Posted on 11/22/2009 7:19:43 AM PST by rellimpank
Years ago I picked up an 1830s book on Accounting and the math in it curled my hair. We didn’t have a standard currency until the 1850s and the book, among other things, has charts and formulas for converting foreign money into U.S. dollars. You had to be a sharp cookie to be in that profession, and no doubt others. I wonder how many computer dependent grads could do double-entry Accounting manually.
[Sidebar: there’s an old Sci-Fi story about us being in a war with some distant aliens and our hideously expensive computer-manned spaceships were impoverishing Earth. Two guys enter the President’s office and one guy declares they’ve make a breakthrough that will win the war. When asked to prove it, the guy points to the bespectacled little guy he brought in and says, “Ask him a mathematical question.” The Prez says, “What is 14 x 10?”. “140” the nerd replies. The Prez breaks out his pocket computer, verifies the answer, asks a division question with the same results. “It’s a trick!” says the Prez. “No, it’s for real. We discovered we can train people to do that. We can replace our expensive computers with cheap human calculators and flood the aliens with our new spaceships.” And that’s how we won the war against the Altarians.]
oh my brain
If if was a test for teachers, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to find an actual test students at that time had to take. The question remains: were standards more rigorous for yesterday’s students than today’s?
My dad graduated in the 20s, 8th grade. Immediately went on to Berea University, received a Masters in Mathematics. We looked through his 8th grade textbooks when he died. They were much harder and more advanced than our textbooks from the 60s.
The thing is that they don’t know just how much they don’t know. They believe that the knowledge sufficient to survive is an urban setting is pretty much all there is to know. It isn’t!
My great-great grandmother could read and write English (native tongue), Latin, Greek, Russian, and German. She was better versed in the classics than most professors today and had read many of them in their original languages.
Schooling does not equate to education, and putting in time in a classroom and parrotting the prejudices of professors does not make one a great thinker, it merely punches one's ticket.
Many modern schools have become mere warehouses for children or indoctrination centers for the Leftists.
Dooming our children to an ignorance of their Republic's history (warts and all) only condemns them to repeating it.
I married her at 17, 59 years ago - the light of my life!!
Although my experience may mean nothing in the great scheme of things, I have observed that the greater the expectation of performance, the greater the level of achievement.
This works with individuals and especially with groups.
If you want people to be able to jump higher, raise the bar. Have the courage to redefine 'average' as what is taken for good or very good, and while those who cannot excell will not, all will strive harder and accomplish more than they might otherwise because it will be the norm.
At least it worked that way when our society wasn't preoccupied with self-esteem instead of self-respect.
How many 'city' kids could tell you, beside--"The grocery store",where milk,cheese, comes from ???
I read a similar story many years ago. Warring countries couldn’t afford more than a couple of spaceships until this man invented math. The countries could then build many more spaceships since human pilots were a lot cheaper than computers. I think the man committed suicide after he realized what he had caused.
I once came upon a young man while working as a manager in a store.
I was having coffe and this young man came over to me and asked if I would help him fill out a job app. I said sure.
I recognized the app, but didn’t say anything.
What really shocked me was when it came to writing his edu. He asked me how to spell his High School name. I kept cool and helped him.
Needless to say I went home and told my children that I had better see homework and plenty of it.
thankfully all of my children have college degrees (one PHD)
I also informed their teachers I wanted to see some concrete proof that they were learning. Works everytime.
True, but add to that something Mark Twain said, "It is not so much what we don't know that gets us in trouble as it is what we know that is not true."
When this nation became urban in majority it began to die, liberal urban cultures cannot compete with forces based on reality.
Our enemies are wrong in their philosophy, but they have the toughness forged by reality. They can slit a throat without breaking a sweat. I'm afraid that at times that is a vital survival skill.
And I’ll put the writings of any West Point graduate of the 19th century up against any modern day liberal arts graduate....
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From what I have seen you could put the writings of any eighth grade graduate of the nineteenth century up against most of today’s liberal arts graduates. The errors I see and hear every day are abominable. Our church ordered a set of the ten commandments on embroidered flags to hang in the gym. Imagine my astonishment at learning that we are commanded that “Thou shalt NOT have No other gods before me.”
