College Seniors No More Knowledgeable Than 1950s High School Grads

CNSNEWS.com ^ | 12/19/02 | Scott Hogenson

[kattracks]

(CNSNews.com) - The college seniors of today have no better grasp of general knowledge than the high school graduates of almost half a century ago, according to the results of a new study.

The average of correct responses for modern college seniors on a series of questions assessing "general cultural knowledge" was 53.5 percent compared with 54.5 percent of high school graduates in 1955, according to a survey by Zogby International.

The Zogby poll of 401 randomly selected college seniors was conducted in April for the Princeton, N.J.-based National Association of Scholars and released Wednesday.

"The average amount of knowledge that college seniors had was just about the same as the average amount of knowledge that high school graduates had back in the 1950s," said NAS President Stephen H. Balch.

Balch noted that the high school grads of half a century ago performed better than today's college seniors on history questions, while contemporary students fared better on questions covering art and literature, with no appreciable difference on geography questions.

The questions asked in the April poll by Zogby were virtually the same as questions asked by the Gallup Organization in 1955, with a few questions being slightly modified to reflect history.

"The questions were just about identical, as identical as we could make them," said Balch. "In most cases, they were absolutely identical."

Balch attributed the stagnation of performance on general knowledge questions to several factors, including a decreased emphasis on general knowledge in high school, placing colleges and universities in the position of having to fill academic gaps among students entering college.

"This is fundamental knowledge that everyone should have and if your students are being admitted without it, then that only reinforces the need for you to take general education seriously," Balch said.

But Balch said he didn't consider such actions to be remedial in nature, noting that "the remedial problems have to do with students not being able to write or read at the eighth grade level and still getting into college. There are many institutions in which that's a difficulty. You have people who just don't have the skills let alone the knowledge."

Even though the NAS study raises questions about the caliber of general education offered in high schools, colleges and universities also bear some responsibility, Balch said.

"I think it probably has a lot to do with the dumbing down of curriculum, both at the college and high school level," said Balch. "It looks good, certainly, to say 'more people are graduating from college,' but is there any real intellectual yield from it?"

Also part of the problem is that many colleges are placing less emphasis on liberal arts education in favor of more specialized education geared toward specific career paths, which Balch said isn't necessarily in the best interest of students or society.

"I think these results, which don't seem to show a great deal of value-added in the general cultural knowledge domain - I think these results are quite interesting and disappointing," said Balch. "We would hope that the college students of today would have done a good deal better than the high school students of the past."

Also contributing to the trend is an easing of college admissions standards. While Balch doesn't advocate a return to standards requiring competency in Greek or Latin, he does say colleges should "insist that the student coming have basic areas of knowledge."

A solid background in general knowledge, Balch said, is "very important both for good citizenship and, for many people at least, for a happy and interesting life," by providing students with what Balch called "cultural furniture that allows them to be better citizens."

Click here to read the general knowledge questions.

Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.

[Hila]

True, many of the 50's and 60's served in Nam and we bless them for that. Many of this generation will go on to use their hearts and brains for good, in spite of the terrible curricula and new world over influences. I believe there have always been good and poor students, motivated and lazy, outstanding and mediocre. It depends on the parenting, not the "village".

[Lizavetta]

I also discovered at the time that my son had an abysmal knowledge of geography (he was in high school)

My Danish grandmother almost had a stroke when, while talking about China to my teenaged sister, my sister said, "Where's China?" This was in 1980.

[SoCal Pubbie]

To everyone who wants to glorify the fifties as some sort of paradise, please don't kid yourself. Every generation seems to think that their time was the best, and the whole world is going to pot. I'm sure the GenXer's will be saying the same thing a few years from now. But let's look at reality, and not some rose colored image of the past. I was born in 1957 so I'm too young to remember the fifties, but I get a good idea from my older brothers. My father and my mother, who just died two weeks ago, were both born in 1915 and my late grandmother something like 1881 so I do have a pretty good historical frame of reference.

Yes, a lot of things were better for everyone, including kids, back in the day. But no one wants to remember the bad things. Like the premature babies who routinely survive today that wouldn't have a chance in 1955. Or smallpox and polio. I had a relative who walked hunched over with a withered leg, because he had it in the fifties. What about malaria, or the thousands who would die from untreatable cancers we can battle today?

Would you like to be a middle class black today, or in 1958? Yes, you're going to scream about how the welfare state has destroyed the black family but was it really better to have separate drinking fountains mandated by the state?

My point is not to denigrate those times. No one gets angrier at movies like Pleasantville that try to make the time seem uptight and boring than I do. I just don't think it helps to promote a return to a time before MTV as the panacea for today's problems. Didn't you learn anything from your parents who thought Elvis was going to destroy your youth?

[goodnesswins]

Let's see.....and what was significant about that time period? There was NO TV to speak of.

[lonestar]

I just remembered something interesting about the Little Rock 50s grad. His aunt was Senator Fulbright's secretary for many, many years--until he died.

[Nita Nuprez]

Thank you for your compliment. ;-)

[goodnesswins]

The Good Old Days (Good, Sentimental, Read)
email | unknown | email

Posted on 12/12/2002 7:27 AM PST by frmrda

Can't Believe You Made It,

If you lived as a child in the 40's, 50's, 60's or 70's.
Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have...

