On NOW at RadioFR!
Join John Bender and …WISH MERRY CHRISTMAS TO OUR MEN IN UNIFORM! Call 866-RadioFR!
Posted on 12/19/2002 3:08:50 AM PST by kattracks
(CNSNews.com) - The college seniors of today have no better grasp of general knowledge than the high school graduates of almost half a century ago, according to the results of a new study.
The average of correct responses for modern college seniors on a series of questions assessing "general cultural knowledge" was 53.5 percent compared with 54.5 percent of high school graduates in 1955, according to a survey by Zogby International.
The Zogby poll of 401 randomly selected college seniors was conducted in April for the Princeton, N.J.-based National Association of Scholars and released Wednesday.
"The average amount of knowledge that college seniors had was just about the same as the average amount of knowledge that high school graduates had back in the 1950s," said NAS President Stephen H. Balch.
Balch noted that the high school grads of half a century ago performed better than today's college seniors on history questions, while contemporary students fared better on questions covering art and literature, with no appreciable difference on geography questions.
The questions asked in the April poll by Zogby were virtually the same as questions asked by the Gallup Organization in 1955, with a few questions being slightly modified to reflect history.
"The questions were just about identical, as identical as we could make them," said Balch. "In most cases, they were absolutely identical."
Balch attributed the stagnation of performance on general knowledge questions to several factors, including a decreased emphasis on general knowledge in high school, placing colleges and universities in the position of having to fill academic gaps among students entering college.
"This is fundamental knowledge that everyone should have and if your students are being admitted without it, then that only reinforces the need for you to take general education seriously," Balch said.
But Balch said he didn't consider such actions to be remedial in nature, noting that "the remedial problems have to do with students not being able to write or read at the eighth grade level and still getting into college. There are many institutions in which that's a difficulty. You have people who just don't have the skills let alone the knowledge."
Even though the NAS study raises questions about the caliber of general education offered in high schools, colleges and universities also bear some responsibility, Balch said.
"I think it probably has a lot to do with the dumbing down of curriculum, both at the college and high school level," said Balch. "It looks good, certainly, to say 'more people are graduating from college,' but is there any real intellectual yield from it?"
Also part of the problem is that many colleges are placing less emphasis on liberal arts education in favor of more specialized education geared toward specific career paths, which Balch said isn't necessarily in the best interest of students or society.
"I think these results, which don't seem to show a great deal of value-added in the general cultural knowledge domain - I think these results are quite interesting and disappointing," said Balch. "We would hope that the college students of today would have done a good deal better than the high school students of the past."
Also contributing to the trend is an easing of college admissions standards. While Balch doesn't advocate a return to standards requiring competency in Greek or Latin, he does say colleges should "insist that the student coming have basic areas of knowledge."
A solid background in general knowledge, Balch said, is "very important both for good citizenship and, for many people at least, for a happy and interesting life," by providing students with what Balch called "cultural furniture that allows them to be better citizens."
Click here to read the general knowledge questions.
Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.
That is so naive and simplistic I could throw up. I fear you are only fractionally as smart as you smugly seem to think you are.
How could we have survived without your wisdom on FR for so long???
Â÷ÈÄ, °¡Á· ȨÆäÀÌÁö³ª, ¼îÇθô, µ¿È£È¸, µ¿Ã¢È¸ µîµî °·ÂÇÑ ±â´ÉÀÇ È¨ÆäÀÌÁö¸¦ ±¸Ãà ¿î¿µÇÏ½Ç °èȹÀÌ ÀÖÀ¸½Ã´Ù¸é À̹ø±âȸ¿¡ ²À ±¸¸Å ÇØ µÎ½Ã±æ ¹Ù¶ø´Ï´Ù.
À̹øµµ ¸¶Âù°¡Áö·Î ¹Ï°í °Å·¡ÇÏ½Ç ¼ö ÀÖµµ·Ï ¿Á¼ÇÀ» ÅëÇØ ÆǸŠÇÕ´Ï´Ù.
And that's all I have to say on this subject so don't try arguing with me!
I wasn't referring to "organized sports" but games we organized ourselves; which was my point!--a lost art. Yes, we had organized basketball and volleyball for girls starting in Jr. Hi.
The reasons kids are fat is because they eat many more calories per day than in perivous years. They eat for entertainment and not just at meal time. They eat because they are affluent enough to eat out more often and to snack more often.
They are fat because they are inactive! They eat out more because there's nobody home to cook and serve food. I think it's funny that you don't realize that we had plenty to eat. If you like homemade cakes, pies, cookies. We weren't poor but even poor people ate better then; they grew their own. We also had a bakery that served freshly made cookies, pies and doughnuts everyday. You could buy the best hamburgers you ever ate for 15 cents or two for a quarter.
