Posted on 12/01/2003 10:02:21 AM PST by Maceman
In America, the government-controlled education system produces some of
the least educated high school graduates of any industrialized nation on
earth.
The rot has extended far into higher education. Iowa prides
itself on its schools and its highly educated citizenry. Yet even here,
most UNI seniors who graduated in the top half of their high school
class are confused by 6th grade math. Most don't know how many degrees
a triangle has on a flat surface, let alone a curved one. Some don't
even know what a degree is. Others think Turkey is a country in South
America.
Some have even stated that Africa is a "county" in South America.
In light of this, where do you think an article entitled "Modern and
postmodern racism in Europe: Dialogic approach and anti-racist
pedagogues" would be found? Well, of course, it was found in the same
place as the article entitled, "Improving collaboration between
educators and their lawyers."
Both were published in one of America's top education journals. A quick
scan of the articles published in the last five years in this elite
repository found five on politics, including one warning schools how
conservative business philosophies would destroy true democracy, 13 on
racial issues, seven on gender, and another 14 on social class,
diversity, and equity issues.
To be fair, I did find one article on how
to improve reading in public schools.
So, we have college students who don't know how many moons the Earth
has, and/or believe Chicago is a state of the Union, and the
education journals look like political science rip-offs with the science
removed.
Maybe education publications that aren't so elitist would be more
interested in actual education? Yes, it appears so.
I inspected a
journal that specializes in higher education. It actually contained
some research on learning and student motivation, preparation, and
demeanor. It also contained 19 articles on race, 14 on gender, and 20 on
social class, diversity, and costs (read, money), in a five-year period.
I didn't find one article that explained why 75 percent of my students couldn't
divide $2 trillion by $1 million and get the correct answer, or why half
do not know how to calculate the square root of a fraction. There was
nothing there to explain why 88 percent of my students do not know what the
population of their own country is to within plus or minus 30 million,
or why more than a third thought that African-Americans and Hispanics
constitute over half of the entire population of the United States.
There is nothing in the journals that would explain why 70 percent of University of Northern Iowa
students I surveyed don't know who Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle is.
You could, however, learn a lot about the evils of racism (even though
97 percent of the students do not know what percent of the United States is
African-American), why women are oppressed, and the threats of capitalism.
Yet this entire politically appropriate dialogue still does not explain
why UNI students don't have a clue about the proportion of religious
peoples within their own national borders.
Professors research issues that are of interest to them and ones that
the journals will publish. It is obvious that the educational community
is much more interested in trendy social issues than in education.
Of course, it is possible to redefine education in terms of the
educators' interests, and maintain that the true purpose of education is
appropriate socialization. We can do that and hide a lot of issues for
a long time. But sooner or later, we will need a good doctor, or
engineer, or economist, or someone that can think logically with
numbers, and then we will have to pray hard that we can continue to
steal the talent from other countries.
It is not hard to envision a future in which almost all American
professionals started school in China, India, or from Nigeria for that
matter, while the products of American schools flip their hamburgers and
wash their cars.
Outside the narrow and myopic view of American educators is a real
world. Our nation is large enough and rich enough that we have the
luxury of playing stupid games, but not forever. The demands of reality
reward graduates that understand math, science, geography, history, and
capitalistic economies irrespective of any proper socialization. That's
a hard fact.
American schools produce a highly flawed product, and very few within
the system actually care. Unfortunately, that is another hard fact.
Dennis E. Clayson is a marketing professor at the University of Northern Iowa.
Weird, huh? I ran that by my math whiz son and he acted as if he knew exactly what this guy meant by this statement. My son says that he's referring to a triangle sitting on top of something curved, like a ball. So, the triangle would still have three sides because it doesn't matter on which surface it is sitting. He then "informed" me that the guy was simply making a joke. I told him that there were no other jokes in the article, but he insisted he was right.
In any case, I have no clue what that guy was talking about. I guess three semesters of calculus and a semester or two of vector analysis and differential equations didn't prepare me for this kind of math. I think I need to go back to school, lol.
LOL...I'm with you (and my son) on that one. I'm tempted to write to the author of that article to find out what he was talking about.
http://www.lakeheadu.ca/~physwww/courses/Astro/2330/Cosmology/Geom.htm
To make a long story short, apparently on curved surfaces like balls, triangles have more then 180 degrees, on other curved surfaces, like saddles, they have less. Honestly I had to google that up, School didn't teach me that, and I've put 2 semesters of Calculus behind me in college.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.