “problem method” of teaching being one in which the students respond to questions that require the use of the material beyond the rote instruction.
“Here, then, lies the deeper significance of the problem method of teaching because of the direct effect of the school training on our citizenship and national progress. The history of education contains several illustrations of the relation of school training to citizenship and national advancement, the most striking of which, perhaps, is found in the Mohammedan system of education. In the elementary schools, and also in the universities of these countries, the instruction consists of dictating passages from the Koran or from commentaries on the Koran. It is all memoriter work and prevails much more than in America. Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, has given a most interesting description of the work in an elementary school in Tangier in North Africa. In this school for young children, he found a white-bearded man clothed in white, seated on straw in the center of a group of children. He had a long, flexible fishing-rod with which he could reach every pupil. This teacher recited several words from the Koran and then the children repeated these words in unison exactly as they had been given. Mr. Eliot states that this was the only work done in that school. Later, he visited the University of Cairo and found that every teacher was doing the same thing, but to a greater degree.
This memoriter method in education is the prime cause of the backward condition of the Mohammedans. This is the reason that for many centuries natural science has made no progress in these countries, and clearly shows the relation of school training to national progress.
Likewise, the cause of the static condition of the Chinese people may be traced to the kind of education given in their schools. Their method is that of direct and exact imitation. “The object of the teacher is to compel his pupils, first, to remember; secondly, to remember; thirdly, and evermore, to remember.” ”
You do bring up a key point of the new technology. That is the use of the calculator. A useful tool but a crutch for those who never learn the ways of thinking to do it manually. Same for the now defunct mechanical drawing when compared to CAD. The development of mental visualization in 3 dimensions has been lost to those who’ve not received pen and paper mechanical drawing. We are just now discovering the impact of these losses as those who learned before the “magic box” did everything retire and those who remain don’t have the skills. Education should teach these “old” ways to develop the students mind and thinking even though the actual production has been assumed by the machines.
What idiot would have a 7 year old second grader memorize the G’burg Address? I 7 year old could probably do it; I memorized and recited ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas at four, but only the most precocious 7 year old would know enough to to put the Addresss in the Civil War, the Civil War in the right century, or have any idea of what it was about. But, it is the typical sort of example a teacher would use, essentially a false alternative fallacy. But then teachers tend to be among the least educated of the college credentialed, so they would not be expected to recognize a fallacy these days.
Whether in child rearing or education, the children as vegetable school is destroying our culture. Both mommies and teachers are taught that all a child needs is sunshine, water, and nutrients around them and they will grow into a fully developed, functioning human being. They won’t! To the extent that homo sapiens has instincts, they are for animalistic urges and the senses of a particularly smart and vicious predator. They have to be taught to be anything other than a monster. When they are not taught ANYTHING about how to be a civilized human being, they become monsters. We have a lot of monsters these days all of whom feel very good about themselves.
Memorization with some context and public speaking are invaluable skills. Having many Bible or Shakespeare quotations stored away in the gray matter is a very useful tool. I let students memorize 15 lines of Shakespeare to “make up” for a bad quiz grade, which my Shakespeare identification quizzes produced. But it is amazing how much better some students are at memorizing, than others, and not because they have been taught how to memorize. They are apparently hard-wired that way, and would always have a huge advantage over the others if memorizing were all that we did, (which they would have voted for) and the same for public speaking to a different degree.
The key is to make both mandatory and do them a lot, but not to the exclusion of all the other things that need to be done. A kid who can get through school without knowing math tables or being able to memorize (just to pick two examples) is permitted to be able to function, rather than facing abject failure, but the cumulative effects on the whole curriculum can be disturbing. To simultaneously push and challenge the gifted students, and those who just plain need pushing, while not squelching all the “challenged” or just average to below average students, with their multiple sensitivities etc…. ain’t easy, at least it wasn’t for me, and you know that you are always not getting it right for a certain segment on a given day, but you have to live with that and move on to the next day, the next unit.
Again, I come back to Whitehead’s description of an ideal education as combining the rhythms of romance and precision.
Heh, that’s funny. When I was a bandsman in high school, we had to memorize all of the music for halftime shows. The only way I could do this was by playing each piece over and over. We had one gal though, a trombonist, who could just gaze at a piece of music once, put it down, and then play it perfectly without looking at it. She had other qualities, too: Her nickname was “The Dynamic Duo” for her, um, vast tracts of land.
I recall my first college course wherein the professor stated “half of you won’t graduate”. There were, quite naturally, chuckles all around at such an outlandish statement. As it turned out, the prof was wrong… 80% didn’t snag their engineering degree. Times have certainly changed. My professors weren’t willing to devalue the institution by passing out degrees like Halloween candy.
“the student shrugs it off: another assignment due the same day”
On our last day of classes one professor made two comments: (1) “Keep 6 months salary in cash because there will be economic downturns in your career and, as your job is to spend money, engineers are usually the first to be fired” (post Obama you’ll need 6 years salary). (2) “It was no coincidence that all of your projects were due and you had tests in all your classes on the same day. If you can’t handle that minimal amount of pressure then you’ll never survive in the workforce.”
The change in attitudes on college campuses can be regarded as the principal difference between liberalism and conservatism. Liberalism pushes you toward the lowest common denominator, conservatism pushes you toward the highest common denominator. Liberalism rewards mediocrity, conservatism rewards excellence.
Perhaps one should give every student an F or whatever it is they call a failing grade these days then sit back and wait to be besieged with beseeching emails. Then grade the emails that pour in. You might get a better idea of their abilities and potential since all they seem to be interested in is the grade. You could then publish a book and maybe a calendar with snippets from these pleadings. Call it Doggy Dog World – One of my favorite malapropisms.
These days, it’s a “Prezzy Dog World.”
“Doggy Dog”…People really say that? I had no idea.
A “malapropism” is a (usually funny) misremembered or misheard saying. “It’s a doggy dog world” is what someone thought he was hearing instead of “it’s a dog eat dog world”.
“For all intensive purposes” is another howler.
But more and more I see people writing “I should of done that.”
Point it out, and you’re a grammar nazi, of course.
I think some people are barking at the wrong tree.
Well then the joke is complete. I was going to end it with misappropriation. But then I didn’t want to beat a red horse. It is as the kids say – same difference.
You have come to your own brilliant seclusion.
You have peaked my interest.
Stop throwing in red bearings.
As a Baby Boomer, I should be immune from most of this self esteem nonsense. It may have a place with a small percentage of younger people, but not as a whole group, not a systematic way of raising children. The problem I see with raising children in this way is that it leads these children into a total dis-regard for others. This explains perfectly some of the social breakdowns which we see all around us: the rap music played to the point where buildings are shaking, and the blank look on the faces of these kids when told that it’s unacceptable. As a human being, I’m not immune from this self esteem crap. One of the biggest personal issues I work on daily is getting out of me, remembering others actually do exist. So, I am not immune from the whole self esteem craze, but I’m aware of my human faults, and work on them daily.
My personal belief is that almost all of the problems we fellow human beings face are not political problems, they are social problems, and this article nicely points out the root cause of these problems: how our children are raised and taught. I haven’t a religious bone in my body, haven’t been anywhere near a church in years, but I have a spiritual foundation built on strong blocks – blocks identified as living frugally within my means, treating others as I would like to be treated, respect for other persons and their property, respectfully disagreeing, accepting my own personal problems and working on them, and the knowledge that my purpose in life is to be happy, work hard, and help others wherever I can. And these are all conservative values absent from today’s society… sadly.
The existing system seems to assume the values you list are a given. They aren’t. The must be constantly renewed. The self esteem movement not only prevented them from being formed in younger members of our society, the everyone is special attitude helped erode these values across the enter society.
Whatever happened to the value of learning for the sake of learning?
Fine essay. There is another factor to be considered in all of this: many professors under, say, 50 years old — especially those in the humanities and social so-called sciences — are little more than community organizers. We are rapidly reaching a point where the credentialed blind will be leading the ignorant blind, and all will be happy in their blindness. There will even be a theory of blindness to justify their existence.
The only problem with protecting all the failures from facing reality is that the nation can fail as a whole, bringing all down together.
We are well on our way.
“The spirit of I’m as good [equal] as you has already begun something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system… The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modeling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career… In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good [equal] as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching.” C.S. Lewis – Screwtape Proposes a Toast
http://screwtapeblogs.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/screwtape-proposes-a-toast/
“My Dear Wormwood,”
Stonewall – I read “The Screwtape Letters” in mid-high school. I was not made to feel that it was beyond me. I got in trouble in 6th grade for having a copy of “Animal Farm” for silent reading time. The principal called my parents in to the office to berate them. She is the one who got the lesson.
I had forgotten how topical or maybe eternal CS Lewis’ thoughts were.
It killed me when Liam Neeson said that Lewis did not mean Aslan to be a metaphorical Christ figure. Neeson knew nothing of Lewis apparently.
“Too often, the smiles are gone for good because the customary “B+” or “A” grades have been withheld, and many students cannot forgive the insult.”
There you go, give me what I deserve not what I earned. The Foundational Basis for the OWS movement.
“Thus our universities participate in a happy make-believe. Students get their degrees. Parents are reassured that their money has been well-spent. And compliant professors are, if not exactly satisfied — it corrodes the soul to give unearned grades — at least relieved not to encounter student complaints.”
“Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*.”
… Dr. Ray Stantz (Ghostbusters)
In the process of developing Self Esteem (a clinical way of saying Narcisism) the educaional system has totally bypassed Self Respect.
“When students who have always been praised must confront the reality of their low achievement, their tendency is, as researchers James Coté and Anton Allahar report, not to confront the problem directly but to hit back at its perceived source — the teacher who has given them the bad news, the employer who does not renew a contract. Far more than their adequate peers when faced with difficulties, these students experience a range of negative reactions, including anger, anxiety, and depression.”
Gee, does that sound like anyone we know?
Say a President that’s in over his head?
How will that play out in the next 25 weeks and what follows?
……..
In an encounter some time ago with a family member who became a public school teacher, I was assisting her with explaining to parents the issues they need to familiarize themselves with for the child’s next year.
I said, “You have a Masters in Communication, My degree is in Economics, why do I have better English Skills than you do?”
She answered, “Because you took classes to learn something, I took classes to get credit.”
And she’s teaching the next generation.
This whole “Self Esteem” mantra is just so much bullcrap. You can’t hand out self esteem. It must be earned. The job of the teacher is to teach kids how yo learn – how to win – how to excel. There will be winners and there will be losers. There always have been, and there always will be.
In Boy Scouts, we teach with failure. We let the boys fail, then pick up the pieces. They do. And the most spectacular failures turn into the best campfire tales.
“Hey, remember the time I forgot all the cook gear and we had to eat off birchbark? I’ll never do that again.” It works.
With the recent revelations that 78% of eight graders in California failed the basic science standardized test and 50% of high school students in Florida failed basic reading, one has to wonder if our public education system is now a national security risk.
28 id: “Gee, does that sound like anyone we know? Say a President that’s in over his head?”
