Readin’, Ritin’, ‘Rithmetic

At the American Council on Science and Health Alex Berezow is dissatisfied with the state of American K-12 education. I’m in general agreement that there should be a re-emphasis on the tradition definitions of literacy as reading, comprehension, expressing your comprehension in writing, and basic arithmetic. But he lost me in his very first paragraph:

Literacy is typically defined as the ability to read and write and do basic math. However, in the 21st Century, that is simply insufficient. To be a truly literate member of society — and to have a government capable of enacting competent policies — one must have a fundamental grasp of science, technology, and economics.

The devil is in the details. All of those goals—reading, writing, basic math, grasp of civics, science, technology, and economics—are defined arbitrarily not just in the United States but everywhere. In some places and for some people reading means the ability to read Plato’s Republic in the original. In others it means the ability to recognize passages of the Qur’an that you’ve memorized based on the shapes of the letters. In still others it means being able to read street signs.

If by “technology” is meant vendor-specific knowledge, it’s futile. Change is too rapid. Here are some of this definitions:

Civics. Americans do not have a sufficient grasp of how our republic works. One statistic poignantly depicts this truth: Only one in three Americans can name the three branches of government. Given that profound ignorance, is it any wonder that Americans also don’t understand what the President can and cannot do, the role of Congress, or how elections work? Really, these are lessons of which any grade school child should be familiar.

I continue to be astonished at how few adult, educated Americans understand how our system works. Not how it works in theory but how it works in practice. Except among a rarified few the level of knowledge is about at the level of Schoolhouse Rock. That’s better than nothing but not nearly enough.

Economics. There is no avoiding the economic laws of supply and demand. Policies that decrease supply and/or increase demand will cause prices to rise. Policies that increase supply and/or decrease demand will cause prices to fall. These “laws” apply as much to apples and oranges as they do to healthcare, the labor force, and currency exchange rates. The fact that economics is not required for all students to graduate high school is a national travesty.

I will tell you with confidence that it is not possible to teach even a basic understanding of economics without venturing into some level of indoctrination. When I was taking Economics 101, the indoctrination was strongly Keynesian. I have no idea what it is now but I’m confident that it’s there.

In its best form economics should be a science of human behavior and, yes, I think that everyone should have some understanding of human behavior. How you do that without getting into indoctrination is beyond me.

Technology. It goes without saying that comfort with technology is vital to being a productive citizen in the 21st Century. As globalization increases competition and digital technology takes over the economy, high schools should require all students to take computer science. A basic understanding of computer programming could help create a more literate and competitive workforce.

What does elementary school computer science consist of? High school? I really don’t know. I suspect it’s vendor-specific knowledge but it’s beyond my ken.

I think that people would be better off learning how to organize themselves into groups to accomplish specific projects as a team than they would learning “technology” as Dr. Berezow seems to think of it. But that’s my point. The requirements of reading can be well-defined. The requirements of basic math can be well-defined. Just about everything else is a matter of opinion.

And how does he plan to accomplish those goals in environments in which half of the students don’t even complete their senior year in high school under our system as it is?

11 comments… add one
  • PD Shaw Link

    One of the issues is that schools and states increasing the minimum requirements, it crowds out other courses. I looked at my high school’s website to try to refresh my memory and was surprised at the number of requirements for all graduates that used to be only electives for college-bound, and the only course requirement that was reduced was physical education from 3 years to 1. I remember taking two years of extra classes before school started to get in all of the classes I wanted to take. Economics is about scarcity.

  • I haven’t thought about this in about a half century but IIRC my senior year high school curriculum was

    AP English (basically college major English Lit.)
    Religion (2nd year college theology major prerequisites)
    AP Russian (4th year–we read Russian poetry, short stories, some short novels in Russian)
    AP Latin (we read the Aeneid in Latin)
    Greek (2nd year)
    AP Math (2nd year calculus)
    AP Physics
    Physical Education

    A lot of the above was prep for taking the Advanced Placement examinations. IIRC I took six (I added honors history to the above). We took a lot of tests. In addition to the ACTs, the SATs, the National Merit, and the AP exams, I also took the American Actuarial Society’s test.

    What’s an “elective”? 😉

    We were busy. I left home at 7:00am in the morning and returned at 9:00pm in the evening. I was involved in lots of activities.

  • michael reynolds Link

    High School is much tougher than when I was in, and the stakes are far higher. These kids can’t even skip class without a nationwide manhunt starting. Electives are nearly gone, it’s a bunch of STEM and now interwoven with liberal artsy stuff so that even if you’re good at English or good at Science, you can manage to fail both.

