Posted on 12/11/2007 10:02:24 PM PST by MadDoctorD
That is so discouraging.
That’s almost the truth——if you can’t compare interest rates, or compute the price of two items on a menu. THAT is terrible! I would expect junior high school students to be able to complete those tasks.
I'm beginning to see how so many people made subprime loans they couldn't afford to pay back.
One stands out in memory, just because of the hilarious picture it conjures:
“I work under a yolk of self-sacrifice.”
Good stuff, and just sad.
On the main post of the thread, I’ve been railing about innumeracy for ages. It’s a major problem with MSM reporting, because not only is our modern journalist class Left-wing biased, they are also innumerate, and thus unable to begin to comprehend many of the issues we face.
"College men from LSU"
Went in dumb, come out dumb, too"
Colleges don’t teach basic things. They teach nonsense, like quere studies, lezbien studies, hate-Whitey studies, non-White studies, marxism, unrestricted sex and binge drinking.
So it’s no surprise that big corporations won’t hire Americans, and are welcoming foreigners with open arms.
Have you noticed? No White Americans are getting jobs.
My Grandpappy had a favorite quote:
"If you want a degree, got to college. If you want an education, go to the library."
Apparently Frank Zappa and Gramps were of like mind on the subject.
"If you want to get laid, go to college, but if you want an education, go to the library."--- Frank Zappa
I'd put it even earlier. Our boys had to be pretty proficient with fractions and percentages in elementary school, and so for that matter, did I. My former mother-in-law had an 8th grade education, and I'd stack her up favorably against many college graduates I meet today. It's just another form of inflation - everyone has to have a college diploma, so the rigor of the college curriculum is reduced to permit everyone to succeed.
The number of respondents is too small for this to be believed with much accuracy. When they do a survey of more than 10,000 students that I can verify, Iwill believe.
Not to say that we have problems - this just smacks of a “Hey, let’s get in the newspapers” study.
Note that the sentence read “Killian said.” He’s speaking, not writing. Most of us speak in a far less formal and grammatically correct fashion than we write. Using “that” instead of “who” is a pet peeve of mine, too, but not in rapid speech.
A few years back one of the part-time girls at our store told the boss that she was going to be going to college. We were more than a little surprised because this girl was far from the sharpest tack in the pack. She got a Pell grant that paid for her tuition and books and she even had enough money left over to buy a pretty decent used car.
Well, come to find out her first year in college she was taking all REMEDIAL courses. Why, why would a state college be offering remedial courses?!? Well, as expected she bombed out of her first semester, but still she received more Pell grant money for the next semester. She ended up dropping out of that semester.
What we find to be totally unbelievable is that the next year she got yet another grant and went to a technical school. We lost track of her, so I don't know what ever became of it, but this is how the government wastes our money and drives down the average literacy score of all the college students.
bump
“I’ve met an inordinate number of young teachers who can’t spell, add or subtract, let alone construct meaningful sentences—and there seems to be more of them every year.”
I am convinced that many of the teachers today are the “second (or maybe even third) string.” The first string women (for the most part) were the teachers, nurses and secretaries through the 1950’s. Then they began to be accepted into the professions. Now, the first string go on to get their MBAs, PhDs, Law degrees, medical degrees, etc.
Problem is, now days the getting laid starts in middle school, hence the government schools are passing out pretend birth control methods starting in middle school.
By the time most kids reach college age they are already have been indoctrinated in the ad campaigns that sex sells all products and their immediate vehicle for purchasing is easy credit cards.
It goes deeper than that.
I spent several semesters as an adjunct professor at a major state school, teaching an upper division course in advertising.
To my dismay, at the very first class session I discovered that only six out of 36 students could correctly solve a simple division problem -- even with the use of a calculator.
In a business writing course, the objective was to get students to the point where they could compose one intelligible paragraph -- without misspellings or grammatical errors -- in one semester.
The students were, for the most part, bright eyed and eager to learn. Problem was: Nobody had ever taught them anything.
Left-wing university professors intent on indoctrinating rather than teaching are one thing. A public education system that doesn't provide a functional "reading, writing and 'rithmatic" competency is quite another.
Hah! Yer all as dumb as me are!
It does seem a bit much to assume that colleges can take up the slack for the inadequacies of primary education. Remedial classes are, after all, an attempt to remediate a previous failure. It strikes me that this sort of thing is better addressed by simply denying admission to the ignorant, but then that's judgmental, isn't it? Discriminatory? Those are Bad Words.
I tend to agree, especially in the case of young teachers. The situation is often different with career changers who turn to teaching after having stayed home with kids for some years. I know a number of very intelligent women who are "sitting on" MBA's and raising kids. They don't all wish to re-enter the rough and tumble world of business. Quite a few are re-discovering the family-friendly work schedule of teaching, light office work, etc. It's not unusual for women to make a lot of changes to accommodate the changing needs of their families.
As a philosophy major who works with engineers (all kinds) and physicists, I would say that choice of major does not assure that basic writing ability or clarity is present.
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