Ahh, but he was elected with a majority of his peers who expected to be given “what I deserve(want?) not what I earned”.
“They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything!” Women studies, ethnic studies.
“And she’s teaching the next generation” to “get credit” to teach. Her Master degree from a diploma mill raises her salaries a few notches.
Btw, professors who didn’t give A’s are driving taxis now.
They may be driving taxis,but they’re making more money then they’ve ever made in their life, and trying to figure out why they wasted all taht time in the educational system…
Janice:
Thank you for using “she” and “he” instead of that detestable practice of trying to use “they” as a singular.
Up until now, I was convinced that there was a filter that kept such proper writing as yours off of the Internet. It’s nice to find out that it is indeed possible!
I’m 55 years old and my penmanship is gone. It’s so bad that I can barely read it any more. I think spending the majority of the past 30 years working on computer keyboards might be a factor, perhaps with some arthritis. It’s physically painful to write for more than a few minutes but I can type for hours. Back when I was an undergrad, I took a graduate genetics class. It wasn’t uncommon to write 10-20 pages of notes for a single class. I simply couldn’t do that today. My hands won’t allow that much writing.
From what I’ve read, cursive writing isn’t even taught in most schools any more.
The problem is even more basic. Look at the handwriting (penmanship) of most recent graduates. Totally unreadable.
Then there is the “college graduate” who is working as a cashier because he/she cannot find a job in their (useless) field. They are incapable of calculating the proper change for a cash transaction.
Let’s not even get started on their grammar, word use and pronunciation…
I’m going to come to the defense of the Penmanship thing.
I was NEVER able to get my handwriting even near legible. (And it was not for lack of trying that I failed.) I simply cannot write legibly, regardless of how much effort I put into it.
Fortunatly, I managed to work in the Engineering Field (in spite of my degree in Economics) where most hand written communications was in Printed all Caps. Otherwise my taking Typing in Junior High saved me with most of the rest of my correspondance. (In the 1970′s and 1980′s computers were still a thing of the future.)
Handwriting, like drawing, is something that some people simply cannot do. That does not indicate a lack of knowledge or effort in all cases.
I think I know why handwriting is worse than it used to be: computers. At least, that’s why MY handwriting, which was never great, has degraded so badly.
The fact is that I do everything I possibly can on the computer, so much so that I rarely have to write ANYTHING by hand. Therefore, when I do have to write something longhand, my writing is pretty bad. Even a simple To Do List usually gets done on the computer rather than on a scrap of paper. Just about the only things I actually write longhand are labels for DVDs (I’m usually labelling a single DVD and can’t readily print just one label on the computer without wasting a whole sheet of labels) and my signature on checks and forms.
I’m essentially shooting myself in the foot. I could reduce the problem by making more effort to write things in longhand but I prefer the tidiness of doing things on the computer rather than having to look at my own handwriting.
My handwriting is eccentric enough that I can’t necessarily read it easily, even minutes after I wrote it. The odds of others reading it easily is much worse. Therefore, I prefer to write things on the computer where I can then either read them on the computer or print them and know that they will be legible to everyone.
I expect many young people are in much the same situation.
Thank you to Norma York, who fearlessly introduced me to my actual ability in my sophomore year of high school. I couldn’t have done it without her.
Enjoyed this article, with one large bone to pick:
the admittedly important emphasis on character formation…on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on.
Admittedly important emphasis? No, these qualities are the inevitable by-products of good teaching, and will take care of themselves if students are taught how to think, study and strive effectively. No need for special emphasis, let alone platitudes and patronizing course work, just encouragement. ‘Character issues’ quickly become self-evident and will be enforced fairly by the peer-pressure of fellow students.
Sadly, we’re now entering the third generation of dumbed-down pedagogues and it shows: themselves the product of low standards, many become active participants in the self-perpetuating race to the bottom. As someone said about the Victorian polymath Walter Bagehot, ‘he was educated to a level now believed to be impossible’. Most of today’s schools and teachers gave up long ago.
The kids get to pay the price — no easy or quick fix.
The smartest students know it. May they receive the help they need, and fast.
In Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, there is this priceless scene.
[History and Moral Philosophy instructor Mr. Dubois expounds to his high school class, including protagonist Juan Rico:]
“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at
birth only through gasping effort and pain.” He had been still looking at me
and added, “If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly
born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier . . . and much
richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You!
I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you
happy?”
“Uh, I suppose it would.”
“No dodging, please. You have the prize — here, I’ll write it out:
`Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.’ ” He had
actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. “There! Are you
happy? You value it — or don’t you?”
I was sore. First that dirty crack about rich kids — a typical sneer
of those who haven’t got it — and now this farce. I ripped it off and
chucked it at him.
Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. “It doesn’t make you happy?”
“You know darn well I placed fourth!”
“Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you . . . because
you haven’t earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing
fourth; you earned it. I trust that some of the somnambulists here
understood this little morality play. I fancy that the poet who wrote that
song ["The best things in life are free"] meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other
than with money — which is true — just as the literal meaning of his words
is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and
sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all
things in life is life itself — ultimate cost for perfect value.”
“They have been allowed to assume that happiness is a goal, rather than a by-product.”
That about sums it up.
Well, they can be excused for misunderstanding, because if they have been taught at all about happiness, they are directed to the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of happiness.” One cannot pursue a byproduct, one can, on the other hand, pursure a goal.
I have always been told that the original word in the Declaration of Independence was not “happiness”, but “property.” Happiness would then be the natural byproduct of the pursuit.
Alas, a subtlety lost on the party of subtlety and nuance.
“This pedagogy of self-esteem developed in response to the excesses of rote learning and harsh discipline that were thought to characterize earlier eras.”
Perhaps. Or more sinisterly that provided the cover, the EXCUSE, to deliberately set an agenda for dumbing down and ignorance. If you embroider with flowery words and embellish with edu-crat mumbo jumbo, maybe no one will have to ability to see the fetid through the tease. After generations of educational malfeasance all that is being done is the same old thing with different labels and more phony goals. It’s time someone said it: learning is not the goal. Molding good little conformist pliable robots for the state is paramount. And in that they have succeeded brilliantly.
When my son was in Boy Scouts, I volunteered to teach Marksmanship Merit Badge at his troop’ summer camp. Of the ten, or so, boys who took the course, only a couple had the strength and discipline to hold the .22 caliber rifles steady enough to shoot accurately. Also, I was very strict on the issue of gun safety and having the scouts being aware of whether the gun was loaded (one assumes it is always loaded!) and where they were pointing the muzzle at any particular time (a concept called muzzle control). Only two or three of the boys passed the merit badge that camp session. My view was that the others would pass the next camp session the following year.
The scoutmaster expressed his disappointment in “the failure of the curriculum” under my direction for not passing more scouts. He had been eager to add the passage of ten more merit badges to the troop’s rather large total for the summer camp session so that the troop’s record among all the troops in the district would shine.
I was interested in saving lives.
I warn people when I take on a volunteer job that I have a personal policy of losing power struggles. I do things my way, or you do things your way.
Funny thing, the only time I went to the range and didn’t qualify when I was in the service was when the instructor taught me to hold the M-9 in a ‘teacup’ grip. He didn’t teach push-pull, or different stances. I failed.
The next time I went to the range I was given proper instruction. I not only didn’t fail, I was awarded the expert marksmanship designation.
My CO wanted to know how much time I spent at the range on my own dime between the two (about six months apart) and was quite surprised to hear me say, “None, Sir.” When he questioned me further about it, it boiled down to exactly what you are trying to claim doesn’t happen.
Not all students are shiftless lazy layabouts. Some really do get crap instruction, and this results in garbage in, garbage out.
I was interested in saving lives.
You were interested in saving lives. He was interested in puffing up his ego.
This pedagogy of self-esteem developed in response to the excesses of rote learning and harsh discipline that were thought to characterize earlier eras.
I musta missed it: when then they hold the big votes on turning public schools into political education classes, with instructions once unthinkable in a classroom now accepted as the norm? Maybe all the time now spent on B.S. is what’s hurting subject competency so badly.
The key word there is thought, a process whereby the deciding what tack the inculcation was to take, and its general limit. I attended an old school Catholic grade school. Mass at 7:30am, religion first thing once in the classroom, depending on what grade you’re in working the 10 Commandments, the Cathechism, then church history, with 7th & 8th graders focused on the Ecumenicals and such.
But after that, about 9:30am, the inculcation was done for the day and the rest of it you were supposed to perform in each class… and behave like a good Judeo-Christian, in other words, act in a civilized manner.
But there is no 9:30 any more. The inculcation now is all day long, in all subjects, no matter how unrelated, all the time, and with a uniformity of importance, purpose and piety. There can always be a globosocialist angle made on a subject. Worse, competency in a subject is now heavily deemphasized in favor of feel good process.
Bad education = stolen raw material.
This is *not* a pedagogy of self-esteem. Genuine self-esteem is *earned*, not given.
Today’s postmodern ed is driven by a pedagogy of pragmatism, driven by pragmatism’s subjectivism, which is made “true” by means of evasion and rationalization:
“Truth happens…It [truth] becomes true, is made true by events…” (James vi), because “[f]or the feeling [i.e., belief] to be cognitive in the specific sense …it must…create a reality outside of it to correspond to its intrinsic quality….” (James 6).
James, William. The Meaning of Truth. 1909 New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.
And this “pedagogy” is justified by pragmatism’s ultimate standard: expediency.
“The true is only the expedient in a way of our thinking….” (James vii)…
All of which is done in the name of that holiest of Leftist holies: egalitarianism.
The solution, however, is not an education in which obedience to authority is the goal. Nor one in which rote learning is rewarded.
The solution is a pedagogy that stresses the conceptual:
“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.”
And which rigorous conceptually defined curriculum is based on the way the human mind learns: inductively and hierarchically.
In so learning that, the student will then achieve the *result*: self-esteem.
Genuine self-esteem is *earned*, not given.
Yup.
And nowadays opinions are programmed, not realized. So let’s give a big hand to the union brothers & sisters of the NEA & AFT, our permanent gubmint workers, and of course all the esteemed news entertainers on the TV.
I think you are confusing Self Esteem with Self Respect.
Self Esteem is opinion of one’s self – and can be high or low regardless of actual accomplishment.
Self Respect is opinion of ones being. (that is to say, all that one has accomplished and the sum of one’s work.)
People willing to defend themselves (concealed carry etc.) have Self Respect. It takes self respect to defend your self, your family, and your community from those who would prey upon them. Self Esteem requires others to do the defending for you.
As proof I offer our very own President as an example. No one can deny that the Prez has Ooooodles of Self Esteem. He Eseems himself so much he creates the Seal of the Candidate for President and the Office of the President Elect. Yet did he ever earn one iota of the High Esteem in which he holds himself?
Self Esteem is in Fact GIVEN, (and sometimes taken) not Earned.
how can one genuinely enjoy success if one never has experienced failure.
(unless, of course, one is barack obama, in which case one’s life is a testament to success)
Phonics. Learning anything but math comes down to phonics- because reading is required.
