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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Ah, well.
I met a med student who insisted that Windsor Ontario was part of the United States because it is south of Detroit and everyone knows that Canada is north of the United States.
Met another one who did not realize that other countries have their own military forces, separate and distinct from the ones who operate out of the Pentagon. She thought all “military” was American and therefore evil and everyone we were fighting was simply a popular group resisting oppression by Americans.
6 X 5 = 30. Try to keep up!
That would be Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. That’s when they invented canning (which was actually bottling when they did it) and then Pasteurization which was necessary to prevent mold growing in the bottles. For the American Civil War we invented refrigeration cars, better than preserved food, if only because it lead to central air which makes life in Tucson survivable. Just because I know why students forget 90% of the history they’re taught 5 minutes after the test doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of the subject.
I’m not saying don’t teach it to them, there’s good stuff to be learned. I’m saying don’t be shocked when it falls out of their head the second they don’t need it for class. The problem is most of that stuff is data without direct impact. And the human brain cares about impact, it’s a survival oriented organ, pure data that it doesn’t retrieve regularly gets de-prioritized and forgotten. I learned how to tie a tie 3 times and sitting here right now I don’t know how, because I don’t need to. Each of the 3 times I learned to tie it immediately preceded the only 3 times in my life I’ve worn one, it’s useless data to me, the brain has dumped it to make room for Douglas Adams quotes... I use those.
Classical education, the education of Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison: the purpose was to sharpen a student's mind by instilling in his mind the method of logic, the rigor of mental discipline, and the ability to think clearly while using broad abstractions.
Progressive education: action has primacy over thought, and the child must learn by doing.
Pluralist education: a wide variety of subjects are offered, but none are regarded as an element connected with the others to form a hierarchy or system resting on some ultimate base. The proper goals of educators are an irreducible multiplicity which depend on one's social group.
Totalitarian education: indoctrination of pro-statist propaganda.
The kids remember it forever.
/johnny
Got a great compliment from my youngest son when he was a sophomore in high school.
He had enrolled in a full semester American History course. After about six weeks I asked how it was and if the instructor was any good. He said the instructor was alright, but he said, “Dad, after growing up with you at the dinner table or in the car, most of the course is just review.”
The problem with your list is it goes from data you NEVER use in your life, to data you use sometimes, to data you’ll use a whole lot for a period. Really, assuming you don’t teach the subject, when was the last time ANY piece of knowledge you had about the Revolutionary War had any impact a the real rubber meets the road SURVIVAL aspect of your life? Helped you put food on the table? Roof over your head? Change the baby’s diaper?
Sure it’s fine stuff to know, makes you smarter than liberals so you don’t vote for the kind of douchebag that’s why we had a revolution in the first place... But of course then the douche wins the election anyway, so even there it didn’t really impact your life.
Go DAD!
You rock.
/johnny
Mark Twain
lol
Thank a Teacher!
No they don’t. Really, ask yourself how much of what you were taught through high school you really remember. Not can dredge up if given a bit, but really immediately answer a question. The truth is probably very little, because it’s not data you access all the time, your brain’s got more important things in there. Probably math, there’s lots of algebra in cooking, and bill paying and some other parts of normal life. The basic English language skills obviously, but the books you were forced to read probably not. Outside of that it’s background noise in your brain you dredge while watching game shows or chatting on FR.
And truth is these boxes we’re sitting in front of make it worse. The more we learn we can just go GET data the less we store. Nobody remembers phonenumbers anymore, they punch them in the cellphone. If you can’t make your brain store 7 numbers you actually intend to use think of how much harder it is to store data that’s just “nice to have”.
Education - like travel or experience - broadens the mind. Some argue that if you stop learning and growing; you stop living.
I’m sorry, but someone who does not know which war came first fits the narrative of some dope smoking, mouth breathing, basement dweller waiting for the next welfare check while watching The View.
Why is there food on your table? Because you know where the grocery store is.
If you don’t know which war came first, then don’t worry. Chances are your Mom knows. Just like she knows where to buy your Mac and Cheese dinners.
(Not directing this at you personally, I know you are educated.)
Without a scaffolding of facts it is impossible to reason.
I didn't have a traditional 'high-school' class thing. So your comparison is invalid.
There is almost no Hebrew language in any of my daily life. But I do still read it.
You are barking up the wrong tree, because not everyone is like you, and had the life you have had.
Your conclusions are parochial, and apply only to you.
/johnny
No they don’t. Really, ask yourself how much of what you were taught through high school you really remember.
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I don’t think it really matters how much you remember, but the key is - you were taught to think.
Education allows us to think, to study, to discern the truths from the lies. To grow the brain.
Yeah, I’ve forgotten more than half of what I (supposedly) learned in school. But the basics stayed with me.
And its sad that many kids are just pushed though 12 grades without even learning how to read or write.
BruceDeitrickPrice
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.
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Being historically literate is like being literate in other areas of life. It gives you a framework to hang the information you run into in life. And to test its reality. Someone once said that and education basically teaches you what is rot and what is not.
Or maybe they just learned other stuff. It’s a big world, lots of stuff to learn, an ever increasing quantity, and our time and capacity to learn is still finite. And there’s also the difference between “don’t know” and “don’t remember right now and looking it up is faster than racking my brain”. And these computers and the wiki and the google a lot of us find that second category growing at a rapid rate. I look up lots of stuff I know I know, but it’s not on the tip of my brain and there’s this W next to a box on my browser. Heck I even look up stuff I know just to make sure I got it right (like that Napoleonic thing, I did a quick wiki poke just to make sure).
I spent last summer teaching my grandkids this. Will they remember it in years to come? You bet they will. It came with a catchy tune, and they had to interact to learn it.
Will they use it? Meh... Maybe the older one will use parts of the greek alphabet as an engineer. Maybe the middle one will use greek as a doctor. The little girl? No bets there, but I'm fairly sure she will remember the catchy tune and words, at 4 she knows all the words to 'Do you want to build a snow-man?'.
Of course, me finding the parody of "Do you want to build a meth lab" isn't helping my relationship with my own daugher (her mom).
/johnny
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