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.
If by "practical use" you mean making money, then knowing who Lindbergh was might never be useful—it is unlikely that such knowledge would ever earn anyone so much as a dime.
But the author is trying to make a different point. The students who do not know about Lindbergh are the same ones who have never bothered to learn much else. (That is why they are put into "developmental" courses.) The author observes,
In all likelihood, therefore, the developmental students had heard the name Charles Lindbergh. It's just that 90% never cared enough to follow through. They never looked him up in a reference book or on the web. They never asked their parents or teachers. They just shrugged and went on with their lives.The author argues that such students are not college material because they lack the desire to learn. As he writes near the end of the piece,
In other words, you can teach facts. You can teach skills. But you can't teach intellectual curiosity. If students haven't caught the bug after twelve years of elementary and secondary school, if they don't prize knowledge for its own sake, nothing their college professors do or say is going to remedy that lack.