Someone else gave a Boy Scout story, as will I. I do all three citizenship merit badges. When the scouts are working on Citizenship in the NAtion they have to read the Declaration of Independence and Constitution to me, and discuss as we go along. Within 30 seconds of reading I can tell who learned reading by phonics and who learned look-say. Phonics readers can read. Everyone else, well, tehy try.
Further note- since I know how they do in school (small school system), the phonics readers are, surprise, surprise, at the top of their classes academically.
If you can tach them to read properly, they will like to read. If they like to read, you don’t have to teach them history, social studies, or any of the soft courses- you only need guide them.
Good column. I would add a couple of points. First, none of this can be applied to Black Studies, as Naomi Schaefer Riley found out. Second, was a major progressive leader who impacted education in a detrimental way (IMHO). Not only did we get rid of rote learning, we got rid of the classics; remember these were the foundations of liberal arts. Third, I agree that teaching character is important, but not as redefined by our leftie comrades. The founding principles of our country rely on people being self-reliant, respectful of others (not just other races and gays), vigilant for infringements on liberty, and assertive (not anarchistic). And moral development needs to go beyond “there are consequences”; people need to understand that there is a reason for morals and ethics beyond the fact that they might get caught and punished. Compare that to the values being taught in our schools.
Forgotten attribution (apologies):
This is from “The Comprachicos,” _The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution_ by Ayn Rand (also found in a more recent publication of her essays on this subject, entitled: _Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution_):
“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort”
Here is another applicable quote from the same sources:
“The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation—in those incubators of lethargy known as “Progressive” schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development. (See “The Comprachicos” in my book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.) It appears, however, that the “progressive” rich will be the first victims of their own social theories: it is the children of the well-to-do who emerge from expensive nursery schools and colleges as hippies, and destroy the remnants of their paralyzed brains by means of drugs.
“The middle class has created an antidote which is perhaps the most hopeful movement of recent years: the spontaneous, unorganized, grass-roots revival of the Montessori system of education—a system aimed at the development of a child’s cognitive, i.e., rational, faculty.”
Signed,
One in a minority in academe
“The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and
sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all
things in life is life itself…”
This brings John Milton to mind.
“I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue [knowledge], unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary [ignorance], but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” John Milton
As a middle school reading specialist in a low income area, I deal on a daily basis with 12-15 year old students who have no real home, no real parents, and no real sense of integrity of character. There are so many “character” programs out there for schools now and they are simply programs. Character, integrity, respect begin at home. And home is no longer what it used to be. Education in this country is flawed, no doubt. But “homes” have been flawed for decades and until people accept responsiblity that ALL are part of a child’s education, nothing will improve. I never give up on my kids; I never give up on believing that I can make a difference for just one child.
Speaking of reading, I still remember my delight when I learned, in the first few days, that every letter had a sound assigned to it. (This was in a two-room, small town school nearly 70 years ago.) I’ve tried to compute how many books I’ve read since–5,000, at least. When I started high school, the
teacher put words on the board to see how many of us knew what they meant. I knew every one. The teacher made them more difficult, but I could still define every one. I am not quite as good at math, but I have, in all my life, never been without a job.
JF: “This pedagogy of self-esteem developed in response to the excesses of rote learning and harsh discipline that were thought to characterize earlier eras.”
Betina 38: “Perhaps. Or more sinisterly that provided the cover, the EXCUSE, to deliberately set an agenda for dumbing down and ignorance.”
I think Betina is correct here. Real learning often requires the rote memorization and harsh discipline which characterized the earlier eras where self-esteem naturally derived from the labor and love of learning. There is a sinister method in the madness of today’s education failure – George Orwell identified the totalitarian source of this madness.
“Crimestop…includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc [Socialist Principles of Oceania], and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity… The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird… What opinions the masses hold or do not hold is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect… It was possible no doubt to imagine a society in which wealth… should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged cast; but in practice such a society could not long remain stable, for if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves, and when once they had done this they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function and they would sweep it away… In the long run a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.” George Orwell – 1984
I teach basic chemistry to pre-nursing students. This is a very fundamental course with effort made to minimize the mathematics needed. I require the students to not only memorize basic facts, but apply them to solve problems. Every quarter, I have at least one student who complains to the dean that I require too much thinking and that I should (in their determination of what a chemistry class should be) emphasize more memorization and recall. Perhaps the epitome of student complaints was from the student who insisted to the dean that no student should make a grade less than the class average, assuming that the average had to be a “B” (the minimum grade required by the nursing program) if I were doing my job properly. She further went on to insist that though she admitted to earning less than half of the points possible for the course, she should still get the “B” because “grades should not be tied to the points I earned” (her statement).
She’s not likely to make it through nursing school with an attitude like that. Would love to be a fly on the wall when the proverbial Nurse Ratchett (every nursing school worth its salt has at least a small handful of those) gets her hands on that student.
The attitude is all too typical. The kids have an excuse for everything and just expect their stupid excuse to be accepted.
Tell her, “You want to be a nurse? Then you had better do a whole lot better on my exams and not talk back to me, because based on your performance, I wouldn’t want you measuring out and administering my medicine; I’d be too afraid you’d accidentally kill me.”
Believe me, I know what you’re going through. Last year I busted a nuclear engineering student who wanted to go to medical school for cheating on a final exam. And it’s not like he even had to cheat- a 0% on the exam would still have resulted in a B- for the course. He got expelled, and I can say I would not have wanted him to get into medical school for fear that if he ever did become a doctor, he’d kill somebody.
I remember reading the results of a study of the behavior of poor performers. The methodology was ingenious, but I will not take the time to report it, here. It would take too much space and I doubt that I could do it justice from memory. The major results were that poor performers overwhelmingly believe that they are doing just fine, and also that they are very resistant to information to the contrary.
My own 24 years in university teaching confirmed these results every so often.
Here is a slight change of topic: I remember one student who had written in a paper that he had turned in to me that single people in this country, living alone, were very commonly subject to disapproval and discrimination during the 1950s and 1960s. Having grown up in that era, in a very small town, where everyone knew most of everybody else’s business, I told him that his assertion was entirely wrong, and he then told me that one of his other instructors asserted that it was true. Of course, the student couldn’t recall the name of the instructor.
As an advisor, I sometimes had advisees who told me that they could not remember the names of courses that they supposedly has taken nor the names of their instructors in those courses, nor any of the course content. I never knew if I was simply being lied to, or if it is possible to take university or community college-level course and not even know its title or remember a single thing about it.
I also became over the years gradually more and more aware that the poorer performers among my students overwhelmingly expected to be entertained in class similar to what they saw on television.
Reports that come to me nowadays from both higher-performing university students and faculty who teach even graduate courses, tell me that a lot of students basically refuse to do assignments and reading for their courses.
Perhaps this is more true in the humanities and social sciences than in the hard sciences and math, although one of my informants is my brother-in-law who has a doctorate in forestry and has said this about his own graduate students.
The person who wrote this article sounds really butthurt. Maybe she just sucks at grading.
Maybe you’re just one of the idiot children with high self-esteem and no reason to have it that she’s talking about.
I was one of those students who knew something fishy was going on, perhaps because I was friends with a number of professors and they told me directly that they were being forced by administration to inflate grades to make the school look good and keep students coming in. They were told not only to boost grades but to dumb down tests, give “study guides” with all the answers on them for the students to study from, etc. Even so, grades tended to be bad.
It did damage the moral to get an A but know it wasn’t really worth it.
I had a completely different experience when I started grad school. The second or third day of the semester we were called into a meeting by our department’s graduate school liaison. He proceeded to inform us that the graduate school dean had made a determination that the cumulative graduate school GPA was too high. At that time, the school I was attending was ranked as one of the top 10 engineering schools in the world.
You couldn’t hear the pin dropping on the floor because of all the jaws dropping and hitting the floor. Followed by grades dropping as the semesters went along.
Nobody went and complained to some dean or the chancellor. Nobody complained to their congressman or the board of governors. We sucked it up and went to work.
How times have changed.
I learned English when taking Classical Latin.
So far, two of my children have taken four years of high school Latin. Their SAT scores were in the mid to upper 700′s. The one who took French scored only in the mid 600′s (verbal). #4 has signed up for Latin and we won’t be making the mistake of allowing a different language for the rest of them, either.
Just as a point of fact, concrete busters do not get payed a premium, and they cannot support a family. I’ve met smarter people in the construction world than anywhere else. It is also true that I’ve met some very unintelligent people in this profession as well. You teachers complain about the quality of students that come into the classroom. I complain about the quality of tasks that come to me in my job. We all must stop wishing for easier jobs and deal with the hard and dirty work that is before us. You complain that your students don’t know how to work hard to improve themselves. Sounds to me that you teachers don’t know how to work hard to teach them. I’m sorry that your budgets keep getting slashed. I’m sorry that you have to teach to the standardized test. But simply complaining about the system will not reform it.
The issue becomes what, as an increasingly technological society, are we going to do with these unteachable dumb bunnies. In addition to will not, they can not learn because their teeny tiny brains simply aren’t capable of putting together and using the skills needed in today’s society.
Jobs like Detroit auto assembly, the US Postal Service, and (too frequently) professor / teacher of womyn / black / social studies are going away. Or have gone. And the people who used to do them to support their families are left twisting slowly in the wind of unemployment and Obama’s promises of “free everything”.
I’m sort of thinking we might want to start looking at breeding communities, where people who can’t add or spell or read are supported by the state if they have enough children to maintain an even societal keel, while everyone else goes about their business of actually working to accomplish stuff or getting us into outer space, which ever comes first. Of course, such breeders wouldn’t be allowed to actually raise their spawn, since the kids *might* be teachable in a different environment.
Other than that, there’s nothing for it but for the — what? — 49%? of people who actually *can* think / work to head for the stars, and to leave the green green hills of home behind to progressive liberals and all that they are capable of producing and creating.
I’m not sure if your post is serious or satire, like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” since it has that ring to it.
Whatever the case, suppose instead if certain of the females in your special zones were paid extra to act as surrogates for those outside? That may take away some of the trouble of keeping up the higher end population.
On a serious note, attempting such a segregation would be very dangerous. Just who decides who goes into the camps, I mean special zones, and who stays on the outside? Is it based on single snapshot of a person’s life, over a period of time, or could they be put in on a whim with no recourse to get out? Its an interesting thought experiment but practically very dangerous.
You use Self-selection. They don’t know they’re going into the camps, but they go on their own free will. Once in, they never come back out, whereby they lack the means to mentally “escape.” Those who know they are camps, do not go in the first place.
Fortunately, jobs in the Postal Service were never that easy to get into. Employment was predicated on a fairly high score (usually 90% plus) in an achievement test. The only ones who had it a little easier (justifiedly) were veterans. They automatically had 5 or 10% added to their score. An article in Forbes recently stated, to the author’s astonishment, that postal workers tended to score significantly higher than the general population on intelligence tests.
What I simply do not understand is what the “education” system is doing with these kids for thirteen (13!) years, K-12.
