Mar. 3rd, 2008 02:10 pm
Perhaps to no-one's great surprise...
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textualdevianceAmerican teens are culturally illiterate
The argument that kids need basic reading and math to understand other subjects is, of course, valid. But given that basic competency in these things is also slipping (read any MySpace pages lately?) that's not exactly a good excuse.
If kids aren't learning language, math, or sociocultural topics, exactly WHAT is going on in classrooms? Anyone have a kid in public school or just got out of one who can tell me? Because I'm seriously bewildered. Is it just that no time is being spent on anything except test-taking skills, or are the students not being held accountable for actually learning?
Going by what I saw from many of my classmates while I was doing my recent degree thing, I suspect the answer is the latter. I saw some of the work that these kids were producing and it was absolute garbage. Yet they got passing grades anyway. I don't know if there was just a lot of passing pressure on the faculty, or if they had endured such low performance for so long that their own grading standards were low, but whatever the reason, these kids were getting good grades for crappy work. No wonder so many of the faculty adored me. It had probably been years since they saw many students who actually liked the subject and wanted to learn about it instead of just getting the piece of paper to get a job.
Unfortunately, the low standards are so deeply entrenched now that there isn't an easy way to get things back. Since most of these kids have been suffering with subpar education their whole lives, we can't just suddenly reset the bar at a reasonable level and expect them to reach it. Perhaps the only solution is a gradual raise, like the gradual slippage that has brought us here. The students who would normally get D's should be failed, those who normally get C's now get D's, etc. Yeah, some students and parents will pitch a fit (you mean my kid actually has to learn something?) but the kids who really do work hard and want to learn will no longer be dragged down to the level of their classmates.
In the GOP ideal world, only the kids of the rich get good educations--the rest of them are being groomed for their jobs in the growing service industry, so they supposedly don't need cultural education. But is that the kind of country we really want? Should we really have a caste system here, where your parentage determines your destiny? Ugh.
The argument that kids need basic reading and math to understand other subjects is, of course, valid. But given that basic competency in these things is also slipping (read any MySpace pages lately?) that's not exactly a good excuse.
If kids aren't learning language, math, or sociocultural topics, exactly WHAT is going on in classrooms? Anyone have a kid in public school or just got out of one who can tell me? Because I'm seriously bewildered. Is it just that no time is being spent on anything except test-taking skills, or are the students not being held accountable for actually learning?
Going by what I saw from many of my classmates while I was doing my recent degree thing, I suspect the answer is the latter. I saw some of the work that these kids were producing and it was absolute garbage. Yet they got passing grades anyway. I don't know if there was just a lot of passing pressure on the faculty, or if they had endured such low performance for so long that their own grading standards were low, but whatever the reason, these kids were getting good grades for crappy work. No wonder so many of the faculty adored me. It had probably been years since they saw many students who actually liked the subject and wanted to learn about it instead of just getting the piece of paper to get a job.
Unfortunately, the low standards are so deeply entrenched now that there isn't an easy way to get things back. Since most of these kids have been suffering with subpar education their whole lives, we can't just suddenly reset the bar at a reasonable level and expect them to reach it. Perhaps the only solution is a gradual raise, like the gradual slippage that has brought us here. The students who would normally get D's should be failed, those who normally get C's now get D's, etc. Yeah, some students and parents will pitch a fit (you mean my kid actually has to learn something?) but the kids who really do work hard and want to learn will no longer be dragged down to the level of their classmates.
In the GOP ideal world, only the kids of the rich get good educations--the rest of them are being groomed for their jobs in the growing service industry, so they supposedly don't need cultural education. But is that the kind of country we really want? Should we really have a caste system here, where your parentage determines your destiny? Ugh.
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no subject
It's not the kids of the rich who get better educations, it's the kids of the already-educated and the kids of parents from cultures that value education - which doesn't necessarily mean rich - who end up getting the best educations. I look at the Asian, Indian, and Eritrean immigrant communities in my neighborhood, which are considerable. They are not wealthy, but by gum, their kids are hitting the books. I have three words for non-English speakers: assimilate, assimilate, and assimilate.
We need to be teaching the parents how to play this game, because that's what it is: how to monitor and enhance their children's educational experience; how to be aware of and get their kids into the charter schools, how to find tutoring, how to be aware of and prepare their kids for standardized testing. We should also be supporting two-income and or single-parent families in such a way as to allow the parents to have more time to pay attention to their kids' progress and to play the education game.
Bottom line: No Child Left Behind is silly - I can't believe how much time my kids spend preparing for those stupid tests, and once the test has been administered, all teaching seems to stop at their school even though there's typically a month left -- but the schools are only one part of the equation. Parents need to be taught how to ensure their kids get a good education just as much as kids need to be given a good education in the first place.