Letters to the Editor
-
To read the PISA scores on 15 year old educational attainment
Summary here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7126388.stm
and
http://www.siteselection.com/ssinsider/snapshot/sf011210.htm
Note the US ranking:
Reading skills 15th and below average; Mathematics 19ths and below average; Science 14th.
-
And just to be tedious about PISA
You can get a detailed executive summary with tables here:
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/2/0,3343,en_32252351_32236191_39718850_1_1_1_1,00.html
For anyone who wants to comment about US economic policy, literacy, education or intelligence it must be required reading. I hope to hell Obama, Hillary and McCain have read it!
-
This crap again?
The baby boomers were told how stupid and inarticulate they were (like, man, they didn't even read) and then turned around and dumped on us Gen Xers about how dumb we were. And I hoped, hoped, we would not turn around and hypocritically diss the following generation. Sadly that seems to be happening.
I'm grateful that the first comment here was by Rowena, and am likewise happy to read the comments by J. Nathan, Alec Elixir, Jeff Smith, and 565656565656.
Does a quiet dorm really signify intellectual malaise? Is knowing about the fireside chats really relevant? (If the student didn't recognize who FDR was, or that there had been a Great Depression, or know who won WW II, that would be a different scenario.) I guess soon we're going to start hearing about how they don't have any moral values, have thrown out all the things we worked so hard to achieve, blah, blah, blah.
Must each generation become the crotchety critic of the younger set? I don't think Gen Y is stupider or less interested in intellectual discourse than the previous generation. There's always a spectrum of both intelligence and ability to communicate.
I think Jacoby is demonstrating her own lack of intelligence, and analytical skill, by resorting to such cliqued criticism, and indulging in such blatant self-righteousness. By the way, if the new generation is so dumb, what does that say about the older generation that was responsible for educating them?
-
1776
I regularly teach critical thinking & composition classes around Southern California. I always ask my students, "What day was the Declaration of Independence signed?" around the second class. When no answer is forthcoming, I widen it: "What year was it written?" (We study the document, and for about 90%+ of the class, this freshman/sophomore college course is the first time they've read it.) Telling them it's 04 July 1776 is like some sort of magic trick. Yes, Virginia, it turns out there is a reason we call it "Independence Day."
Now, usually they laugh and realize it was a really obvious question. Of course, they "knew it" -- there was just no recall to connect the holiday with an event of national importance or a context of history. I then spend the rest of the hour going through a basic timeline of American history, which is useful since we study several texts that were written in and for a particular time and place. But the thing is, they don't know this stuff. At all.
Google is great for esoteric or specific information. Want to know who the fifth signer of the Declaration was? Go ahead and Google it (or, you know, check it out in a library or something). But there is information we need to know by memory, just to get a context of when something happened and an order for our social, intellectual, and national progress.
Somewhere in all of this, someone -- whether it is the school, the individual, or the culture at large -- has failed these students. While we try to be part of the solution (I don't believe for a moment my students are "less intelligent" or "less capable" than previous generations), there still remains an apparent, and very real, problem.
AD
-
When I think about America now
these words from Shelley's poem resonate with me -
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!".
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
Living so far away from America and in an entirely different time zone, all I can get is a partial, possibly occluded, view of the US but it is not an attractive sight. Your media pundits seem to have crawled out of a cesspit and there are, apparently, no boundaries to their sheer nastiness - Schuster and his "pimping" comment. Although it would be hypocrital of me to deny that many people enjoy gossip, many of the 'posts' on the Democratic nomination consist of little other than tittle-tattle, voyeurism, and an extraordinary reliance on the anus to dismiss the humanity of others. Without wishing to give the nether regions of the body undue emphasis, don't Americans realise that the anus performs an important function and it would be agonising not to have one? The Iraq war has been an abject lesson in arrogance and folly and it now seems to have been reduced to which of the candidates realised this first. Within six months of the invasion of Iraq, everybody in the world knew it was a fiasco but, in the Spring of 2003, there were protest marches of thousands of people in Western Europe who, quite frankly, did not believe the words of General Colin Powell in his address to the UN on 5th February 2003. I don't know the attitude of the American public at that time but believe that the vast majority was in favour of an illegal (by international standards) act. Naturally, it is easy to be wise after the event and the Democrats seem to want to skedaddle out of Iraq as quickly as possible, leaving chaos behind. Yesterday the Court of Appeal in London dealt with the case of Lofti Raissi, the Algerian commercial pilot wrongly accused of training the men involved in the terrorist attacks on 9/ll. He spent 4-5 months in Belmarsh Prison on the flimsiest evidence, with the FBI importuning the British authorities to extradite him to the US. Raissi is innocne and the Court of Appeal has given him permission to sue the British government. Will this story receive any coverage in programs like "Hardball" and the likes? This man's life has been ruined but I suppose he was lucky to escape "waterboarding" and the other treatments that await terrorist suspects in US custody. Yes, education is important if it encourages creativity and analysis but it, in itself, is not a substitute for keeping oneself informed on the world outside one's own bailiwick.