Think of it: nine months of schooling per year for twelve years…plus kindergarten and perhaps even Julia’s “Head Start” program, graciously provided by Obama the Lightbringer.
Yet after who knows how many thousands of hours, and untold trillions of dollars fed to the Teachers Unions, students still cannot read, write or do basic math.
Amazing. And sad. Unless that was the goal all along: ignorant people are easier to control.
Now the schools in our area have breakfast for them. Slowly but surely they are implementing aftercare at all the schools PLUS dinner served to them!!
Why do parents have kids so others can raise them??
This indoctrination MUST stop NOW. If we don’t it doesn’t matter who is president, who runs the house or senate, ect….This indoctrination/lack of education will drag us all down eventually….
Listen to this teacher for exactly what i am talking about
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vjpWaESn_9g
Terrific article, and some great points in the commentary. As an educator working in public education, I am induced to contemplate a couple (I hope) relevant points.
First, I think it is relevant to uncover the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the room; race. A goodly amount of the dilution of education serves to cover over the ever present “achievement gap” that elicits so much hand wringing amongst educators. As was recently evident in Florida, if we cannot bring students up to par with the standards, then the standards must be adjusted to meet the students. As many posters have elucidated, it is the gospel of most public educators that all students, regardless of achievement or ability, must be treated exactly the same. As a result, we get the inexorable march to the bottom that plagues modern education.
A genuine effort to identify the foundational underpinnings of this achievement gap would valuate certain ideas of which most thinking individuals are aware but prefer to ignore. We would be forced to face the reality that the disintegration of the family has had consequences whose long reach have affected every corner of our society. It might become openly known that modern culture and especially urban, minority sub-cultures, devalue, even openly mock education and the educated. We might even have to admit that the hyper-sensitivity to victims and victimization so prevalent in our National narrative cannot help those who truly are unfairly treated, it can only produce more and more victims.
I want to state unequivocally that I do not think this performance weakness among minority students in inherent in their race. Rather, the greatest tragedy here is that minority students who could distinguish themselves academically fear to do so as they will be ostracized by their own. It is a self-perpetuating meme – all the things that lead to individual success: enthusiasm for knowledge, development of character, being well-dressed, elocution, respect for authority and tradition, are considered white things and pursuing them represents a betrayal of one’s heritage; better to be angry and ignorant, better to perpetually see every failure as proof positive of the failings of others. As a consequence, these students are failures at life, and the band plays on.
I will only briefly mention to other point I was thinking about, as I have run a bit long. In brief: the inmates are running the asylum. I often stand in the hallways of my shcool and look on in disbelief: students grab each other in ridiculously exaggerated hugs, girls hold hands, some students screech and scream, profanities are yelled, pants hang about the knees -and I work in a middle school! Adults need to be in charge of the culture in our schools, not students.
As was recently evident in Florida, if we cannot bring students up to par with the standards, then the standards must be adjusted to meet the students.
Anything is possible if you lower your standards far enough. The way things are going, it won’t be long before someone who is completely illiterate and innumerate can earn a Ph.D.
I’m a former teacher who left because the BS to Benefit ratio was so poor. While still in college, I was hired to teach science and math to some small town (Alabama) students. I had two classes a day with some advanced students and one 8th grade math class. The advanced students were pretty good as a group but two of them were exceptional. Their names were Alan and Selvin. Several years ago, I searched for them on the Internet and found that Selvin is now a civil engineer in Tuscaloosa and Alan is an Assistant Professor of Surgery, Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Department of Surgery, Emory University School of Medicine. I wish I could claim some credit for his success but he was truly an exceptional young man when I knew him. Keep in mind that both young men were 15 years old at the time (1984) which isn’t an especially bright age for most boys. I knew them at 15 and knew what kind of men they would become. Should I or any member of my family need the services of a Cardiothoracic Surgeon, I would only hope to have Alan perform the operation.
That 8th grade math class was another story. They were functionally illiterate and innumerate, unable to even perform simple addition on large numbers. Not that it matters, but they were all black. One day at lunch, I asked the school’s vice principal (who was also black) about the differences between such exceptional students as Selvin and Alan and that 8th grade class. He said that Selvin and Alan’s parents (plural) were educated themselves. They valued education and stressed the importance of education to their sons. That 8th grade class, to a student, came from multi-generation welfare dependent families. The only reason they were still in school was that the state required they attend until age 16. He said that once they turned 16, almost all of them were going to drop out and go on welfare themselves. That was the only life they knew.
One day during the math class, Alan came by to clarify a homework assignment. After he left, I commented that he was a young man who was going places in the world. The students said he was “acting white.” The thought occurred to me that if working hard and being intelligent was acting white, what would acting black be. Of course, I didn’t have the guts to say that thought out loud. It isn’t the race of a person that matters, it’s what he/she learns at home that counts.
Lamentably, I think you have summarized the situation to a “T”.
My Uncle and brother are both Math teachers, and I have NO CLUE how they put up with the idiots who constantly enter their classrooms. (Actually my Uncle recently retired so he gets to smile and laugh at my brother’s situation)
This whole sorry system of “learning” doesn’t really help the “majority” and actually holds back those few stuck in the system who actually WANT to learn. I remember sleeping through high school basically because 95% of the classes were stuff I could care less about or about things I already knew from self-study.
Thinking back, I’m pretty sure my biology teacher must have noticed (and been amused by) me jolting awake every time she said “genetic”.
This is an old anecdote I have related many times in the past four decades.
I was a science major at a Texas university. It was regionally and nationally acclaimed for its teachers college. A large number of students were education majors. They were unavoidable on campus even though I tried.
During one lunch in the cafeteria I sat at a table with an education major complaining to her companion about her “felt board” class. My first moment of incredulity occurred when I realized that they were handing out college credits for learning “felt board.” My second occurred after hearing the education major complain how hard it was.
Apparently, for three college credits this undergraduate was required to script and demonstrate four sessions using the felt board and cutout figures used to tell a story of any of the holidays of the school year, seasons of the year, or historical figures appropriate for elementary school.
As a science major coming to the world of science late in my academic career, I had no remaining electives to soften my schedule. I was committed to taking four courses each semester made up of my remaining requirements. These were limited to advanced mathematics (Cal II – IV), physics (mechanics, electricity and magnetism, optics, and nuclear), as well as my full 12-course demand for chemistry (fundamentals, organic, instrumental analyses, theoretical, biochemical, and inorganic).
The academic juxtaposition of a three-hour class in instrumental analysis (with accompanying lab) with a three-hour class in felt-board seemed, at the time, to be ridiculous and even comical.
I expressed myself to my lunch companions in as genteel a tone as I could muster but was only given blank stares in return. I was speaking a foreign language — one of challenge, self-discipline, above-average effort, and personal sacrifice.
I predicted then that the students of the next generation would not be well served and am, sadly, rewarded with the satisfaction of the accuracy of my prescience. (Personal satisfaction cannot stem the terror of our current reality.)
If their teachers found “felt board” difficult and overwhelming, what would the students of such certified elite really learn from their mentors? Obviously, the inheritance of incompetence is greater incompetence and the seeds of ignorance have grown a bumper crop of failure.
Whats scary is many kids learn NOTHING that will help them later in life. Some kids just are not as smart with “book work” as others. At one time most people didn’t even make it past 8th grade BUT they did continue to learn through DOING or apprenticeship or through the family business.
This indoctrination MUST stop NOW. If we don’t it doesn’t matter who is president, who runs the house or senate, ect….This indoctrination/lack of education will drag us all down eventually….
Listen to this teacher for exactly what i am talking about
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vjpWaESn_9g
I think it would be awfully difficult for a student to learn well in a class (even one being taught by a terrific instructor) if that student is more preoccupied with getting their 500th text message sent/received that week.
Simple rule- no texting in class. If a student pulls out a cell phone to read a text message, it gets confiscated. If there is some family emergency, you call the student. The teacher can in turn confirm that the person on the other end is a competent authority informing the student of an actual emergency. Any other use of the cell phone during class results in the phone being confiscated.
A couple of days ago I came across two separate articles, completely different sources, no relation at all.
One was about how for the first time since such data has been compiled, more than half the unemployed have had “some college.”
The other was about the lack of skilled tradesmen and how that is becoming a serious problem in the manufacturing and service sectors–carpenters, electricians, tool-and-die makers, HVAC techs, automotive techs, on and on and on. 20 and more years ago, people predicted that this would happen as the previous generation retired and no one was being educated to replace them, but those warnings were ignoired by our educational “betters.”
Austrian economists talk about malinvestment, where misleading market signals, mainly artificially low interest rates, lead to investments that cannot pay off in the time society really expects. But our whole educational system for the last 50 years or so is maybe an even bigger case of malinvestment–we have been doing a very poor job of educating people at all, except in some narrow technical areas, and by denigrating vocational and technical education while encouraging liberal arts and the goofy new areas such as gender studies, we have mis-spent billions of dollars, annually, leaving millions of people without the ability to perform economically useful jobs while such jobs go begging.
The connection to this post is that those people who aren’t qualified for the jobs that actually are goinmg begging, do not even realize they have a problem. It’s always someone else’s fault and someone else should just support them. Just like giving them an undeserved grade, give them an undeserved income–not just a little help while they train for something useful, but for an indeterminate future until something happen. In other words, the typical Obama voter.
I certainly hope that at some point we allw ake up and realize how much damage the education “establishment,” teachers, professors and administrators, has done and will cointinue to do unless they are reined in.
When kids or young adults are influenced by Music, Movies, News Media, Puplic Schools it has no moral value of learning or character. I saw a high school kid wearing a tee shirt with Obama’s face on it. This kid said he “I’m voting on Obama, because he is black.” Not knowing anything about the campaigne of Obama. If most American kids do not want to think for themselves, the media will do it for them. This 1212 election has world leaders that own the American media have put a restraining order on the truth and is trying to misleads the nation of
free election voters. The American school unions our no differant. This why parents need to be involved with the influence of morals of character and self control to push them and help them reach their full potencial. The sectular government is not going to do this, and does not want to, for their agenda of controlling of the masses.
A friend from India described the process (which is very different from America) this way: “I had to take a test to enter fifth grade; most students fail. Every year, you have to score 80% to move on to the next grade; you get one repeat if you fail; after two failures, you are out.”
There is no “right” to an education. If you’re not doing the work, if you’re not learning, step aside, you’re wasting time. As he put it, American students have no fear of failure; there are no negative consequences.
It’s really all backwards. Your knowledge and accomplishments are what instill in you a sense of self-esteem. But here, the system believes if you have self-esteem, all accomplishment flows from it.
Further, compare the two: If I am the former case, and I fail at something or do poorly on a test, I learn from that experience and see to it that it never happens again. I don’t act out. I move on.
If I am the latter case, all I do is whine like a spoiled child, and make noise about how “unfair” it all is. And I learn nothing.
It’s as if by hard work and hard learning, you become a bit like steel. You flex and bend, and can take the stress. But by artificially applied self-esteem, you’re more like a balloon. You may grow impressively large, massive even, but a single pinprick will deflate you.
