The Council on Foreign Relations took a survey on what young people educated in America knew about geography, the environment, demographics, U. S. foreign policy, recent international events, and economics. Here were the results:
The average score on the survey’s knowledge questions was only 55 percent correct, and just 29 percent of respondents earned a minimal pass—66 percent correct or better.
If the sample questionnaire at the link is representative of the actual questions, they should all have gotten 100% correct. I did. The only question I hesitated on was about treaty obligations.
Maybe it’s true that we get the politicians we deserve. How do we get the educational system that we need?
“Maybe it’s true that we get the politicians we deserve. How do we get the educational system that we need?”
By not continuing to elect the politicians we deserve. Don’t hold your breath.
I missed two: treaty obligations, and the U.S. population as percentage of global population. I guess my sense of the treaty obligations is that of a continuum in which U.S. obligations are more clear w/NATO, than those commitments made in the Far East. But on further thought, I was simply wrong and this is an important issue.
On percentages, that was an asinine question, I was off by two percentage points. Congratulations Richard Haas, you’ve exposed the seedy underbelly of American problems with numerosity. How many states in the U.S.?
Which branch has the power to declare war?
Executive (48%)
Legislative (30%)
Department of Defense (11%)
Judicial (4%)
And these are the college students.
Yeah, that’s what a pal of mine grad school used to refer to as a “single choice, multiple response” question.
I got 100%, and so what? My vote counts for less than the idiot gender studies scholars, because those twerps will vote en masse for the Democratic candidates no matter what, and I’ve got no one worth voting for.
Incidentally, I voted the way I was supposed to vote on the Mexican immigration question. I don’t believe the numbers on Mexican immigration promulgated by our ruling class, and I haven’t in over a decade.
Kids don’t learn because we spend most of their school day teaching them useless crap. If you can look at your school work and realize that 90% of it will be forgotten within 24 hours of you learning it, and you will never have any further need of it once you beat the test, you forget it. The human brain is programmed to purge useless information.
I’ve got two teenagers, one in college, one in high school. They both attend(ed) very well-regarded schools. But still a third of their teachers are burn-outs or incompetent. God knows the people who create textbooks have no idea how to plant a fact in a human brain. And in an environment where the only acceptable purpose for education is to get a job, and the only things that matter are standardized tests, how is a kid supposed to give two shits about education?
My daughter is not an academic sort. She’s struggling with geometry in which I got a D. And that was generous. There is zero chance of either Julia (or me) ever, ever, ever using geometry in any job and she knows it. In the almost 50 years since I took that generous D, you know how many times I’ve wished I knew geometry? Maybe twice. You know how many times I wished I could perform basic carpentry or plumbing? Hundreds of times.
The curricula are irrelevant to real life (assuming that’s even the goal), the testing obsession annihilates curiosity, the books are written by committees of Texas goobers, every idiot politician from far left to far right has his fingers in the pie, schools don’t know what to do about the Age of Google and teaching is so top-down and admin-driven that I can’t imagine how anyone would want that job.
The truth is we don’t teach in schools, we warehouse kids and hope they become socialized in an environment that bears no similarity to the rest of their lives. Education is incidental. You have to really want to learn something and find a way to work around the obstacles placed in your path by the system. From Julia’s point of view high school is a place you go to be made to feel dumb because you struggle learning useless crap no one expects you to either use or remember. I despised school when I dropped out 46 years ago, and I have not had my opinion changed. A complete waste of time.
@Dave, a good friend who received a national academic recognition in law school repeatedly failed to pass the bar exam; his complaint was that he spent so much time learning exceptions to rules, competing rules, limitations on rules, and crazy applications of rules, that when handed multiple choice questions, he couldn’t identify the single best answer.
Sounds like he expected the body of law to be rational. It isn’t. Each individual decision by each individual judge is rational but that doesn’t mean that when taken as a whole it is. That’s why the Supreme Court exists.
Michael:
It sounds as though your youthful experience was very different from mine. I did okay in school but it was too easy. Mostly, I found it boring.
And my folks made sure I had basic skills. I took woodworking classes for what seemed like years, learned how to do basic plumbing and electric, painted, etc. I put myself through college by (among other things) rehabbing houses for a flipper.
PD:
Oh, I was perfectly capable of learning geometry. If you believe my math SAT I was in the top 15%, despite having missed two years of high school. But I knew myself. I knew I wasn’t a STEM person. I was never in any danger of being an engineer. So I knew I was wasting my time. Who willingly spends time learning something they don’t enjoy and consider useless? You might as well randomly assign me to learn the zither.
All learning is worthwhile if the object is to learn for fun or self-improvement. But school is not fun and it’s not about self-improvement. It’s about keeping you locked up while your folks are at work.
I have a basic question: why on earth is education punitive in nature? Learn X or you’ll get a bad grade, and be held back, and make your parents sad, and get extra homework. Learn X or we will hurt you. WTF is the logic there? I know a fair bit about writing now and none of it was learned via intimidation. Nothing I know came because I was forced to learn it.
I have fans who know details of my books that I’ve long-since forgotten. These 14 year-old kids are brilliantly close readers of 500 page books. Do you think they take the same interest in school assignments? No, of course not, because the assignment is boring. Because the curriculum is boring, and because we can’t motivate kids to give a shit about things they know perfectly well are irrelevant, we fall back on a system of teaching-by-intimidation.
Sorry, that was for Dave not PD.
I have no idea. Some of that may be perception on your part. My recollection is of both rewards and punishments. The praise of the teacher, gold stars being given, promotion from one class to another. Stuff like that. You might not have viewed any of the rewards as rewards.
When I was in school the punishments were certainly punishments including corporal punishment. I was struck by a teacher when I was in first grade. It probably contributed to my not learning how to read until the summer after (a story I’ve told before).
I now have four test cases, me, my wife, our two kids, and I will be damned if I see much point in school except as a convenient child prison – which is certainly necessary, but could perhaps be managed with less trauma.
Life made no sense to me until I started work. “I do X and you give me money?” That made sense. “Learn this useless crap so you can beat a test and promptly forget everything,” made no sense to me as a kid and makes no more sense now as a parent. We’re asking kids to find motivation in some wholly imaginary future involving these mythical places called “college” and, “job,” when 99% of adults can’t think past the next paycheck.
You cannot force people to learn, not and have it stick. People learn what they need to learn. They learn what amuses them or what profits them. Exactly the same thing with children. But for some reason with kids we demand that they work their butts off for years on the tentative promise of 40 years at a boring job. I wouldn’t put up with that kind of a deal. In fact, I didn’t.
Michael,
Have you heard of the unschooling movement? Sounds like something you might be interested in.
Andy:
We did that with our eldest for part of his education. But Jake’s real school was Google. The problem with my youngest is that unlike the rest of the family she is not a misanthropic hermit. She actually likes, even needs (!) human contact.