Posted on 09/28/2009 4:27:05 AM PDT by IbJensen
Several years ago, I discovered a curious phenomenon among the diverse freshmen in the developmental English classes I teach. These are students who fail the placement exam and are forced to take a reading and writing refresher course before moving on to basic composition. In one of their grammar exercises, the name Charles Lindbergh appears. What I discovered was that roughly 90% of the developmental students didn't know who he was.
That in itself would be unremarkable. More remarkable was the fact that when I mentioned the name to my honors students, roughly 90% knew that Lindbergh was a pilot, and the majority correctly identified him as the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
Afterwards, I joked with colleagues about scrapping our entire English placement procedure and just asking students, as they registered, to identify Charles Lindbergh. If they couldn't, they'd be placed in developmental English.
But the Lindbergh phenomenon highlights a more serious deficit. Eight decades ago, Charles Lindbergh was perhaps the most famous human being on the planet. He's part of the cultural ether. Even if there's no need to know who he was, it's virtually impossible to grow up in America and never hear his name. It's a point of reference in newspaper and magazine articles, movies and documentaries, television shows, songs, even old cartoons.
In all likelihood, therefore, the developmental students had heard the name Charles Lindbergh. It's just that 90% never cared enough to follow through. They never looked him up in a reference book or on the web. They never asked their parents or teachers. They just shrugged and went on with their lives.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
They're not college material.
Due to the fact that there are far few fields left from which young Americans can cnoose they opt for college.
Here is the issue, and allow me to just ponder for a bit, honors students know who Charles Lindbergh is because they READ. They read for fun, they read to quench a thirst for knowledge, they read when they are bored. They read. Therefore, they can string a sentence together reasonably well and not need remedial English.
Put two and two together.
Great Article - thanks for posting. Common sense view of the silliness of sending non-intellectually curious kids through an expensive babysitting program.
Now you're expecting them to do math!
That's racist!!!!
One thing I often hear is, “how will this affect me when I leave here?” This usually is asked in exasperation over grammar verb tenses. My answer is, “I don't know. But neither do you. You have no idea, really, what you'll be doing 20 years from now and if you don't learn it, you will be limiting your choices.” I try to encourage the students to seek knowledge beyond the classroom and just for the joy of knowing things.
So far, I'm not sure if I've been successful at all.
It’s true, love of reading is at the heart of any well-rounded education.
However, if 90% of students graduated from US high-schools (or 90% of some large sub-set of those graduates) can’t identify Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis, then I believe that 90% of all elementary, middle-school and high-school teachers and administrators should be immediately fired from their jobs, sued for the return of their salaries to the public coffers and prosecuted for malfeasance and and violation of the public trust.
And the NEA leadership should be brought before military tribunals on capital charges.
What they’ve done to education in America is beyond criminal. It is treason.
His toughest assignment as a teacher of English is to get them to read a book. Most of them never saw their parents read anything more complicated than a grocery list or a People Magazine (lots of pictures) which presented no model for them to follow.
Parents have become so dazed and lazy that even reading and understanding that they present the worst type of example to their offspring will not budge them an inch.
But they'd better. They're the reason the kids can't speak or write in sentences and paragraphs and why the central government has usurped all their responsibilities to make nice little robots of their pride and joys.
Texting anyone? Can spell but love to use letters instead of words to talk to my buds.
I think the age requirement that requires teens to remain in high school destroys many young men who have natural skills in trade or craft oriented professions.
It used to be that children (and adolescents) could learn a lot from their parents, such as who Charles Lindbergh was and a myriad of other cultural factoids. But today’a younger parents, products of the MTV age and liberal dumbing down, don’t know who Lindbergh is either.
Yep, and I’ll bet they don’t recognize the names Karl Marx, George Orwell, Friedrich Engles, etc. That’s why Obama is so attractive, they have no idea what socialism, communism, statism, fascism, etc are.
His toughest assignment as a teacher of English is to get them to read a book. Most of them never saw their parents read anything more complicated than a grocery list or a People Magazine (lots of pictures) which presented no model for them to follow.I know a couple with good incomes, a beautiful home, two young children and not a single book in the house. No children's books. No books of any kind.