One of the bits of teaching theory I learned back in school was that the job of a teacher was to teach you how to think [about their subject]. Not “what to think” and certainly not “all the content you need to have to think about the subject.”
The biggest issue I have with liberal education is that it’s a lot of what to think, short-circuiting or eliminating the how. Is it any wonder, then, that products of that “education” consequently can’t learn? They’ve rarely had to do so. All they’ve learned is how to memorize and regurgitate.
Is it also any wonder we’re lapsing into a balkanized society where truth is what the people who you’ve decided to believe say?
“and certainly not “all the content you need to have to think about the subject.”
Then you are indeed part of the problem, even though you don’t recognize it. “All the content you need to think about the subject” are tools in a toolbox, and the goal of a school is to put as much in your tool box as you can mentally carry. There are often times you only need one or two tools in the toolbox, but when you need a specific tool, there are no replacements!
If your head can’t carry much, or won’t carry much because you refuse to exercise your potential, you need to get out of the way and work a low level job so those with more mental ability than you can recieve the attention they deserve.
One thing that seems to be overlooked in these rants against our education system is the overwhelming importance attached to standardized tests. Teachers are pushed and coerced into “teaching to the test” and not much importance is given to teaching children how to learn, or how to think critically.
If standardized tests and rigid rote learning are so successful, why do countries like Finland, (which does not even formally test a child until they are at where our 8th graders would be in age) continually show superior results to our system?
One other thing using Finland as an example – they don’t expect or even push a student towards college unless they show an aptitude or flair for it. If the student wants to learn a trade, they are not disparaged or discouraged. Rather, they are supported and mentored through vocational or apprenticeships.
They are pushed to teach toward the test because they cannot be fired for just being crappy at their jobs. This is the only outside pressure that CAN be applied to these morons. It is better than absolutely nothing, which is the alternative, I’m sure.
A little curious about all the Obama hate going on here. He has only been president for less than four years, yet people are making it sound like he has single-handedly ruined America. Maybe I just have a bad memory, but I sure as hell don’t remember this country being perfect four years ago. In fact, my lot has gotten considerably better over the last four years. Also, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this point, but wasn’t the first President to bring the United States into debt Ronald Reagan?
As to the last: no, this nation has practiced deficit spending quite literally back to our inception. There has been almost no time when we didn’t have some national debt.
It’s because the very common man has no long-term memory, and totally forgot the disaster of “Dubya” as if he never existed.
My existential question while I was still in high school is this: “do stupid people realize that they are stupid, or do they think that everyone else thinks the same way they do because they don’t have the capability of conceiving of anything else?”
After decades of observation, I have decided that no, stupid people do *not* realize they are stupid. They are toddling blithely through life totally convinced that the way they put together 2 and 2 to equal O(bama) is the same way everyone else thinks. And in *their* world, the other guy is the stupid one, and it’s all his/her fault.
Reading the comments above, they all seem to support my existential answer that dumb people do not realize they are being dumb, but think the fault lies in those about them who are holding them back from being NBA stars through no fault of their own. Therefore, the bottom line issue is not whether education is worthwhile or being taught correctly but what are we going to do about the increasing numbers of extraneous bipeds who simply cannot keep up and need to be tended to and taken care of like snarling pet Dobermans.
Really, there people so stupid that they don’t know they’re stupid. (You have to be at least somewhat competent to realize there’s a standard and to assess your own performance and find it lacking in comparison to that standard. Folk who can’t do that… well, the get their butts kicked in bars repeatedly or their last words are “Hey, watch this!”)
The problem isn’t really people that are so stupid that they don’t know it. Those sorts have always existed. The problem is that now these people are being told that they are NOT ignorant. Now they are told that they are in fact smart. That’s the gist of the article.
That’s where the problem arises. When people that cannot master basic reading, arithmetic, etc. start to think that they are ‘educated’ and just as ‘smart’ as you… a problem arises. Their ignorance combined with arrogance only leads to disaster.
I have to ask: are all of spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes in many of your posts intentional? I smiled to myself when I encountered the first one (blaming the so-called “left” for something-or-other) and chalked it up to an unintentional proofreading error, but as I continued to read more comments, encountered instance after instance. I suppose it could be a local custom on this forum to make intentional errors as a joke (while commenting on the lack of education of the rabble) and I’m just too new here to “get it”.
In any case, I’ve long believed that many of the problems in modern education can be traced to the arbitrary decision to teach students subjects based on their age instead of their mastery of the fundamentals to those subjects. If you can’t “do” fractions, you can’t begin algebra, and so forth. It seems to me that inverting the education system in this manner would produce better students and better teachers. Consider the following cases:
1) Student X has a natural aptitude for math. Currently – in “Grade 5″ she is learning fractions, except that she is learning nothing she doesn’t already know; she figured this all out on his own two years ago. So she spends the year at the top of the class with an easy A, but is bored the entire time. Instead, why not have her learning algebra (with students that are mostly older than her)?
2) Student Y does not have a natural aptitude for math. Also in Grade 5, he is struggling daily because he never really mastered the math taught in Grade 4. As time goes on, he decides that he’ll NEVER “get” math and gives up trying. He is likely going to get a C grade – not because he merits it, but because the teacher feels sorry for him and doesn’t want to hold him back because in other classes he is either doing adequately (or better than average). Between the teacher “giving him a break” and his giving up when he realizes that he’s falling behind, his other grades suffer. Instead, why not have his math education at a slower pace?
In both cases, the standard education system hurts both students because everyone is lumped together. If instead we eliminated the lumping by age and concentrated on establishing mastery of content, student X would be able to advance and be challenged far more quickly. Student Y would have the opportunity to learn at a pace more suited to them and wouldn’t “fall through the cracks” of the system.
Taking this on a course-by-course basis, students would find themselves placed with other students who are at the same level of proficiency than birth date, and as they age concentrate on those subjects where they excel or have greater interest. You might be 15 years old but taking “college-level” courses in history because you’ve already tested through the high school level curriculum, muddling through geometry with a bunch other 15 year-olds (and a few 14-17 year olds, and one 12 year-old who has already mastered algebra).
Note that this also applies to Phys Ed classes too.
I don’t suppose a genius like you has noticed what passes for English grammar, syntax, and orthography, not to speak of logic, on the lefty sites. Consider there is no really edit function and most things are written on the fly, the standard here is pretty high, and stratospheric compared to lefties.
You really have nothing to contribute do you?
Seriously – You’re about the saddest most bitter person I’ve ever seen post online . .
Please end yourself – The Universe will be a happier place . .
Is there any part of Go Fu*k Yourself you’d have trouble comprehending? If so, I’ll explain in more detail.
4 sum of us not as intelegent as you r pleas do demonstraight.
What a great system! It’s called “homeschooling”. Most of us make typos from time to time, and some people just aren’t as strong at grammar as others. I give it a pass unless the poster is calling someone else stupid.
(“i cant believe you dumb people would vote against they’re own interests” kind of thing)
I applaud this idea. However, I think you have missed a key point which is being driven home by the primary article and the majority of posters. A system like the one you describe would never be allowed under the current schooling regime because it would be tantamount to admitting that not all students are absolutely identical.
What would happen, of course, is that students from strong families that valued education would quickly surge ahead and be inculcated with higher level skills, while students from failed homes with angry, “victimized,” adult mentors would endlessly flounder in even the most basic classes.
You mean like what is basically happening right now?
Ursomniac, as for your first paragraph, it would be nice to have all things correct. But don’t pretend you couldn’t read what was said because a comma was out of place. Read what E.M. Forster had to say about the librarians at Alexandria and pedantry. Grammar and punctuation has not come from an engraved monolith but is something that is an evolution. The thought is what is important and not what color pencil is used.
Before you set about criticizing other people’s grammar, you should at least do it with an error-free post.
As to what you suggest regarding how to tailor educational curricula above, most would doubtless find it quite impractical & way too expensive. Nice try though.
I completely agree with this approach, and this is how I handle my own five children at home with their academic subjects (we homeschool). We have two who read at an early age; while two others struggle. We have one who grasps math concepts and facts quickly; and an older one who needs to master third grade math until I feel she is ready to move forward, so we’ll keep at it until she is. It only figures: we are each uniquely gifted. The challenges and requirements need to be tailored for each student as much as possible.
I have to ask: are all of spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes in many of your posts intentional?
Some of it is intentional. Some of it is typos. Most of it is failure at English.
What I find hilarious is that you yourself complain about the grammar here, and probably elsewhere, but you obviously write grammatically incorrect sentences on a regular basis.
Case in point from the same posting:
Student Y would have the opportunity to learn at a pace more suited to them and wouldn’t “fall through the cracks” of the system.
“Student Y” is the subject of this sentence and is in the SINGULAR. “to them” refers back to “Student Y” and is in the PLURAL. One, by definition, must be WRONG. Does “Student Y” have two heads? Or does “Student Y” have one head? Both CANNOT be correct!
I’m glad these pathetic helicopter parents have done nothing but push ridiculously inept snowflakes into this harsh world. It makes my educated, intelligent, and disciplined child all that more able to stomp all over these “attachment parenting” losers. Let them FAIL and live with their FAILURE parents until they are 40.
Unfortunately, YOUR child will get the honor of PAYING for those failures.
On learning facts: The current President of the United States did not know how many states there are in the United States (he said “57,” when there are only “50″). He is so ignorant that he thought that the people in Austria speak a language called “Austrian” (when it is German). In his address in Cairo flattering Muslims, he said that Muslims had invented the movable type printing press (so much for Gutenberg in Mainz!), that they had invented the compass (tell that to the Chinese!), and that they had established the first university, Al Azhar, when it was Italians who established the first university at Bologna. He is an ignoramus!
My concern is his educational level in economics…
In the latter regard, he saw what he wanted to see – more powerful than facts.
Al Azhar founded 970 A.D.
University of Bologna founded 1088 A.D.
I just went after the easiest of you errors. I wonder where else you are completely wrong.
Lefty idiot, the only thing the Muslims ever accomplished was forcing the Byzantines into conversion or dhimmitude. The only thing they knew how to do was fight and f*ck camels, but they did manage to conquer a civilized area and force its citizens to work for them. I guess you can call that becoming civilized.
Ain’t eddukashun grand?
Sadly, when the article says, “…research has not turned up a single case of anyone in America being arrested for speaking ill of former President…” I can only conclude that they don’t know how to do research. There was a case in Chicago where then President Clinton had a woman detained for no more than saying, “Those people died, and you suck.”
To claim that no one abuses their power in the office of the POTUS is to ignore history completely.
