We browbeat our children for 13 years of grade school, and then 4 or more years of college. The result? Not much. Education doesn’t work, or not very well.
Education Doesn’t Work
In this video, college students can’t name even one US Senator. They don’t even know how many US Senators there are.
In this one, students don’t know who won the Civil War, who the current Vice President is, or from what country America won our independence.
Here is one where college students know almost nothing of the Gettysburg Address:
There are dozens of these, where college students don’t know basic, everyday information.
Schools Are Doing Their Jobs
People see these and complain that schools, students, and parents aren’t doing their jobs.
What if they are doing their jobs? Think about it; school reform began in the 1980’s. Government keeps raising the bar. And students constantly improve their test scores. After over three decades, this is the result.
How could uniform memorization ever produce independent thinkers? We need to consider the fundamentals; maybe as we envision it, education doesn’t work.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to come out different.“[1]Variously attributed to different people, including Albert Einstein.
What if rather than solve the problem, school reform has simply exposed the problem. Schools, students and parents are giving us better test scores. It’s just that test scores aren’t education. So maybe we need to consider that as we currently define it, education doesn’t work.
The Best Students
Take it another step. Consider that these students in these videos are enrolled at major universities, they overwhelmingly come from supportive and affluent homes,[2]Yes, some of these kids work two jobs to go to school. We badly define affluence. Almost all of these kids come from homes with computers, Internet, and more than one TV; compared to the rest of the … Continue reading and that they graduated in the upper levels of their high school classes. These are our best students.
So how much less do the great majority of our citizens know? How much do the blue-collar workers remember, those who weren’t among the strongest students, and who have been out of school even longer than the college students?
Sowing & Reaping
Then look at our current attitudes, our dangerously radical presidential candidates, our worrisome social ideas, our uninformed ideas on industry and government, and our downright incendiary ideas about foreign relations.
We may not remember much from our school days. But I think all of us remember enough of education to connect the dots. I think you can see why I contend that education doesn’t work.
Medieval Education
Education began in the medieval with memorize-don’t-think. In these videos and from my earlier comments we see that very few kids remember what they learn. And from all of this it is worth considering a novel proposal: the more they memorize, the less they remember.
It’s time to disabuse ourselves of the medieval myths. We are working from busted educational paradigms, giving us strategies that undermine real learning, real thinking, and real progress.
Sheep courtesy of James Good via Flickr.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Variously attributed to different people, including Albert Einstein. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Yes, some of these kids work two jobs to go to school. We badly define affluence. Almost all of these kids come from homes with computers, Internet, and more than one TV; compared to the rest of the world, these kids come from affluent homes. |
So though I agree with much of what you’ve written I have to say those videos were hoping to catch people. Now I know it wasn’t hard, but they also don’t show all the people that got the answers right. They are shock videos and what percentage of people actually get these questions wrong is what is important. These are fundamental aspects of our country and our rights. So not so sure these show anything other than a select group of extremely uninformed people
I started thinking about this in college, when a friend who had taken 4 years of HS French could not remember the present tense conjugation of être.
I found this: “A 2012 ACTA survey found that less than 20% of American college graduates could accurately identify the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation, less than half could identify George Washington as the American general at Yorktown, and only 42% knew that the Battle of the Bulge occurred during World War II.”
I’ll see what else I can find later.
UL has a freshman class that required students to give some service to the community. This is a fantastic idea. I was building a Native American structure at Vermilionville when a group of these students came to help. It was strange. I am thinking where have these kids been all their life. You give them a screwdriver and they did not know which end to use. It was like another experience I just happen to have at the same Vermilionville. I was was working on a house when a Native American showed up with a tipi to put up for Native American Culture Day coming up that weekend. I was so interested when he started to erect it, that I went over and offered to help him. He told me it would take him 15 minutes to put it up, but if I helped it would take a half an hour.