This article, from Newsweek, How Dumb Are We? presents some of the problems with education which have been problematic for decades. I think this quote sums up the point quite well:

They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

Don’t get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they’ve existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. And they’ve been lamenting the philistinism of their peers ever since pollsters started publishing these dispiriting surveys back in Harry Truman’s day. (He was a president, by the way.) According to a study by Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, the yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World War II have averaged out to “slightly less than 1 percent.”

But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us.

Over a fifth of adults believe light sabres exist
http://derrenbrown.co.uk/blog/2011/03/adults-light-sabres-exist

Why does U.S. fail in science education?
http://www.postgazette.com/pg/11079/1133328-84.stm

Part of the reason for that, Mr. Pellathy said, is a broad attitudinal problem that many American students and their parents share.

In Asian countries and other parts of the world, parents believe that doing well in science is mostly a matter of hard work. But in many American households, he said, there is a more of a belief in innate ability.

This post (i.e. ‘We’ are pretty dumb), is similar to one I wrote several weeks ago, describing the fact that the Jay Leno-on the street interviews were not that far off the mark. This Newsweek article describes the fact that there are too many poorly educated former’ high school students out there, with that is, with the exception that they are reasonably well versed in the ephemera of pop culture. There is an obvious implication here, that we, as a society are not doing a good enough job. There is also an implication that what separates the USA from a third world country is far less than many would be willing to consider.

Is this the ‘fault’ of teachers, or school administrators? Is it the political climate? Is it the ‘fault’ of ‘pop culture’, or parents? My best guess is that it is all of the above, with bits of responsibility accorded to the students too… I know that this sounds rather harsh, but there are some tangible results which we can all see; the process which brought us so many poorly educated citizens goes back to a time when issues like this were not given much consideration (i.e. seemingly forever). It just seems that we are moving into a time where being educated is becoming more and more important… because the world is getting smaller (I hate this metaphor…), that the world is relying more and more on complex technology, and that our culture is changing at an ever increasing rate (making more things obsolete, more quickly).

Are there answers to this problem? Sure, there are plenty of small scale ‘answers’ out there, the fact is that while we, when taken in the aggregate are dumb, but there are still lots of hard working, bright students, and motivated teachers…The point here, is that the number of these people, who would seem to take these issues seriously are a minority. They have always been the minority.

What are some possible outcomes to this, if extrapolated in time? The prospect of a self fulfilling prophesy some to mind, in that we are looking at the beginnings of stratified society, of the knowledge haves and have-nots, of the people who are successful in a global market, and those who seemingly self selecting themselves for marginal roles in their futures.

When compared to the ideal which we base our society on, this sounds pretty terrible, doesn’t it?

This is also, at least from the presentation I am making (e.g. that this is a far bigger scope of problems than merely a sloppy and inefficient education system), a problem which may have roots as deep (and likely quite similar) to any of the host of other society level problems we are bedeviled with. Just what is this problem?

Be Sociable, Share!

•