They're not college material.
Due to the fact that there are far few fields left from which young Americans can cnoose they opt for college.
Here is the issue, and allow me to just ponder for a bit, honors students know who Charles Lindbergh is because they READ. They read for fun, they read to quench a thirst for knowledge, they read when they are bored. They read. Therefore, they can string a sentence together reasonably well and not need remedial English.
Put two and two together.
One thing I often hear is, “how will this affect me when I leave here?” This usually is asked in exasperation over grammar verb tenses. My answer is, “I don't know. But neither do you. You have no idea, really, what you'll be doing 20 years from now and if you don't learn it, you will be limiting your choices.” I try to encourage the students to seek knowledge beyond the classroom and just for the joy of knowing things.
So far, I'm not sure if I've been successful at all.
I think the age requirement that requires teens to remain in high school destroys many young men who have natural skills in trade or craft oriented professions.
Yep, and I’ll bet they don’t recognize the names Karl Marx, George Orwell, Friedrich Engles, etc. That’s why Obama is so attractive, they have no idea what socialism, communism, statism, fascism, etc are.
My question to this person would be: of what practical use is it to know who Lindbergh might be? Or about our nation’s history? Or the U.S.Constitution?
I did not know that I would later need to know algebra as a designer of electrical circuits? Algebra made no sense to me when I was 15-years old. Why would I need to know it for an Art Major? Making it a requirement was stupid to me. Same goes for having to know grammar; adverbs, adjectives - I didn’t care one wit!
We, as students, were required to learn by rote and not by practical application. It wasn’t until I was nearly 34-years old that I understood how important mathematics and grammer really were to the average person.
But our educational system seems to have screwed us all.
This is an update on the “cultural literacy” idea promoted by E.D. Hirsch, who went on to found the Core Knowledge Foundation. Hirsch basically argued that many young Americans have difficulty learning because they do not share a common base of culturally transmitted knowledge. Is that because they were not curious enough to inquire further about unfamiliar terms when they encountered them? Sometimes. But more often, these young people come from cultural minorities who do not value reading and whose encounters with mainstream American culture are confined largely to trashy TV shows.
Last night while my husband and 17 year old son watched the football game, they were chatting about the book my son is reading—C.S. Lewis’s “The Great Divorce.” I could hear my son reading quotes to my husband from the book and then getting very excited about what he was reading. I have to say that it warmed my heart!
Ping for later.
I think the more plausible explanation is that universities have marketed themselves for two generations as worth attending because “you will get a better job and earn more money than if you don’t have a degree.” That’s the main reason why far too many members of each high school cohort attend college.
Then, in the last 20 years or so, in order to compete in marketing against each other, colleges have ratched up the peripherals: pretty campus, nice dorms, gourmet food, “college” atmosphere, superior coddling of first-year students (a big seller among helicopter parents) and so forth. So they go to college for the “college experience” and colleges bend over backwards to give it to them in a way that they hope will set them apart from their competitors.
Faculty are expressly told not to get in the way of this marketing work. Demanding too much of students, thinking that it’s all about intellectual curiosity or reading the world’s great minds or reading anything at all (it’s all about gadgets and the classroom-as-variety-show-atmosphere; the teacher’s fundamental job is to keep them entertained; the students’ primary complaint on teacher evaluations is “she’s boring”)—all these are forbidden.
We are teaching at a high school level for most students. Honors programs are the islands where something like what would have qualified as higher education forty years ago still goes on. Maybe.
Colleges have brought this on themselves by turning to a business/marketing model. Faculty lost governance years ago; policies are set by people with graduate degrees in University Administration who by definition don’t know what it’s like to be scholars, only what it’s like to administer and market products.
Parents who care about education need to send their children to the new start-up colleges (I’m familiar largely with the new Catholic start-ups—Thomas Aquinas College in California, Wyoming Catholic, Christendom in Virginia, St. Thomas More in New Hampshire—and some reverts—Belmont Abbey College, Assumption College, Benedictine in Kansas etc. I’m not sure there’s much of the same sort of thing going on either in the secular or Evangelical Protestant worlds—Patrick Henry College would be the exception, I suppose.)
During a conversation I once had about these sort of issues with the dean of my college at UF, the dean told me that for too many incoming freshman, high school was just too easy. And he’s right.
Students breeze through their high schools with minimal effort. Teachers tell them exactly what’s on the tests. If they pay mild attention in class they don;t even need to study. Essays are not graded hard (the history teacher does not take points off for bad spelling and grammar). Homework ranges from light to non-existant. Now we have a movement to get rid of the SAT and ACT.
But Brawndo has electrolytes.
Approximately 10% of legitimately graduating twelfth-grade students can earn a legitimate baccalaurate degree.
Of course, since half of the graduating HS seniors are not capable of twelfth-grade work, the fraction of the population that should go to college is about 5%.
College is subsidised, politically and culturally powerful.
Let a kid try to open a cabinet shop, an engine custom shop.
Government inspectors, tax forms, licenses, permits, fees, lawyers, accountants.
Henry Ford couldn’t start in his garage today, nor the Wright Brothers.
for later
80 years from now even fewer people will remember who Lindbergh was. Get over it!
Who was the most famous artist or traveler in 400 B.C.? Huh? What don't remember? You must be illiterate!
This is racist. The developmental students would know who Kanye West is, while the nerdy white-bread getting their ‘good’ grades probably would not.
As a college professor, I agree with much of what the author says about intellectual curiosity. Many kids today just want to get an A without doing the work. Not that it wasn’t true in my time (it was), but not to the degree I see today. At least back then a lot of students realized that not learning would come back to haunt them later; now, a lot don’t seem to care.
Frankly, I shudder at the prospect of “college for everyone”. Colleges are already filled with kids who either aren’t ready for college or (perhaps) never will be. In many cases, these kids should get jobs and gain some maturity and appreciation for the opportunity first.
I take a little bit of an issue with his “Lindbergh” example. While I certainly know who Lindbergh was, he was a cultural icon back in the 20s and 30s. So, ... its a bit much to expect a teenager from today to know who he was—especially when many can’t remember recent Presidents.
Who cares what football team Charles Lindbergh was quarterback for...
:-)
I teach at a university part-time, and started not long ago.
I’m startled to find that fully 1/3 of my students fail _consistently_ - not because the material is hard, and not because I am a hard grader (very lenient in fact), but because they utterly fail to enough objective work.
I would guess over half of the people in college have no business being there, and are wasting their time and money.