Posted on 12/05/2014 11:59:46 AM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
A history professor, writing in VEER (an arts and culture magazine published in Norfolk, Virginia), tells a startling anecdote:
“A couple of years back, a student came to me for a conference, late in the semester, and asked, ‘Which came first, the Civil War or the Revolutionary War?’ Never mind that we had spent a week on both, and that he had been in attendance (physically, at any rate), for all of those sessions.”
Note that the professor and the student seem equally unashamed.
This is not a homeless man with a drug problem. This is an adult student taking a history course at Old Dominion University, a fairly prestigious college. But he does not know the answer to a question that is roughly equivalent to “What’s 6×5?” Furthermore, he’s not the least bit aware that the question is foolish and he should be ashamed to ask it.
Meanwhile, the professor is similarly oblivious. He doesn’t have any sense of shame that one of his students has learned so little. Why isn’t the professor wringing his hands and screaming, how could I be such a failure? My students have learned nothing!
Just as striking, the professor makes no resolution to figure out what has gone wrong and how he can improve his teaching. Instead, he brazenly asserts the cliché that has gotten us into this mess:
“Yes, the learning and retention of certain facts is important. But it receives far too much emphasis in conventional education, especially in this day and age when one can look up virtually any fact in a matter of seconds.”
Far too much emphasis?? No, apparently not nearly enough, as he proves to the world. A college-age student doesn’t know which came first, the Revolution or the Civil War, and this professor thinks there is too much emphasis on retaining “certain facts.” Aren’t we seeing a sort of liberal collective insanity? The very sophistries causing the problem are celebrated as if they are bold new wisdom. Clearly, the learning and retention of “certain facts” needs to receive far more emphasis.
He then adds a second cliche. Because virtually everything is on the Internet, you don’t need to bother learning anything. Wherever ignorance rules, this goofy sophistry is the palace guard. Didn’t we have encyclopedias 50 years ago that contained everything worth knowing? Did it ever occur to even the nuttiest professor to say, well, kids, you don't need to learn anything because it’s all right here in these books? In obedience to this nihilism, our public schools have often stopped teaching altogether. Welcome to Wasteland.
This professor, now on a roll, charges onward to a condemnation of everything that could save us:
“But the greater challenge for me, as I see it, is that there’s also much work to un-do. Thanks to Virginia’s ‘Standards of Learning,’ and comparable initiatives in other states, my students come into my classrooms carrying a deeply ingrained notion that their minds are vessels; it is my task, many of them seem to believe, to fill them with knowledge—and it is their task to spit it back on tests or in papers.”
What filling? What knowledge? What spitting back? Student who know virtually nothing have never experienced either the filling up or the spitting back.
If you want to understand why American public schools wallow in a swamp of mediocrity, it’s because this professor’s attitudes are epidemic, and have been for years. Educators at all levels robotically echo these pious hostilities toward the gathering of knowledge. Failure is built in, because all of education should start with a foundation of facts but typically does not. Young minds arrive as empty vessels….and they are kept empty.
When students have big gaps in their knowledge, it’s usually because the school didn’t bother to fill those gaps. There is nothing obscure about this. Students won’t learn much unless teachers teach, or at least set up a structure that forces the students to learn. Take your pick
Unfortunately, we have something new in our era, a celebration of non-teaching, of floating disdainfully above it all, of refusing to fill anyone with knowledge. The professor’s “task,” whatever it now is, does not include anything so trivial as dealing in knowledge.
Quite naturally, you have college students who don’t know the basic facts of American history.
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"Jaywalking": relevant video, 6 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Url1HL6oExk
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VEER article: http://veermag.com/2014/09/seeds-of-passion/
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/johnny
Answer: he was educated by a systom sabotaged by communists
ultimately the communists are the stupidest of all
“..aren’t nearly as important as the whys...”
Agreed, all those dates I knew back in high school don’t mean much now. But not knowing the order of the two major wars on our land is huge. Especially that one was in large part an attempt to resolve issues not fully taken care of after the first one, as well as abuses of matters that had been resolved after the first one.
But you never know what got the person into that. Maybe they’d just been hip deep in diffy-q and then something comes up and their brain just didn’t want to put the bits together. We’ve all had something come at us and we’re there thinking “I know this but right now I can’t make those words make sense”. The brain definitely has gears, and much like a semi-truck shifting them the wrong way has bad results.
Heck a friggin cook prolly has more critical thinking skills than anyone that’s even walked by the Whiteyhut since 2008.
Seriously, I thought you knew. Now I have to go back to Don’tgiveashit level.
Short answer : egalitarianism, taken into the absurd.
Every time I think of a functional moron, idiot, imbecile or drooling senile human being being entitled to vote, even if "someone else" gets to vote for them, and I marvel that the Republic still functions at all...
Those kids will get critical thinking, but only after they get some facts to hang that on.
/johnny
Correction: The government is not supposed to operate on verbal orders. Need I cite some apparent violations of that in the past few years?
Affirmative.
/johnny
So teachers must fail or succed on the whim of the IQ of her students' lottery?
Pssst.
It's not all incompetent teachers. Not even most, actually.
Ever heard of the bell curve?
Parents, students and irrational dependence on "tolerance."
50 years of leftist indoctrination in public schools.
Enjoy the Grandkids.
Sounds like your son wasn’t even paying attention to the movie. It makes it clear that it happened after we had already landed on the moon. The astronauts lament that nobody cares after the first moon landing.
That's easy... the Chineses /s
Robert E. Lee the civil war general
How about Vice Admiral Lee?
When I was kid in elementary school in e 60s, they used timelines for history. I still think of history as a timeline, and I have tons of dates and events memorized. In my mind, I sort of move a cursor back and forth on the timeline to get a sense of the passage of time and the location of events on the timeline.
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