Posted on 12/05/2014 11:59:46 AM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
A history professor, writing in VEER (an arts and culture magazine published in Norfolk, Virginia), tells a startling anecdote:
“A couple of years back, a student came to me for a conference, late in the semester, and asked, ‘Which came first, the Civil War or the Revolutionary War?’ Never mind that we had spent a week on both, and that he had been in attendance (physically, at any rate), for all of those sessions.”
Note that the professor and the student seem equally unashamed.
This is not a homeless man with a drug problem. This is an adult student taking a history course at Old Dominion University, a fairly prestigious college. But he does not know the answer to a question that is roughly equivalent to “What’s 6×5?” Furthermore, he’s not the least bit aware that the question is foolish and he should be ashamed to ask it.
Meanwhile, the professor is similarly oblivious. He doesn’t have any sense of shame that one of his students has learned so little. Why isn’t the professor wringing his hands and screaming, how could I be such a failure? My students have learned nothing!
Just as striking, the professor makes no resolution to figure out what has gone wrong and how he can improve his teaching. Instead, he brazenly asserts the cliché that has gotten us into this mess:
“Yes, the learning and retention of certain facts is important. But it receives far too much emphasis in conventional education, especially in this day and age when one can look up virtually any fact in a matter of seconds.”
Far too much emphasis?? No, apparently not nearly enough, as he proves to the world. A college-age student doesn’t know which came first, the Revolution or the Civil War, and this professor thinks there is too much emphasis on retaining “certain facts.” Aren’t we seeing a sort of liberal collective insanity? The very sophistries causing the problem are celebrated as if they are bold new wisdom. Clearly, the learning and retention of “certain facts” needs to receive far more emphasis.
He then adds a second cliche. Because virtually everything is on the Internet, you don’t need to bother learning anything. Wherever ignorance rules, this goofy sophistry is the palace guard. Didn’t we have encyclopedias 50 years ago that contained everything worth knowing? Did it ever occur to even the nuttiest professor to say, well, kids, you don't need to learn anything because it’s all right here in these books? In obedience to this nihilism, our public schools have often stopped teaching altogether. Welcome to Wasteland.
This professor, now on a roll, charges onward to a condemnation of everything that could save us:
“But the greater challenge for me, as I see it, is that there’s also much work to un-do. Thanks to Virginia’s ‘Standards of Learning,’ and comparable initiatives in other states, my students come into my classrooms carrying a deeply ingrained notion that their minds are vessels; it is my task, many of them seem to believe, to fill them with knowledge—and it is their task to spit it back on tests or in papers.”
What filling? What knowledge? What spitting back? Student who know virtually nothing have never experienced either the filling up or the spitting back.
If you want to understand why American public schools wallow in a swamp of mediocrity, it’s because this professor’s attitudes are epidemic, and have been for years. Educators at all levels robotically echo these pious hostilities toward the gathering of knowledge. Failure is built in, because all of education should start with a foundation of facts but typically does not. Young minds arrive as empty vessels….and they are kept empty.
When students have big gaps in their knowledge, it’s usually because the school didn’t bother to fill those gaps. There is nothing obscure about this. Students won’t learn much unless teachers teach, or at least set up a structure that forces the students to learn. Take your pick
Unfortunately, we have something new in our era, a celebration of non-teaching, of floating disdainfully above it all, of refusing to fill anyone with knowledge. The professor’s “task,” whatever it now is, does not include anything so trivial as dealing in knowledge.
Quite naturally, you have college students who don’t know the basic facts of American history.
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"Jaywalking": relevant video, 6 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Url1HL6oExk
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VEER article: http://veermag.com/2014/09/seeds-of-passion/
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Public schools don’t teach, they indoctrinate and give tests, the students are only shown how to pass tests.
They don’t think, they parrot the idiocy they are told to parrot.
A nation that once had God among them, but then turns from God, will be destroyed.
God will not be mocked.
Nailed it!!
Stupidity is the coin of the totalitarian regime.
It takes time away from what I could be doing. I wasted a summer teaching kids fundamentals of physics, and chemistry (their mom hates me worse now, but she got the same education) and a smattering of languages and history.
It requires a commitment of time. Many would rather lay in front of the TV than share their knowledge. Unless I screw up on FR, and then, they will bother to correct me.
Abe Lincoln was during the Revolutionary war? Right?
/johnny
In answer to the question posed; it requires effort to think, thinking is hard. Much better for many people is eating, drinking, drugging, copulating, evacuating the bowels, snoring and free tickets to “The Games.”
I am reminded of this quote:
"Did the Japanese go and sit down and have dinner with Pearl Harbor before they bombed 'em?"-- Jerome Brown
A typical education is not about thinking. It’s about remembering enough to pass the test.
“Radical Left teachers unions, Marxist college professors, national media an appendage of the Democrat party, depraved Hollyweird celubutard culture....need I gone on?”
We have a winner and yes you could go on and on and on...........
Saw a reporter on a business channel this week reporting from Amazon’s HQs. She said “Everything in the world is LITERALLY on these shelves.” Click.
Which Lee? There have been quite a few US soldiers with that name. Including several in the Revolution.
Some times the acorn does fall far from the tree, I guess.
Peruvia
Capital of Bolivia.
Go on. Tell me I’m wrong.
TV. They stopped reading.
I am going to assume you are kidding.
I showed one of the twins a "your argument is invalid" poster that showed Neils Bohr and Sachmo.
I explained that I didn't expect her to understand it.
She pointed out that was Bohr. And who was the guy on the trumpet?
Sigh... We did some jazz training that evening.
But she did know Bohrs from the electron level 'thingy' that he figured out.
There is hope. Just needs some work.
Lots of work.
/johnny
one reason.. Public school and TV.
We spend a lot of time teaching people stuff that isn’t really useful. I mean honestly if you’re not actually teaching history when was the last time it mattered in your life if the Revolutionary War and Civil War came first? There’s some level of “good American” that probably should know that, but it’s just not part of life, it doesn’t make me better at my job, doesn’t put food on the table. And really even on the “good American” level the dates aren’t nearly as important as the whys, that’s the part that shaped the country.
Go on. Tell me I’m wrong.
__________________________________________
I can’t. I don’t speak Peruvian or Bolivian.
(Nor Austrian either, for that matter)
Painless.
It doesn't take a week.
I reject your assertion and will continue to teach kids 'useless' stuff that actually turns out to be useful.
/johnny
Yes, you can look up practically anything these days but without a framework of basic factual knowledge you don't what to look up or even that you should look it up. For instance, you work in an ER. You have been told to watch out for patients who have recently been in West Africa. A very sick patient comes in and says he was recently in Liberia. It would be easy to look it up and find that Liberia is indeed in West Africa but without some inkling of that fact, how would you know to look it up in the first place? What if you don't know that there is more than one country is West Africa or that "Liberia" is the name of a country at all and not some resort in Mexico?
I so disagree.
If you don’t know which war came first, then the chances of you knowing anything relevant or even fundamentally necessary are also pretty slim.
Is it really important to know the Revolutionary War came first? Is it really necessary to know how to dress for a job interview? Really necessary to know that babies can’t be left alone while you go drinking?
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