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. Not to mention hitchhiking to town as a young kid!)

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a Tfew times we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. Our parents knew that all the neighbors would watch out for all the kids. No cell phones. Unthinkable. We played dodgeball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We got cut and broke bones and broke teeth, and there were no law suits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame, but us. Remember accidents?

We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda but we were never overweight... we were always outside playing. We shared one grape soda with four friends, from one bottle and no one died from this.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, video games at all, 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, Personal Computers, Internet chat rooms .. we had friends. We went outside and found them. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door,or rung the bell or just walked in and talked to them.

Imagine such a thing. Without asking a parent! By ourselves! Out there in the cold cruel world! Without a guardian. How did we do it?

[Bahbah]

LOL. How can we determine which it is? I do not want to stir up any Psycho_Bunnies. I am jealous that you can sing.

[Spiff]

Thank you for the link. Just read the questions and took a crack at them. Missed one. (I didn't recall that Waterloo was fought in Belgium.) In 15 minutes I've planned next week's column, unless events overwhelm me and I have to go with something else

You and me both. I only missed the Belgium one too. I knew of the Battle of Waterloo but was never taught - beyond that it was in Waterloo - where the battle actually happened. Besides, since then there's been a number of name and border changes to the nations in Europe. My European History is a little rusty.

[The Westerner]

You are so right. My grandfather dropped out of school in the 6th grade, but wrote elegantly like so many of his generation. By the way, one of his first jobs was working for Edison in his workshop in N.J. In those days, one didn't need a degree to get a job.

[conservativemusician]

It was the same for a lot of us.

It pained me to see my father take my youngest brother up to the school to ride his bicycle because it was too dangerous for him to ride around town by himself as I did when I was 7.

[weegee]

Nothing is better than a good command of the English language.

A college degree is better than nothing.

Therefore, a college degree is better than a good command of the English language.

[PeoplesRepublicOfWashington]

This isn't that surprising. In the 50s being a college graduate meant something. Today, not only does almost anyone get into college, almost anyone gets through college. And there's no shortage of morons with PhDs running around these days.

[warchild9]

In the past few years, I've picked through a large sample of new college graduates trying to fill technical positions, and the greater proportion are immature illiterates. It's EXTREMELY frustrating when society's supposed cream-of-the-crop are lazy, sports-addled babies. And if you give me time, I'll really let you know what I think!

[weegee]

Increasingly we are turning out students who are totally divorced from the history of our culture. They make decisions based on contemporary trends, without understanding the historical background on many issues. This is dangerous, because it means a significant portion of the population can be manipulated by celebrities who purport to be "experts."

[Psycho_Bunny]

I don't know. I've always assumed that when "The Messiah" is printed on a score, it's probably the most likely name for a couple reasons; first and foremost because "ensemble" music copyists tend to be anal about such things - one mistake could ruin a page that took an hour to set.  Scoring is a b#tch.  

Another reason is that often, the most popular scores are the photocopies of 1800s to early 1900s hand-set scores which are not that many generations removed from the composer.  (The most beautiful score I've ever seen is my first printing, hand-set "Also Sprach Zarathustra" - almost any page of which, could be framed and hung.)

I know there has to be a picture of the title page to this piece, in Handel's pen, but I've never seen one.

[Semaphore Heathcliffe]

Education majors (29%) were the most likely to give an incorrect answer.

The education majors I knew in college were generally women looking to find a hubby.

[jjm2111]

I got them all right now, but I'll be honest-I'm not sure if I knew Waterloo was in Belgium when I graduated H.S. in 1980.

I'm a recent college grad and I got that one wrong too. Picked "The Netherlands". That and I didn't have a clue who Florence Nightengale was either.

Most people are amazingly deficient in general knowledge. I have to credit my parents though. They always took me to museums, we traveled, they gave me big National Geographic books when I was a kid.

[SamAdams76]

There is a reason schools should require the reading of Homer's Illiad and Odeysey (among others); there is a reason students should memorize Shakespeare, Poe, and even Walt Williams; there is a reason why students graduating high school should be competent in science and math. It may or may not make them better computer programmers, but it will make them more productive citizens.

I agree with that. Literature, science and math are still very important subjects and should not be given short shrift just because we have computers.

Literature is especially a hot-button issue with me. For the past 30 years, literature has all but fallen by the wayside. Teachers now let the students pick the books they read (and they usually choose Harry Potter or some other lightweight children or young teen book). Not that there's anything wrong with kids reading books they want to read. But they should be forced to read in school the classics. I don't like the word "forced" but there is no other way around it. A kid is just not going to pick up a book by Dickens, Shakespeare or Homer on their own.

I think another obstacle to reading good literature in school is the political correctness that has run amuck. Many schools have even banned Huckleberry Finn because of the racial epithets used. Well I think kids should know how blacks were treated and perceived in earlier times and we shouldn't try to sugar-coat it.

[NittanyLion]

Well, I am an old-school type person. Certain things MUST be memorized (multiplication tables, points on the compass, capitals of states and nations, etc.) BEFORE you put it anything in context. This is why the early years of education used to be consumed with memorization...so that the later years could concentrate on critical thinking.

Definitely true. The problem I see is, that critical thinking is not being developed at any level.

More to your point, folks would do well to make their kids understand that not all learning is "fun". Memorization is demanding work, but it's also necessary.