There are certainly many problems with our educational system, but one problem than no one mentions is that university professors want to be employed and have increasingly less control over everything from class material to working conditions to grades. The students are “customers,” and one of the few things students all appear to learn is how to get customer satisfaction on a paid-for product. Want that student to put away the cell phone? Maybe he will, but maybe he will complain to the dean, threaten to sue, cause a near-riot in class, or simply give an end-of-term, anonymous review that would be slander in other circumstances, but at a university is seriously considered as part of an instructor’s employment review. Want to fail that plagiarized project? Better have proof that will stand up in court. Even then, the student is going to complain and the instructor will be told to “work with” the student (because the senior who copied the Wikipedia article didn’t know it was wrong to do; translation: the department chair wants good numbers for the department and does not want to deal with the hassle).
The government and accreditation bodies want to assure that customers get value for the money, and demand measurable results. The problem is that many pieces of education are unmeasurable; their solution is to look at graduation rates. Another requirement is that all instructors must have graduate credits specifically in the field of the class. In other words, to teach freshman math, the graduate hours cannot be in a theoretical area. There’s even talk in some circles (read: Education schools) that all instructors must have a teaching certificate, as that has done so much for the public schools. As far as getting those with “real world” experience to teach, that’s not going to happen because they will not have the number of graduate credit hours. If a school did hire that person, the school could potentially lose federal funding (which includes loans) or accreditation.
Speaking of funding: The student must not only eventually graduate, but must receive a C or sometimes a B minimum for the class to “count.” If the student receives a lower grade, then it means the instructor has failed, either by being unfair, not being encouraging enough to the student, or by “giving” bad grades (a C is a bad grade now). Meanwhile, the class content is determined by curriculum committee and standardized across classes. The instructor must meet scheduled turn-around time on grades and student interaction, an interaction that happens at the student’s convenience. Summers “off” means time not getting a pay check. Since instructors are mainly contractors, there are no benefits and no guarantee that a class with happen up until the end of the first week of the class (a class may start then students who decide not to take the class are docked from the instructor’s pay, and if class gets small enough, it will be combined with another section). Hey — how about having a 25-year-old’s mommy call about why someone is being mean to her darling, or daddy leaving a friendly message that he’s going to whip some a**?
Because the holy grail is degree completion, classes that are not part of a degree standard are seldom offered at all. Theoretically, that may mean to many of you that worthless humanities classes in things that have no useful purpose (other than to inflict an agenda) will get canned, but what it really means is that there are no classics departments or foreign languages. Oh — before students get to college, they already have the agenda down pat (they’re less solid on writing or math).
Given this, is it any wonder that college instructors cave to whatever the students and administration want? If students get high grades, then the instructor may get called on the carpet about grade inflation, but more likely nothing will happen because neither the students nor administration are going to turn over that rock. What will get an instructor in fired are failure to meet measurable standards (reported numbers) and bad student evaluations.
People get graduate degrees in any field because they are interested in scholarship and love knowledge — even those who what is popularly called “crap” don’t think they are producing useless work. Really, isn’t the purpose of knowledge supposed to be to enhance the human experience and advance civilization? You may not agree with a topic or see its point, but university is supposed to be where people learn and study all sorts of things. By making college as just another credential-generating job training program, we do no favor to our culture or society.
Short version: The inmates have taken over the asylum and want chocolate cake for breakfast.
This is happening as we speak in FL: the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test) scores have come out, and the writing scores are at an all time low. The parents are upset and can’t understand how Johnny didn’t ace the test. How could the score be lower than before? Something must be wrong with the test! Johnny’s psyche will be damaged it we allow this score to stand. We demand they be allowed to retake it – throw out the results!
And they have. The state has agreed to use a lower grading standard to adjust the writing results so that they are more in line with the 2011 results. You can’t make this stuff up. No discussion that maybe students don’t know how to write, use proper grammar, etc. No possibility that the teachers themselves don’t know how to teach the material. Just adjust the scores and keep moving these kids through the pipeline. Incredible.
http://cfnews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.html/content/news/articles/cfn/2012/5/21/fcat_hotline_opens_a.html
Look, a lot of that is an entitlement mentality, but a friend of mine is afraid he’s not going to graduate because of a single course, not for lack of effort, but because the professor determined in advance that the course would be graded according to a strict curve such that only 25% of the class will pass, regardless of their scores.
And this is the result of the teacher’s union caring about the education of the children, that they want more and more money to get worse and worse results, and we that taxpayers are supposed to just ist back, shut up and be happy to pay for more failures.
Don’t think that this is going to fly in the future because we are no longer having this BS shoveled onto us.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Such idiocy . .
No wonder “conservatives” states have the lowest educational test scores and require the most federal funds to keep their door open . ..
Nonsense. Kentucky doubled their spending on education and grades fell. The only difference is liberals have more money. Simple as that. Kids who live in McMansions in gated communities with private tutors get better grades than kids who come home to an empty house because both parents work full time.
Sorry buddy, Red states score worse than Blue states in just about every measurable educational guideline, when using the same standards across the board for both Red and Blue states. That, sir, is a fact you can ignore, cover your your ears and go nyah, nyah I can’t hear you, but it’s still a fact.
Well, we could just norm that Red v. Blue comparison for race and ethnicity. I think you’ll find that the traditional Democrat/Leftist/communist constituencies don’t do so well.
I guess you think that Federal Funding = Low Educational Test Scores works for you? No doubt
GreeceCalifornia will be in the Obama column come November!Even were that true, how do you test perception, or naiveté? It is not the conservative mindset that enables a racist, anti-racist organization such as the Congressional Black Caucus in the heart of the U.S. Gov’t, but a liberal one. Forest/trees, goose/gander, simple comparisons, are like the riddle of the Sphinx to a liberal mind set.
California, 49th.
Argument sunk.
I don’t think this is anything new. The problem has existed with baby boomers through whatever the current generations are being called. Perhaps at one time rich parents might have been a factor in declaring a kid ‘smart’ but, for years, poor and minorities have had access to legal aid and have made frequent use of threats of legal action. Not all occupations require the same sort of ability and this nation apparently forgot that generations ago. An engineer or even an ironworker on s skyscraper need math that the garbage man will never need. To me, the problem lies in declaring that all kids are equal…..they aren’t, All students or their ancestors before them cannot learn the same things but a lot of us realize that a good plumber is more important than a nuclear physicist when your toilet is stopped up. I often watch a program called “Build it Bigger” on the science channel and marvel at the workmen….from many countries and, I’m sure with widely varying education, can figure out some math problem while balancing on a beam high in the sky. I think the big problem the US has in public private, charter and all other kinds of schools, that not enough is expected of kids. While there may be many ways of attacking a problem, sometimes there is only one correct answer. We value all the wrong things and kids do too. How many aspire to be the next Kim Kardassian who may not be able to figure out her own waist easurement.
Low-grade teachers are the problem, protected by the NEA! I once supervised 2 4 yr. college graduates from an AL state University who could not write or spell a simple incident report! Their defense of their lack of incompetence-I was a racist, and they misspelled/incomplete-sentenced about every 4th word in the rebuttal! I was cleared in the complaint-their presentation + they lied. That is what we get from the currenct education system-learn to lie, cheat. steal, falsify to get all you can get from the man(US Gov’t).
The best teacher I ever had was a guy named John Stellwagen who gave me a D on my first paper in his class my senior year in high school. I had gotten all As prior to that, but his D shook me out of my slumber. I’m not sure if I got any better than a B in that class, but I learned more about writing in one semester from him than I learned all through high school before that.
The author has correctly pointed out that the willingness to learn or to be taught is being wrapped up, and therefore circumvented, by self-esteem. Knowledge, if not tippy-toed into a person’s delicate sensibilities, can therefore easily be seen as an attack and an insult. Say a thing with too much authority, and the barbed wire and bayonets come out.
I recently ran into this in a comments section, where my idea of a gatekeeper, or in other words, the equivalent of a museum or hall of fame mentality that would point out what was historically important as opposed to what was fun in a literary genre, was almost hysterically attacked as me trying to tell them what to read. In this sense, Pearl Harbor can become the end of America’s WW II, not the beginning, if that’s what you LIKE.
Later, in the very same comments section, one of those people told another that such and such a novel was important. In other words, they completely agreed with me, but attached importance to the WAY, I said it, and not WHAT I said. Challenge them in the wrong way and it’s “La-la-la-la – I can’t HEAR you!”
Perception is such an important thing in life, as is a dedication to using it to see facts where they are, rather than how and where you want them to be. Without that perception, a person with a very high IQ is reduced, intellectually, to nothing more than a child. Where the real problem is however, is when such people actually try and produce or create a thing – it doesn’t happen – they are baffled. Not being able to take hard looks at themselves, they became a blame machine – the complete opposite of a pragmatic rationalist, devoid of true creativity, and therefore incapable of creating the very art they claim to love. Such people are engaged in a model that prohibits creation and ensures destruction. In this particular case, of a genre.
People want to get to a place quickly, and in a way that makes them feel good, rather than with the hard work and time that gives one a true and physical reward. It is the equivalent to taking heroin – you feel great for having done nothing, and nothing is what you end up with – empty and repetitious art, unaware of itself or its history. Wheel’s are re-invented, egos soothed, the speedometer numbers of a car changed so it seems you’re going faster, alá The Marching Morons. The greatest of ironies seeing how this was a discussion about science-fiction. The say those unaware of history are doomed to repeat it. Well, those unaware of the history of their own genre are doomed to make shit.
What I find very telling is the amount of pure unadulterated racism depicted in these comments. Bigotry towards not only the poor and disenfranchised but also to those that are doing well, especially if they are the POTUS.
These wouldn’t perchance be the same people that think that anyone smoking pot should be thrown into jail but that Dubya using coke was just a youthful indiscretion. The same kind of people that don’t see a problem with +2.3 million of their fellow citizens being in jail or having been in jail. The highest % in the entire world. The same kind of people that condemn a 13year to stand trial as an adult to face a life sentence in prison but will hardly give a white CEO a slap on the wrist even if his actions were pure treason.
The state of education is bad. But instead of pointing the fingers at “liberals” (=commie tree-hugging woolen sock nature freaks who want to undermine the good ol’ christian USA, at least according to some if not most in this comment section) they should look at themselves. They should look at the Texas schoolboard (hardly a lefty bunch of people) and how they undermine scholastic excellence. They should look at Florida and how it shuts down a computerscience department, saving 1.4million, so as to be able to spend more money on the atlethics department, which barely had 95million to spend. They should look at the plain fact that the reason the education is so poor is not because of left beatnik ideals but rightwing capatalism. Just as the reason healthcare sucks, unless you are effluent, is because of the dollar. Just as the reason healthcare is so expensive in the US is not because of the excellence but because of the profit margins-turn arounds-dividends of the insurrance companies etc.
The more right wing the state is the lower the quality of education.
The more rightwing a person, the more likely that they are bigot jingoistic sky daddy loving gun slinging weaklings that believe that the US is no. 1.
Which it is only not in education, healthcare, freedom, democracy, quality of life.
The US does end up very high though in teen pregnancy, murder, rape, domestic violence, infant mortality, divorce, oh and religion.
Don’t believe me? Look it up, do some research instead of listening to your pastor , Bill O’Reilly or FoxNews.
“Bigotry towards not only the poor and disenfranchised but also to those that are doing well, especially if they are the POTUS.”