What they do have is a huge TV screen up on the fireplace mantle. The children's play area, with all their toys strewn about, is on a wide rug immediately in front of and beneath this screen. When nothing in particular is being watched, CNN drones on and on in the background, sometimes with the volume lowered, but never fully off.
I'm sure their kids will grow up eager to sing Dear Leader songs in elementary school. And I'm equally sure they will never, ever know who Charles Lindberg was, and possibly might not know of Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson, either.
My question to this person would be: of what practical use is it to know who Lindbergh might be? Or about our nation’s history? Or the U.S.Constitution?
I did not know that I would later need to know algebra as a designer of electrical circuits? Algebra made no sense to me when I was 15-years old. Why would I need to know it for an Art Major? Making it a requirement was stupid to me. Same goes for having to know grammar; adverbs, adjectives - I didn’t care one wit!
We, as students, were required to learn by rote and not by practical application. It wasn’t until I was nearly 34-years old that I understood how important mathematics and grammer really were to the average person.
But our educational system seems to have screwed us all.
I agree—and besides, the public school systems are dominated by female teachers and administrators and provide no role models for males except possibly in the sports area, which is meaningless to most boys as far as developing a trade or business goes. The system is hopelessly skewed against young men.
This is an update on the “cultural literacy” idea promoted by E.D. Hirsch, who went on to found the Core Knowledge Foundation. Hirsch basically argued that many young Americans have difficulty learning because they do not share a common base of culturally transmitted knowledge. Is that because they were not curious enough to inquire further about unfamiliar terms when they encountered them? Sometimes. But more often, these young people come from cultural minorities who do not value reading and whose encounters with mainstream American culture are confined largely to trashy TV shows.
Last night while my husband and 17 year old son watched the football game, they were chatting about the book my son is reading—C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce.” I could hear my son reading quotes to my husband from the book and then getting very excited about what he was reading. I have to say that it warmed my heart!
Ping for later.
The explosion of readily available money for tuition, grants and loans, has expanded two things: the number of individuals wasting money in college and how much they are paying for the experience.
I think the more plausible explanation is that universities have marketed themselves for two generations as worth attending because “you will get a better job and earn more money than if you don’t have a degree.” That’s the main reason why far too many members of each high school cohort attend college.
Then, in the last 20 years or so, in order to compete in marketing against each other, colleges have ratched up the peripherals: pretty campus, nice dorms, gourmet food, “college” atmosphere, superior coddling of first-year students (a big seller among helicopter parents) and so forth. So they go to college for the “college experience” and colleges bend over backwards to give it to them in a way that they hope will set them apart from their competitors.
Faculty are expressly told not to get in the way of this marketing work. Demanding too much of students, thinking that it’s all about intellectual curiosity or reading the world’s great minds or reading anything at all (it’s all about gadgets and the classroom-as-variety-show-atmosphere; the teacher’s fundamental job is to keep them entertained; the students’ primary complaint on teacher evaluations is “she’s boring”)—all these are forbidden.
We are teaching at a high school level for most students. Honors programs are the islands where something like what would have qualified as higher education forty years ago still goes on. Maybe.
Colleges have brought this on themselves by turning to a business/marketing model. Faculty lost governance years ago; policies are set by people with graduate degrees in University Administration who by definition don’t know what it’s like to be scholars, only what it’s like to administer and market products.
Parents who care about education need to send their children to the new start-up colleges (I’m familiar largely with the new Catholic start-ups—Thomas Aquinas College in California, Wyoming Catholic, Christendom in Virginia, St. Thomas More in New Hampshire—and some reverts—Belmont Abbey College, Assumption College, Benedictine in Kansas etc. I’m not sure there’s much of the same sort of thing going on either in the secular or Evangelical Protestant worlds—Patrick Henry College would be the exception, I suppose.)
“I really have tried to model curiosity and checking references for odd bits of knowledge”
I totally agree with you.
I do crossword puzzles everyday. When I get to the point where I can’t answer any more clues, I look up the answers and fill in the boxes in red. Then at night I go online and read everything I can find about the clues that are in red.
Great knowledge and vocabulary builder.
I have often thought that if I were a teacher, all my quizzes and tests would be in the form of crossword puzzles.
And that’s a good point. So many younger people should be directed to tech schools if they do not have the drive to find out facts. Many will still have the drive to learn how to do things - also extremely valuable to our society.
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