I feel quite safe in saying that the average recent college graduate in this area could NOT pass the final exam for high school as it was given fifty years ago and many could not qualify to ENTER high school in that era. If the exam were confined to knowledge of history and government there might not be a single one who could enter ninth grade back then and I am referring to South Carolina public schools of that era, not some elite academy.
My father finished eighth grade in the twenties and went to work. For several years he worked on my grandfather’s farm and helped build houses (grandfather was a contractor). While still a teenager he took a job with the county measuring land and was quite capable of measuring irregular shapes and calculating acreage accurately. On his own farm he didn’t bother measuring, he could “eyeball” and come within plus or minus about two percent on land area. He was a master carpenter who could do everything from rough framing to building fine cabinetry. He could pick up a framing square and if given the size, roof overhand and pitch desired for a building could cut rafters that would fit perfectly using only the square, a pencil and a handsaw. He worked for a contractor but once he and a coworker contracted and built a house from ground up on their own. There were no big problems with the house, they simply decided they would rather work for a contractor than be contractors so they went back to their old job. They always said that they made better money as contractors though. When my father died he left two small farms, a house and a considerable bank account to his sons.
He was quite capable and when he retired one of his favorite pastimes was reading. He was far from being the illiterate dummy that most think of now when speaking of a man who never went past eighth grade.
“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I was at church the other night having a discussion about gold prospecting with an adult woman, who had no clue that there were Chinese in California in the 19th century!”
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That doesn’t alarm me nearly as much as the college graduates who don’t know that there was a civil war in America in the nineteenth century! Recently I watched “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader” and a woman won a considerable sum but had to drop out on the question of who was the president of the CSA. I still have a hard time understanding how people grow up in this country and don’t know the answer to that. Young people are not learning history, they are not learning about government and they are not even learning the basics of the English language.
I agree and I would extend that by suggesting that all new ideas are simply new associations of old ideas.
People have become spectators, they stifle curiosity, entertainment has become a series of vicarious experiences, there is little hands on action.
That is certainly true of some but not all. Curiosity is natural but the efforts to satisfy it can be stifled. Perhaps after a period of stifled efforts the natural curiosity can be dulled but it is still there. Video games, Wii, etc., are hands on extensions of the imagination.
I rarely read or watch fiction but I think I am cheating myself by doing that. There can be great benefit to living vicariously. We can feel emotions as if we were actually experiencing the scenario, we are exposed to various characters and situations which we are not likely to run into in life, and we basically expand our knowledge and emotions through that.
I understand there are many couch potatoes out there and many of the opposite attitude from you and I who would rather watch sitcoms and soaps than bother their brains with the news and other educational endeavors. Much of that is through conditioning from early on.
When this nation became urban in majority it began to die, liberal urban cultures cannot compete with forces based on reality.
Urban culture can be very real and opportunities for physical activity and exercise abound. Losing a job is just as real as suffering a drought; building houses in the city are the same as in the country; trying to track someone down in the city is similar to hunting and fishing, just commuting to work can be an adventure and the examples of other things are plentiful.
Our enemies are wrong in their philosophy, but they have the toughness forged by reality. They can slit a throat without breaking a sweat. I'm afraid that at times that is a vital survival skill.
Is a Muslim terrorists different from an urban gang member or mugger? Each preys on the weak, unarmed innocents, taking what they want and leaving the grieving to others. A slit throat or a bullet to the head is just as likely and hard hearted in the city as in the desert.
The country doesn't die until the people lose hope. That is why the Democrats and MSM demonized Bush and the Republicans for eight years, lying about how bad things were and how evil conservatives are. They wanted the public to lose hope.
They then completed their plan by campaigning on Change and Hope. Without the constant propaganda and lies by the Democrats and the media a person like Obama could have never been elected.
We are being played like violins by evil people. Knowledge is power and we are being fed lies.
Viva the internet. Viva Free FRepublic.
Time to break the monopoly of government education. Perhaps enough angry taxpayers could make it happen, state by state.
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