    The single most useful thing we could do is teach kids how to think. We refuse to do that because logic and epistemology and such lead straight to agnosticism and atheism. So we demand kids learn without ever teaching them how. Run, Jane, run, but do it while you wear mommy’s blinders and daddy’s shackles.

    The entire universe of human knowledge is inside my kids’ iPhones and schools do nothing to teach kids how to exploit this technological miracle. They sit there listening to a teacher drone on from an outdated, twenty-pound textbook whose off-label use is as a coma-inducing agent, and then it’s time for a group project the purpose of which is to embarrass the slow and burden the quick.

    What a staggering waste of time and resources. Give me two days and nothing but YouTube and Wikipedia and I will give you a student who will walk away knowing more about history than they’ll learn in four years of HS.

  • Basically, I think that all high school (at least) history classes are propaganda. Whether you think they’re worthwhile or not depends mostly on whether you like the propaganda.

    I won’t go as far as Henry Ford but his assessment is pretty good as a first order approximation. Anything you’ve learned about history prior to about 1400 is bunk and most of what you’ve learned after that is propaganda.

  • michael reynolds Link

    David:

    The propaganda aspect is what I’d like to try and reduce. It’s a big part of the problem with teaching history. On a personal note, historical ignorance gets in the way of my work. I’ve written an alt-history trilogy based in WW2, and had great fun doing it, but the abject ignorance of the audience makes it very, very hard to move beyond such headline events. Not that they are taught anything useful about WW2, but at least they’ve heard it mentioned.

  • Since what most Americans know about anything comes from television and movies it shouldn’t be surprising at how much propaganda there is. Most WWII movies are explicitly propaganda, for example.

    One of the things that concerns me about the whole trigger warning nonsense is the temptation to screen anything unpleasant or provocative out. We should watch the WWII Japanese hate pictures, e.g. The Purple Heart. How else will we understand what people felt about what they were experiencing?

    Not long ago I watched a very fine recent movie called The Railway Man. It’s about the PTSD suffered long after WWII by a British soldier who was held prisoner by the Japanese. It’s bound to offend somebody. I recommend it.

    On an unrelated topic when I was in college the experts swore up and down that shell shock, combat fatigue, and stress reaction were all different phenomena. We now call all of them post-traumatic stress disorder.

  • michael reynolds Link

    When I do school visits I show a clip of a Goebbels anti-semitic propaganda film that explicitly compares Jews to rats. I also run a montage of dead from the camps, from the battlefield, but also from Allied bombing. It’s all quite gruesome, and there’s been no push-back from administrators, but then again I’ve mostly been presenting in the UK and ANZ.

    Got a glowing review from a US teacher who said that Front Lines should be on school curricula, but then admitted because there is some brief, off-camera sex in the second volume that she could not bring it to middle schoolers – the intended audience.

    Kids are not only receptive to, they are also grateful for, nuance and shades of gray. We underestimate them. I’ve made a career out of moral ambiguity. We cut all ‘the good stuff’ and then wonder why they find history (or reading generally) boring. A writing buddy of mine, Daniel Handler, (AKA Lemony Snicket,) gave a now-notorious presentation for a panel I was on a few years back. In front of a couple hundred librarians and publishing people he read an extended excerpt of a decidedly explicit sex scene from The Mambo Kings, then in effect pointed out that if we want boys to read maybe we should not remove all the stuff they like.

  • I wonder what the administrators’ reaction to pro-war propaganda would be? Example: the end of Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent.

    On a vaguely related topic I think that The Best Years of Our Lives should be required viewing. My wife and I have forced a number of Millennials to watch it. It’s always knocked their socks off. They just had no idea.

  • steve Link

    “the experts swore up and down that shell shock, combat fatigue, and stress reaction were all different phenomena. We now call all of them post-traumatic stress disorder.”

    It is remarkable how differently this was expressed in different eras. Not that difficult to see how they would think they were different.

    Steve

  • michael reynolds Link

    The first time I saw Best Years of Our Lives was a long time ago, on TV. I knew nothing about it, had no expectations and suddenly I get one of those lovely moments when someone’s art just cuts right into your heart. What a ballsy, honest movie. Wyler had already done Mrs. Miniver and Wuthering Heights, and this could have been his mike drop moment. But he did go on to direct a few more trifles and achieve some success.

  • michael reynolds Link

    Steve:

    Interestingly by the start of WW2 shrinks had a pretty good picture (albeit incomplete) of shell shock, battle fatigue or PTSD, but it took a while for the brass to get on board. (Looking at you, George) And of course in the later months of the war the soldiers themselves had a sort of generosity toward people who suffered it. There are all kinds of stories of good, seasoned soldiers just one day losing it and walking to the rear. Their buddies typically understood, and a day or two later that AWOL would come back.

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