Peter: That should read: “Bigotry towards not only the poor and disenfranchised but also to those who are doing well, especially if they are the POTUS.” Also you need to rewrite the sentence: “they” (plural) can’t be the (singular) POTUS.
Maybe this: “Bigotry towards not only the poor and disenfranchised but also those who are doing well, especially those like the POTUS.” Isn’t that better?
You know. You really should rewrite the entire post.
Before he tries to rewrite his little libbie talking-points diatribe, he needs to learn the difference between being wealthy & having liquid (usually sewage) flowing forth.
Stop maiking those racist critiques Mr. Tweed, or Petie (I HAVE AN IQ. OF V)will call you a racist;or worse: He mightt call some of the drop out graduates of libbtard run government schools he did time with, to, as he would put it,” F you up”.!What a loser!
PETER V V? is that your iq score Petie dear, or is that the number of times it took you to pass the test for your GED? Same difference! Chicago,Los Angeles,New York,Detroit, are all infested with “progressive ” school sytems, run by hysterical,libtard,obscurantist ignoramuses like yourself;drop out rates are through the ceiling,and performance levels are abysmally poor.These “smart” people turn everything they touch to excrement:just look at Detroit,NY,and California,states run by “smart” liberals and turned into the functional equivalent of Greece.In NY city, libtards spend $17000-$18000 per student and the dropout rate is 50%!The more leftwing state is, the poorer the quality of education,the higher the taxes, the higher the crime and poverty rates,and the lower the quality of life.Don’t take my word for it mr.iq score of V; just move to Detroit! BTW:Bush and Obama may have been cokeheads,but Bush never ate a dog or beat up a schoolgirl!
Learn how to read. I guess you were home schooled or went to one of those colleges where it’s enough to pay the fees, pray and toss a ball around because you sure as heck haven’t been able to learn to read properly let alone being able to do any comprehensive reading.
By the way, any halfwit would have noticed that my name ends with DV and not V. So your entire “joke” of V being a roman numeral goes out the door unless you want to attribute me with haven an IQ of 505. =)
Lest I forget, I didn’t take GED nor any other tests you might know because I’m not a US citizen. I went to a vocational school in Europe which is about the equivalent of undergraduate schooling in the States, back when that still meant something unlike these days where many undergraduates have problems following the plot of a Flintstone cartoon.
English isn’t my first language either, it’s one of 3 languages that I learnt. So yes I do make the occasional error and my punctuation is bad but in my experience my command of the language and the vocabulary is in general superior to most Americans, be they college students or even graduates.
One last point. G.W.Bush was a cokehead, is a recovering alcoholic, did pay for the abortion of a girl he knocked up. All of these are public record. Just as was his “valiant defence” of the US/Mexican border during the Vietnam war or his general lack of intelligence, bravery or fortitude.
Now you can call the present president all kinds of names, accusing him for one fabricated thing or another but except in the delusional minds of some nitwits they are seen for what they are : lies, falsehoods and wishful thinking.
Furthermore comparing the self admitted experimentation of a young person (Obama) with the full fledged addiction of another (G.W. who lies by means of omission) and claiming them to be the same demonstrates a clear lack of moral fiber, independent thought and intellectual honesty.
Congratulations sir, you truly have shown the stuff you’re made of and you have been found sorely lacking.
Any more talking points you would like to bring up?
Sad little guy, open up your eyes to the rest of the world.
Apologies Petie Dear,for not including the D(As in Dumbs–t)part of your name,but I thought in your case, it might be reduntant, given both your iq score(V)and your deranged post.However, I could be wrong,maybethe V was not the roman numeral 5 after all, but V for VERMIN (an euphemism for liberal). As for reading Petie,the charges that Obozo was a cokehead, spending his last two high school years in a drug induced haze,when he was not thugging around bullying girls, are not “fabrications”but actual statements from his autobiography:Get your special education paraprofessional to read it aloud to you-slowly.What are fabrications,are Obozo’s academic credentials;how did such a cokehead thug get into the Ivy Leagues,with his history of self admitted drug abuse? Simple:Racism as in the reverse racism which shuts out the better qualified, in order to let minority boobs into colleges to make rich liberals feel good about themselves.I wish I had been homeschooled, it would have made it easier to obtain my advanced degree in European History from an Ivy League school easier: home schoolers outscore Government schooled students in SAT’s and NAEP testing. If you had been homeschooled, perhaps you might have gotten into an European college instead of a trade school;then again, I could have permed my hair, dyed my skin black, collagened my lips,acted like a thug,and gotten my degree without having to do any work except lickspittle my rich white liberal mentors (Obozo’s career path).Why are you here anyway? Obozo is running the US in the same way the libtard socialists are doing in Europe:into the ground,and if he gets a new term you can forget about your job,and you’ll be back where you started:the unemployment line.Incidentally Petie,English isn’t my first language: it’s Spanish;I came to the USA to escape Castro’s Gulags,and live the American dream of freedom and prosperity,unlike you who came to this nation to help degrade it into another Socialist S–t pit!
“………The same kind of people that don’t see a problem with +2.3 million of their fellow citizens being in jail or having been in jail. The highest % in the entire world……..”
well…… gee, in other nations and cultures they often just shoot these people, so it’s rather relative. True, we are not the most humane and reasonable human beings we should be, but the bar isn’t very high…….
lzzrdgrrl: Of course,PETIE DV (dumbs–t – vermin) doesn’t see any problem at all, with those 2.3 million criminals walking the streets terrorizing the innocent and destroying the quality of life. Typical libtard!
Peter,
I notice many people want to demand more money for the “education system” when the reality is, an Education is indepedent of the “education system.”
The educaitonal system presently takes 13 years to produce an illiterate person. What will more money do to help this pesron read? Ultimatley we must face up to the fact that some people simply do not belong in the academic environment.
Right now people in our country wish to continue cutting the only arm of our country left producing highly qualified specialists. This organization takes 17-18 year old boys and turns them into 22-38-48 year old men, depending on how old these men are when they leave the organization. They earn a better “education” in the 6 months that they attend training than our universities provide in 6 years. A high number of these individuals then apply their skills and obtain degrees at the commencement of their service.
More money to what doesn’t work does not make sense.
The reason healthcare is in such dire straits right now is because the supply of patients far outstreatches the supply of physicians. This is partly due to the rigor demanded to obtain a physician licence, and partly due to the masses inability to critically manage their own health. Obesity is a failure of Discipline in the Mind. It is further exacerbated by people with unrealistic expectations [100% success, every time], hence the requirement for medical malpractice insurance, and they unrealistic expectation that everybody has the right to live forever.
More money will not solve the problem of a bankrupt braintrust. A fool and his money are soon parted – it matters not how much money he starts with, nor how much money you give him.
You might want to look at this ridiculous case:
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-failed-to-get-me-into-law-20120516-1yrcb.html#ixzz1vMrbXyLS
The whole education system is flawed. Back in the day, children as young as six were working in the mills. It was decided that this was a bad thing. what was created to “keep the kids out of trouble” has now become a program by which every kid is turned into a good little robot who is fit to work for any company like Walmart or McDonald’s. We put parents in jail when their sixteen year old son refuses to go to school, and we fire teachers when this sixteen year old boy refuses to learn. kids need a vision, and telling they can be whatever they want to be is NOT a vision, it is a license. A license to do just enough to get by.
That same sixteen year old boy is a whiz with computers. His vision could be a whole lot better than graduating from robot training and then having to take more robot training and THEN having to compete against more robots for a good paying IT job. The best robot always wins and this sixteen year old boy fails miserably at life because he was given a wrong vision.
Whatever happened to apprenticeships?
After middle school, give these kids a job (Make them demonstrate desire,of course), teach them the skills to become a master at their chosen vocation and make the employer responsible for providing any education required past middle school. Any kid could still become anything they want to be, but it would really make them responsible for pursuing their own further education. You want to be a doctor? Here are the standards you have to meet…A vision, see? Make them responsible for improving their life by actually following a vision and learning the necessary skills to have a higher vision. You don’t want to learn anything you don’t have to? Work for walmart. (not saying anything at all about walmart’s employees, Just saying that you really don’t need much of an academic education to work there.) Until we quit trying to make mechanics into philosophers and cashiers into teachers, we can’t focus our efforts in education on having highly skilled engineers and doctors, etc…Make sure that every kid has the opportunity to carry their education as far as he/she will. This will require active participation by the individual child. Let Education be a vision instead of a burden…
“…make the employer responsible for providing any education required past middle school.”
How exactly is something of this nature to be carried out? It’s not as if the employer is there to promote the futures of her/his employees. You need to give some thought as to what is the purpose of an employer.
My daughter is a terrible writer. The thoughts are all there – she’s proficient at literary analysis – but she can’t organize a paragraph, spell, or punctuate to save her life. However, she is one of the top students in her Honors English class. Why? Because her Honors English teacher writes exactly like she does.
Her AP Biology teacher has the students make board games at the end of units instead of a test. Really? For college credit?
What the students don’t learn now will be passed right along to the next generation of students.
AP classes don’t get you college credit. Only passing the AP Exams do that. You can get an A+ in the course, but if you get a 2 on the AP Exam, no college credit for you.
Liberal sailor wrote:
Now thet raht thar is funny! I doan keer hoo yew are!
Well, one thing abour your story I DO believe – that you are a liberal.
Don’t you know that verb tenses are racist?
What?!?!
Them too?
=:O
It now takes 16 years to obtain a high school education.
Correction: It’s now nearly impossible to obtain a high school education in our government schools.
An even bigger problem is the apathy of parents in respect to their children’s education. Many teachers do not give out homework, because they have found that many students do not do homework. Many students will not even take their books home to study. When I was growing up, I was told to bring every book home and my parents made sure I studied for at least an hour, not including homework. Many parents do not even attend parent teacher conferences because it takes away from their “busy lives”. Yet if the teacher fails their child, they are the first ones putting the blame on the teacher and the school.
” Despite the admittedly important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of them. ”
There is no emphasis on character formation in the school. Tolerance? Tolerance of almost anything is not a positive character trait. Anti-racism? How is it possible to teach that when your school employs racial quotas in both admissions and hiring? Anti-bullying? While extreme cases are obviously criminal, common schoolyard bullying and learning how to to deal with it is also an important life lesson, for both the bully and victim.
What you call character formation is simply the adaptation of politically correct policies that deaden the soul not polish it.
The article “The Unteachables”, about a generation that cannot be taught, because they see grade inflation as an entitlement and a source of “self-esteem”, obviously told half the story. The recent rantings of a North Carolina school teacher exemplified, in graphic audio, how teachers themselves are unteachable.
Today, even if Hollywood wanted to or re-discovered its lost mojo, they could never bring themselves to make a film like “To Sir, With Love”. Such a film project would be beyond them. Such a film would be blasphemy, an apostasy, from the party line. And, like Cory Booker, such a producer would have to publically eat crow.
Given that the freaked-out N.C. teacher has only been suspended – fully paid vacation, without prejudice to existing accumulated vacation, with no loss of pay or pension and with no break of service, soon to be re-inducted, one might well call “The Unteachables” as “The Untouchables”.