We ate out every Sunday; frequently drove to the Gulf coast to eat seafood--I liked broiled flounder. Usually we ate beans, peas, potatoes, corn, turnip greens, yams and cornbread. And we ate it the day or day after it was picked. Farmers brought it to town. The grocery stores bought produce from local farmers and everything was fresh. We ate shrimp and steak. We ate a lot of fresh fruit for snacks. We ate Cool Aid out of the bag! My uncle owned the biggest grocery in town and it had a "Kiddie Corral" where mothers left their kids to play, read comic books are whatever. They didn't have to worry about something happening to them while they shopped.
I live 6 blocks from the house my parents built when I was 12 years old. I'm comparing the 50s to today in the same neighborhood in the same town. It was better then. People were happy--maybe they didn't know better, but they were happy. I didn't know a kid without a mother and father due to divorce until third grade.
True, we didn't have seat belts and we had some of the highest speed-limits ever. That was bad.
I wouldn't trade those days for a seat-belt!
See #167
On NOW at RadioFR!
Join John Bender and …WISH MERRY CHRISTMAS TO OUR MEN IN UNIFORM! Call 866-RadioFR!
I'm still game for that quiz challenge. And since I will most likely be totally buzzed on Scotch that day, cynicom will have the advantage. But, as I said, PJ drunk will still BEAT cynicom sober.
...although, I'm sure that they "new" when to use "new" versus "knew". duuuuu!
Ah, bite me. I didn't know Belgium.
This is all general information that I learned by the sixth grade, in 1960.
Well I entered sixth grade in 1975. By the time I left it in 1978, they stopped teaching about that pastry chef Napoleon.
Our superintendent taught us Civics and in 1956 he told us that integration would not be a problem and was way past time. He said the problem would be the federal government would use it to take over the schools and that would be the end of our education system.
Oh that I were as smart as these youngsters, many whom can't identify their home state on a map!
We lived in the country, in poverty -the real thing. We rode horses all over the country, walked all over the country, day or night. We listened to rock and roll - but at our parties we played ring games. We did have walking games, where we could walk 'around the house' with our boyfriends, but we better walk very fast if we wanted enough time to steal a kiss because some adult was mentally timing us. I wish my children had known just a little of that.
That's a very nice thing you just said. I agree
I am the granny now and compared to my Granny, I am not fit to wear the name. She was a wonder. She only finished 4th grade, but read anything and everything with a dictionary beside her chair. She could fix or build anything that she could handle, and could understand how mechanical things worked. She could converse with anyone on any subject. Spent her last years corresponding with politicians, authors, columnists, etc. I think about her almost every time I sit down at the computer and wish she had had the opportunity to experience this. She would have been 'heck on wheels' here on FR.
I've been assigned to higher-ed institutions for the company I work for the better part of 13 years. Mostly at the community college level, some at 4-year college and university level.
At the community college level, we're seeing record numbers of HS students take High School Enrichment courses - basically college level courses for high schoolers. Technology links several schools together. It's good for both students and the colleges.
You also see more and more students who seem unprepared for college. Yes, they may have technical skills, but they often lack the breadth of skills that prepare them for college and life after college. An area this is readily apparent is in the area of research for assignments, etc. Google, etc make available a lot of information. But many students do not have the skills to perform a test to determine the quality of the information presented. And when they do put together their research papers, it's quite a bit of cut and paste and they lack many of the skills to put their research into a generally accepted format and style. From my perspective, it's a case of where the technology brings all this information together, but many kids are ill-prepared to analyze this data brought to them by the Internet and then place into a meaningful form.
Many 4-year Colleges in New York State are expanding their General Ed requirements. I asked an associate of this and he said it was because the courses that HS folks took in years past (languages, certain history courses, etc) are not being taught to a level that was preparing students for college and so, the General Ed requirements compensate for that. It's good for the colleges - they ensure that students will be taking more classes, which generates more revenue. But it makes you wonder what is being taught in HS.
I work in the telecommunications field, but I wish I had availed myself of more courses in the Liberal Arts area. The Classics, for example, don't just teach you about history, but they give you the information about how people arrived at decisions they did thousands of years ago, and to a large extent, still arrive at decisions today. I started taking Latin in May of this year. I've not only learned about Roman culture, but also Latin syntax and grammatical constructs and also many of the same constructs in English (again but well worth the effort (e.g. ablative of means, indirect object, etc)). It may not help me do my job per se, but it helps to provide the ability to think and analyze which can be of benefit in one's job. Maybe it would be of benefit of HS students as well.
K-12 needs to re-evaluate itself. Concepts like Outcome Based Education, mainstreaming children will special learning needs, etc have in part caused unintended consequences for many students. Add to that a family makeup for many kids that hinders kids getting the guidance and perspective they need while they are growing up and I can understand why some kids have problems in HS, and later in college.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.