Susan Jacoby thinks we’re a “nation of dunces” who are smug about our ignorance.
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job.
Jules Crittenden responds to Jacoby’s slur on schools
About achievement testing, it’s much decried by those who say it is unfair to the underprivileged, non-English speakers, over-simplifies, forces teachers to teach to the test, etc. I’d suggest it’s unfair to those who don’t study. Requiring children to actually demonstrate knowledge of math, English and science in order to graduate may be the single greatest educational innovation of our time, forcing schools that had demonstrably not been teaching at all to at least teach for the test. And rather than simply encouraging rote instruction, the testing impetus has required teachers to see to it that students grasp the basics and become literate if they hope to graduate, something our prior system did not.
There’s nothing new about American politicians appealing to the common man. It’s a chicken in every pot, not a copy of War and Peace, after all. I don’t think we’re stupider than in the past, if only because the bar is very low. We certainly have many more years of schooling.
As for “stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests,” that’s cheating. Teachers don’t know the “specific questions” that will be asked, unless test security has been violated. They know the skills and knowledge that are likely to be tested and the format of questions.
Compared to past eras, rote learning has become a rarity: Some teachers won’t drill kids on the times tables, much less force them to memorize long lists of names, dates and definitions, as I did in the halcyon ’60s. 1777? Battle of Saratoga!
But what is significant about the Battle of Saratoga?
There’s a time and a place for rote memorization. I never thought that the “names, dates, and places” school of history teaching was a good one. Tell the hi*story*, and students will grok the meaning.
Times tables and standard algorithms? Memorize ‘em.
I watch 15-year-old honors-level students pull out calculators to figure out what percentage 47 out of 50 is! If I try to put events in perspective (such as Emily Dickinson lived during the US Civil War, they’re as likely to think that was in the 17th century as the 19th. No one can convince me that lack of rote learning hasn’t hurt today’s students.
Saratoga was the military turning point of the Revolutionary War. My eighth-grade social studies used to fill the blackboard with names, dates and places to memorize every time we started a new unit. I love U.S. history and have a very good memory, but even I found it tedious.
Here’s a good example of reasonable competition:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/business/worldbusiness/17france.html?pagewanted=1
In France, roughly 130,000 students compete for 400 seats at the two top universities.
Yes, I’m sure the do-gooders and the bleeding-hearts will hate it, but intelligence and hard work matter. To say, as the “progressives” do, that all that matters is self-esteem etc. is stupid beyond belief.
Plain and simple - there’s two realms of knowledge… the discreet and absolute, and then the conceptual. One requires memorization, the other understanding, and any education is incomplete without both.
Super
I like that. But isn’t discrete/absolute another way of saying facts?
Elementary and middle school should be about memorization. Many of my 8th graders aren’t really capable of abstract thought at this point.
As an example, I teach my 7th graders about the reconquista and about the exploration of the Americas. Yet despite repeated prompts, none of my students in 7 years have been able to connect the two things, despite my prompts about both occuring in 1492.
Let high school and college develop meaning and interconnection.
For many kids, the dark ages are here.
It’s not whether they do rote learning or not so much as growing up unchurched in a sea of immoral teachings. No one is telling them the truth, and they are lost and confused. All they know of a moral viewpoint they’ve learned from South Park and Jon Stewart.
Very strange and very sad.
So much better to give them religion in one of the “prosperity gospel” churches, I suppose.
South Park deflates hypocrites, especially moralizing hypocrites. I cannot think of a better function of entertainment. If there is anything that is going to make kids amoral or immoral, it’s hypocrisy from those claiming to teach morality. They deserve to be lampooned, so that the cream can rise to the top.
Gee Engineer-Poet,
You give a great illustration of what I mean. But you have no idea what I was talking about and no interest. It’s South Park for you. Enjoy.
But I sure wish some of the kids I teach had much, much more. The largest concern that I see consistently is a concern about the brokenness of their lives and a worry about the transience of relationships.
This comment from a sixteen-year-old girl’s essay on her American dream is typical: “I also hope that I don’t follow in my mom’s footsteps and marry someone who cares about himself and not his family. Instead, I hope that the guy I marry is someone whose family is the most important thing in the world, a guy who is content staying at home playing a game with his children instead of hunting. I hope I marry someone that I don’t have to divorce, someone with whom I could work out any problems we might have. The type of guy that family is the most important to him. The ultimate gift in life is the gift of love, and that is exactly what I hope to find in the future.”
The trouble is, she doesn’t know how to find such a guy and she doesn’t know very much, either, about how it is that you can live with someone for decades and “work out any problems” that arise.
By far the most powerful and useful and intelligent answers I know come from religion.
But obviously not any old religion. Those answers are not the property of religion at all, from the looks of them; I don’t see anything in that girl’s plaint that is answered by “God will sort it out for you”, so whatever solutions there may be can be used by anyone.
Then again, if she wants a devoted husband, you might want to tell her about the marriage strike and how the law and female behavior are making her desires all that much harder to achieve.
instructivist -
yup, I was talking about facts, but I used the other terms to make me sound all philisophical and edumacated.
Engineer-Poet -
I think the problem with simply relying on Comedy Central for moral guidance is that it only teaches skepticism. Watchers learn that it is bad to be a hypocrite. but also that it is ok to do bad things as long as you’re open and honest about it.
Most religion strives to teach individuals to do the right things no matter what, which is what today’s society needs a lot more of. Yes, there are hypocrites hidden among the churches, synagogues, etc. and religious organizations should be criticized for their part in promoting hypocrites, but these religious organizations still make up one of the primary tools to produce moral and charitable citizens.
The issues of marriage and religion are intertwined. Religion, and the stigma it puts upon divorce, adultery, and out-of-wedlock children, has been a major foundation for marriage and stable families. I’m preparing to be married in the Catholic Church and I have to say the steps one must take to be married in the Church definitely make you look before you leap.
“But what is significant about the Battle of Saratoga?”
little trivia - Benedict Arnold lost part of his leg at the battle, Saratoga had a statue to that part of the leg he lost.
The ability to reason, to put together diverse facts and reach conclusions, is useless if one has no facts to start with.
A traditional liberal education starts with the trivium, which itself starts with grammar. During this phase, a child is supposed to soak up facts, not reason with them. Reasoning with the facts comes in the later stages, dialectic and rhetoric. These stages are true of anyone trying to learn anything new. First you learn facts, then you learn to put them together and build expressions, then you learn to express yourself completely and reach new conclusions.
This stuff was worked out through trial and error over thousands of years. How is it forgotten in a few decades?
Rob,
That is as excatly as I feel.
You learn rote and memorization, not only because certain subject matters have to be learned that way (i.e., spelling, multiplication tables), but because it trains your brain and indicates your ability (sorry, but if you simply “can’t” rote memorize something, it probably indicates a lesser intelligence.) Also, the memorization of such things as poems, exposes you to correct grammar.
Children simply cannot abstractly reason before a certain age. Their brains are much better engaged before that in rote memorization, with the understanding that in the preschool years (and off-academics) they are given opportunity to explore, investigate, and play with a variety of materials and within a variety of situations.
It’s called expanding the mind.
cj- I like the point regarding mental training. I now have freshmen who complain if I make them read any passages over a paragraph long in my science course. True, part of the problem is likely that their previous science teachers inadvertantly taught them that reading was not required in science, but as many of them do stumble over words that should be common known for their age, I’m guessing that they simply haven’t spent time to train their brains to focus on anything. This is one of the biggest reasons I support the teaching of cursive handwriting, as it requires little more than focus, effort, and time.