I’ve experienced a lot of this in recent years, not only with the students but also the professors. Since most of my coursework is online, posting in conferences is a major requirement. It’s shameful to see so many students and professors with atrocious spelling and grammar. The instructors seldom ever respond or challenge anything I say because I completely inundate them with information on whatever the subject is we’re discussing. Other students remain complacent, un-engaged and un-challenged. Maybe much of this is due to my age and years in the military (18 years active) but if this is what passes for higher education, I’m genuinely concerned about the future of our workforce/”intellectuals”/country.
My first test in law school (Property I) was a disaster. My grade was a 45 (but highest in the bunch of green law students I was a part of) . Still, the Prof didn’t grade on the curve. Wow! What a wakeup call. At the end of the course, I got a 93. That was back in 1956, so I don’t know how law schools grade today. I did hear one professor say that with the high standards required to get in, it was reasonable to expect all students to get a B or above. Not right…earn your keep day by day!
Young folks are denied the shock treatment if bad work is given a good grade.
joshuamarcus, looking up the answer is better than nothing, I guess—if getting the right answer is all you want. But what you need to know, to be able to do computations like this, is the concept of common denominators and how to find them.
E.g., Adding 1/2 and 1/3 is like adding apples and oranges: no can do. So, one has to convert these two fractions to ones that are equivalent—with the bottom numbers (denominators) the same. So, 1/2 is equivalent to 3/6 and 1/3 is equivalent to 2/6. Now, one can add 3/6 + 2/6 to get 5/6. If one has a sketchy hold on the multiplication facts, this kind of operation is difficult.
Our crowded, messy curricula don’t leave time for—or even approval of—learning the number facts to mastery: “rote learning is bad”. No, such ignorant pedagogy is bad. God help us!
This article is the perfect refutation of the view, espoused by Naomi Schaefer Riley and others on these very pages, that students should have a say in evaluating their professors or in the universities’ tenure decisions. “Easy” professors are the ones getting tenure and high students evaluations and “hard” or “unfair” professors receive bad evaluations and less in terms of bonus pay thanks to low student evaluations, all thanks to our administrators’ obsession with the customer service model of education…
“The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability.”
I’m sorry, is it only women who are ‘unteachable’? Because there doesn’t seem to be any indication before this sentence that we are only talking about female students…
At this point you should be educated enough to know that even though the statement says “she,” it is equally applicable to “he.” But alas, you can’t see the forest for the trees…
This is nothing more than dumbing-down the English language.
GRAMMATICAL gender requires “he” in the singular, even when referring to females, whenever a general class of humans is referred to. Referring to individual humans requires the actual PHYSICAL gender, WHEN KNOWN, else defaults back to “he” when unknown. The same rule applies to most gendered animals.
Too bad we are being saddled with politically correct constructions which are destroying the English language.
The author (Janice) chose to use the feminine form. Many authors still use “he” in a similar fashion (not limiting the discussion to men). I think the audience knows she isn’t being sexist.
A rebuttal: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/education-oronte-churm/are-students-really-unteachable
Are you aware that the democrats gin up the claim that “US citizen students are less educated, etc..” and that we need foreign students imported for jobs, by the fact that the massive amounts of the children of illegal aliens, who are dumb as a ton of bricks, dragging down reading, math, science and other scores. This is all part of the colossal scam to destroy the US economy, and pour all our wealth into communist cesspools through the outsourcing of jobs, into China, Brazil, Russia and other communist/socialist nations. The moronic ceo’s who go along with this, and get addicted to govt subsidies, aka corporate welfare, are willing dupes, who will only address reality when the US no longer is a force of strength and the Chinas, etc.. can crush them under the heels, as they did with their own wealthy citizens back during their “revolutions”.
Had the opportunity to visit a local high school recently. Nice big modern campus with athletic fields, etc… In the common area hung a sign “Confidence is Success.” I was thinking they got it backwards or maybe a typo and it was meant to say “Competence is Success.”
But no, I’m sure it says exactly what they intended and that is why we are falling behind other countries.
This is a complex problem and some of the blame doesn’t reside with the schools, but with the parents.
The family unit is falling apart, and with it the ability to supervise, educate and discipline children in preparation for formal education. This was illustrated to me in a very concrete way recently. In my small city there were about 20 valedictorians whose profiles were in the newspaper and all except one came from a two-parent home. This rate of intact families is far above the national average (about half of kids don’t live with both of their parents).
The one exception was a young lady who said that being the child of a single parent drove her to work harder because she knew the deck was stacked against her. It’s quite poignant that this bright young girl could figure out what so many people either don’t know, or won’t admit.
I have news. I didn’t read all the comments, but the idealogues on both the “left” and the “right” have it wrong. Everyone wants to blame the “system.” My son recently graduated HS. He is more than capable of holding his own in a debate and writing well-reasoned essays free of misspellings (without using spell check) and grammatical errors. Why? He went to school in a public school system. So, why can he do these things? Mostly because my wife and I insisted that he be able to do these things.
Of course, he is intelligent, but that isn’t always enough. I should note that the high school he went to was highly competitive academically. The high school was at or near the top of the state’s high schools (it’s a TX school) academically. In comparison, a high school less than 20 miles away was substantially substandard. The difference between the two schools is the parents of students in my son’s school district are mostly educated professionals who commit the time and resources to making sure their kids learn. The other school is an area that is poorer, with less-educated parents.
The fact is that school systems where parents have the financial wherewithal and commitment to student education consistently outperform those school systems that don’t have this critical component. That’s why blaming “progressive” educational ideas for poorly educated students is at best overblown. Education begins at home. Parents who are poorly educated and who don’t value education will, by demonstration, pass the same values to their children. In a similar fashion, parents who value education and stay informed about the world will, by demonstration, tend to pass that value on to their children.
The primary problem that we face is that, once upon a time, a poorly educated person could learn a trade and be paid sufficiently well in one industry or another that his educational deficit didn’t matter that much. He or she could make a decent living and afford a car and an apartment or a house. Increasingly, however, as those kinds of jobs have disappeared to far shores, the only options for these people are low-paying service jobs at Wally World or Mickey D’s.
Good, common sense points; I have often affirmed here that public schools in affluent communities are often (not always) damned good schools. I have enjoyed hearing the many different experiences, which people recall having during the course of their educations. Just in themselves, they show many many different stories there are in the naked city, and teachers have to struggle with all of them. It is interesting to try to figure out what per cent of people are bitter because they are not in the elite, and those who are bitter because the elites are not as smart or competent as they used to be, and where the two merge.
Some are thankful they made it through with a good education, others are bitter that there’s was bad, but apparently they somehow managed to somehow survive.
The old fart “the younger generation is going to hell” talk is always a given, making it harder to tell the degree of truth to it at any particular time.
One “somehow” per sentence is more than enough. Mea culpa.
“and theirs was bad” That one is scary!
The parents don’t even need to be educated; they only need be intelligent to know something has value, and how to instill discipline into their children to obtain it.
Neither parent finished College, but between my 4 siblings and I, we hold 7 degrees…and we’re not done yet…If my other brother was still alive, it’d be 8, and counting.
I regret that I am coming to this commentary so late! What gems of insight and anecdote. My anecdote was in discussing with an undergraduate how Korea became divided into North and South Korea. In the course of explaining the disposition of Korea, part of the Japanese Empire, in August of 1945, I came to realize that this guy did not know that the US had fought against Japan in World War II. I was astounded. He got very snippy–”We never finished the last chapters of our history book before school was out for the summer!” Yes, I thought, but how could anyone not know that the US and Japan fought each other in World War II? This guy now has a law degree from this same university and is practicing environmental law in England and the US. I must add that this fellow was a junior at that time at one of the most selective and prestigious–maybe the most prestigious–of public universities.
My goodness!
They should rectify this mistake in the future by asking History questions on the state bar exam.
I have, on occasion, paid people to tutor me in subject matter that I have needed to learn. I always ask for supervised, repetitive drill, drill, and more drill, because that’s the only way I can learn.
Drill might sound boring, but it WORKS.
The term “self esteem” is a complete misnomer. There was never any “self esteem” resulting from being told you are succeeding when you have never made an effort. There is only “self loathing” that results from the reality of knowing that you haven’t ever done a damn thing that is productive. This is because your wealth is the difference between the value of what you produce and the value of what you consume. All the pats on the back that you receive will never help you when you are running on the negative side of wealth. We keep wondering why we don’t make anything in the USA anymore? It is because our population has become dominated by people who consume more value than they produce. Our so called progressive educations have created this atmosphere. We all know that the solution is to take back our schools from the Socialists. Vouchers and competitive educations are the only pitiful remaining hopes of that happening. The teacher labor unions have to be broken first, and we all know it. The sorry situations in Wisconsin and Ohio show us how difficult that first step will be.
I wonder how many college graduates today would pass the 1895 8th grade exam below?
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
8th Grade Final Exam: Salina , KS – 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of ‘lie,”play,’ and ‘run.’
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000.. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.. Long at $20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u.’ (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’ Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane , vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks
and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each..
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.
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end
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/a/1895exam.htm
I question the validity of your assertion that is was the test administered to students in the late 1800′s. Why? Look at this quote from the “test.”
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.. Long at $20 per metre?
A metre is a measurement of LENGTH. Lumber cannot be sold by length ONLY, as lumber is made in many different forms, thicknesses, and widths as well as lengths.
Lumber then, and still is, sold by BOARD FEET to accommodate all of the variations. Therefore I question your assertion.
Furthermore, the bastard metre, was not commonly used until the politically correct bullies decided to force it upon the American people, against their will, a few decades ago.
Dear Author,
Please, PLEASE don;t give up your convictions.
I am a high school math teacher. Often I witness undeserved argument for marks that are often granted. We do not grant these for our own convictions, but because these are inflicted upon us from higher up. We have no choice sometimes.
If you do have a choice – please maintain this higher standard, or else these average Joes will be our Doctors and Professors. Again – Please.
Everyone has their place in life. And not everyone gets to be the Engineer/Mayor/Doctor/Teacher/Prime Minister. Sometimes we need to face reality before are faced with our true calling.
Give those kids the grades you feel they deserve.
Just wanted to say that I enjoyed the article and will link to it over at my discussion forum (see website slot). It is a well presented perspective and worthy of discussion.
Thanks, Janice Fiamengo, for pointing out a real problem. I think its source is more insidious than a culture of high grades and exaggerated egos. Much of kids’ pre-college education aims to teach them the ideology of relativism. I know that sounds unbelievable. I would scarcely have believed it myself if I didn’t see what my own kids were getting. If all opinions are equally good, then the teacher’s is no better than the student’s. Hence, there is nothing to learn in the humanities. Indeed, there is nothing that can be learned in the humanities. For the students, education can only be about acquiring facts.
Most of every introductory course I teach is devoted to showing students that there is something be learned in philosophy. It’s very difficult work for me and for the students, and the results are partial at best.
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