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 ...
I’m 62. When I was in grade school, Mrs. Gates took us to the school library. Taught us how to use that diabolical card catalogue. We were expected to read. Required to read.”Tomorrow’s assignment is to read pages 88 through 131 in Oliver Twist.” And there were tests, book reports, a summer reading list of a dozen books. You might not like everything, but sooner or later, you found something you wanted to read about.
College is subsidised, politically and culturally powerful.
Let a kid try to open a cabinet shop, an engine custom shop.
Government inspectors, tax forms, licenses, permits, fees, lawyers, accountants.
Henry Ford couldn’t start in his garage today, nor the Wright Brothers.
It is more or less now illegal to have young males in/on any job site, shop floor. So, forget about that.
That's kind of what happened to me. I went to a trade school for high school (studied drafting) and went out into the workforce. It wasn't until after a couple of years in the workforce (and paying for my own schooling all the while) that I decided to study engineering. Some times, it's not necessarily a "natural" curiosity for things that motivates one to go on to college, but seeing a real world example firsthand that will motivate someone to better themselves.
It is my belief, that even dysfunctional parents are capable of choosing a school that best meets their needs and would yield the best results. Private KIPP-like schools would likely be popular with these parents.
What we are doing now with our government schools poorly serves the child from the dysfunctional home, retards the academic and social development of the child in functional homes, trashes the First Amendment and freedom of conscience, creates a mandarin class of government workers, and has turned the American property owner into renters with the tax collector as landlord.
Besides that...Where is the evidence that government schools actually teach anything at all??? It could be that nearly everything a child learns is due to the afterschooling done by the child and the parents. Maybe the only thing a typical government school does is send home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow.
for later
But it doesn't take a genius to be a great plumber, electrician, framer, pipe fitter, machine tool maker etc. Smarts are required to solve problems that haven't been experienced before. Many jobs have the solutions already worked out in fine detail or are learned as an apprentice. Then it only requires knowledge of the solution (or where to go get the knowledge for the solution), a good work ethic and a desire to do the job right.
80 years from now even fewer people will remember who Lindbergh was. Get over it!
Who was the most famous artist or traveler in 400 B.C.? Huh? What don't remember? You must be illiterate!
This is racist. The developmental students would know who Kanye West is, while the nerdy white-bread getting their ‘good’ grades probably would not.
“I discovered a little later that it is not WHAT you know but WHO you know that gets you that better job with better pay.”
Sadly, in many, many cases you are correct. I have seen it over and over, specifically in areas where subjective judgment is the deciding factor.
However, in my experience, it was my technical degree that opened the door to perfect strangers, who in turn, asked me difficult questions that I was prepared to answer. In one case, technical questions which landed me the job. Perhaps I am the exception to the norm, but I do believe it is quite common to obtain a job on merit.
Having said that - once you are in the door, politics, and “who you know” loom large...especially in smaller companies.
Most businessmen and owners will say English, and being able to express themselves, is vitally important for success. Kids will either know how to write or not and if they cannot, they will not advance in their chosen profession.
As a college professor, I agree with much of what the author says about intellectual curiosity. Many kids today just want to get an A without doing the work. Not that it wasn’t true in my time (it was), but not to the degree I see today. At least back then a lot of students realized that not learning would come back to haunt them later; now, a lot don’t seem to care.
Frankly, I shudder at the prospect of “college for everyone”. Colleges are already filled with kids who either aren’t ready for college or (perhaps) never will be. In many cases, these kids should get jobs and gain some maturity and appreciation for the opportunity first.
I take a little bit of an issue with his “Lindbergh” example. While I certainly know who Lindbergh was, he was a cultural icon back in the 20s and 30s. So, ... its a bit much to expect a teenager from today to know who he was—especially when many can’t remember recent Presidents.
Who cares what football team Charles Lindbergh was quarterback for...
:-)
In the UK they recently did a poll and a significant percentage of people thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. When you lose Winston, you lose a lot.
I think we've gone too far in the direction which Andy Warhol pointed out -- everyone is famous for 15 minutes. What that means (for many young people) is that nothing is really worth paying attention to. However, there are some intellectually curious people who have some drive to grab a topic and delve into it and learn about it. The particular topic (Artists from 400 BC, Charles Lindbergh, Winston Churchill, etc.) does not matter. Merely having the ability to be interested can set one apart today.
College is where those people belong. The rest of the crowd? Not so much.
If by "practical use" you mean making money, then knowing who Lindbergh was might never be useful—it is unlikely that such knowledge would ever earn anyone so much as a dime.
But the author is trying to make a different point. The students who do not know about Lindbergh are the same ones who have never bothered to learn much else. (That is why they are put into "developmental" courses.) The author observes,
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.The author argues that such students are not college material because they lack the desire to learn. As he writes near the end of the piece,
In other words, you can teach facts. You can teach skills. But you can't teach intellectual curiosity. If students haven't caught the bug after twelve years of elementary and secondary school, if they don't prize knowledge for its own sake, nothing their college professors do or say is going to remedy that lack.
You might want to add Hillsdale and Thunderbird if the student has the grades and aptitude.
http://www.hillsdale.edu/
http://www.thunderbird.edu/
I teach at a university part-time, and started not long ago.
I’m startled to find that fully 1/3 of my students fail _consistently_ - not because the material is hard, and not because I am a hard grader (very lenient in fact), but because they utterly fail to enough objective work.
It certainly doesn't accomplish anything except to keep the money the schools get for each student coming into the schools. The only thing wrong with that thought today is that our industry has been sent out of the country and the job opportunities that used to exist no longer do. We must get our education and our jobs back.
There is a lot of memorization to it, and it isn't as fun as building your own seismograph or going on an archaeological dig in caves built by the Japanese during WWII. OTOH, imo, knowing the difference between the present perfect and present progressive tense will be applicable in many different fields including archaeology and geophysics.
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