I have stumbled on an answer - of sorts

[vaskidmark]

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2015/07/quote-of-day-lack-of-education-edition.html

GELERNTER: I’m a teacher of college students. I’m lucky to be at one of the best colleges in the world, at Yale. Our students are as smart as any in the world. They work very hard to get here. They are eager, they’re likable. My generation is getting a chip on its shoulder, we always thought we knew everything about every topic, our professors were morons, and we were the ones who were building the world.

My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who – We have failed.

--

(H)ow did we get to this point today when my students know nothing?

They know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don’t rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they’ve never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible. They’ve never opened it. They’ve been taught it’s some sort of weird toxic thing, especially the Hebrew Bible, full of all sorts of terrible, murderous, prejudiced, bigoted. They’ve never read it. They have no concept.

It used to be, if I turned back to the 1960s to my childhood, that at least people have heard of Isaiah. People had heard of the Psalms. They had some notion of Hebrew poetry, having created the poetry of the Western world. They had some notion of the great prophets having created our notions of justice and honesty and fairness in society.

Remember the words of John Taylor Gatto:

    In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state—as it had been done a century before in Prussia.

    Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: "The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided." National need, of course, depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that what school served was an "effective use of capital" through which our "unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained." When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right, pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy.

    It’s important to keep in mind that no harm was meant by any designers or managers of this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it, working progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and firing the blood of zealots.

and

    In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?"

and

    Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.

This is mostly all stuff I already knew - except for the statistics on literacy in the armed forces.  It's just put together better than the bits and pieces that I've been carrying around.

Sadly, because of the illiteracy rate (not to mention those that barely manage to squeak into the category of functionally literate) this is information that cannot be shared with those most affected/afflicted.

If you will now excuse me, I'm off to find some tar, feathers, and lots and lots of rope.

stay safe.

[makattak]

The don't go into it, but it's a result of the education schools.

Currently, they think all that has to be taught to children is a process for learning. What to learn is not important.

Currently, they think what has to be taught to children is how adults do things. Not how they got to that point in the first place.


Additionally, "Education" as a major is a joke. The least intelligent college students choose it and then go on to "prepare" children for college.


Most of education is implementing current fads for teaching styles with no regard to whether they work. There is never any testing done before implementing the new fad, nor is there any evaluation done after the new fad is implemented. The teachers just move on to whatever the next fad is.


If you weren't able to glean it, I have a low opinion of our education system. There are, of course, exceptions to the above, but they are just that- exceptions. The majority of public education works this way.

[MechAg94]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk

Amazing to think that we all assumed that Idiocracy was a fictional movie. 

[wmenorr67]

Too much emphasis has been placed on "reading" and math and teaching to tests instead of teaching.

[RoadKingLarry]

I see it every day. Even in people my own age (53) with college degrees. They have no perception of the world beyond their narrow slice of reality. They don't want to know anything outside their specialty, it is beneath them.
No sense of history, no sense of the true enormity of the world we live in not just it's size but he variety of cultures and peoples that inhabit it.

Two of my most disheartening examples come from the names I gave my two boats. The first I named Serenity, 1st because FIREFLY!!11!! and 2nd because at the time it was the #1 most popular boat name that year and there was no other boat with that name at my marina. The number of people that thought I was a recovering alcoholic was mind numbing.
When I got the bigger boat I chose HALCYON for it's name. The number of supposedly educated people that can't even pronounce the word let alone have any clue as to it's meaning is demoralizing.

[Tallpine]

Even back in the halcyon days of my youth, I don't think that I ever heard anyone pronounce it 

[vaskidmark]

Even back in the halcyon days of my youth, I don't think that I ever heard anyone pronounce it 

Halk - Yon?  Nope, that's not it.

Hal - Kee - Yon?  Also nope.

Hell - Ki - On?  Another nope.

There's a hipster used clothing store in the hipster part of town with that as its name.  Just for giggles once I went inside and, while looking at moth-eaten fedoras, asked the hip young thing in pencil-leg jeans how to pronounce the name of the store.  Deer in headlights look - said everybody he knows refers to it as "That place where James (his name) works."

stay safe.

[Boomhauer]

The don't go into it, but it's a result of the education schools.

Currently, they think all that has to be taught to children is a process for learning. What to learn is not important.

Currently, they think what has to be taught to children is how adults do things. Not how they got to that point in the first place.


Additionally, "Education" as a major is a joke. The least intelligent college students choose it and then go on to "prepare" children for college.


Most of education is implementing current fads for teaching styles with no regard to whether they work. There is never any testing done before implementing the new fad, nor is there any evaluation done after the new fad is implemented. The teachers just move on to whatever the next fad is.


If you weren't able to glean it, I have a low opinion of our education system. There are, of course, exceptions to the above, but they are just that- exceptions. The majority of public education works this way.

This is what I have been saying for at least a decade.

K-12- nothing about 20th century history outside of the Civil Rights movement, very little other US history. The main focus of our sociology/history/gov't classes was about the Civil Rights era and the Civil War era (not learning about the Civil War itself, but only about slavery). A smattering of SC history. A smattering of Revolutionary War history.

The only class where we went into any detail about the other parts of US history was the AP US History class I took in High School. (I was the only one in the class to pass the exam, by the way, due to all my reading about history for personal reasons).

Everybody my age thinks the computer wasn't invented until the 1980s/1990s from the memories of their first home PCs. They don't have any clue that the first electronic computers came into existance during the WWII era, for code breaking. Not to mention mechanical computers long before that. They don't have any concept of the industrial revolution (other than "child labor exploitation" and "exploitation of women"...they don't know that capitalism and industrialization and hard work built this country to what it is today. They don't know about Communism and the countless millions that have perished as a result of it. I could go on and on for days on this. Their only knowledge of the past, outside of the very very very little taught in schools, is what has happened in their lifetimes (and often they don't know hardly anything about those events)

What it comes down to is that history is dangerous. It is a threat to the leftist movement, with all of the uncomfortable truths that one finds when researching history. Therefore, it must be hidden, repressed, and dissemination discouraged.

[tokugawa]

That pretty well covers it.

[BlueStarLizzard]

I disagree with makattack.

They do not even teach the process for learning, since you cannot teach how to learn without providing practice material. Learning history, literature, religion (academic studies, not religious studies) art and philosophy is is learning how to think well, since all of these subjects require thinking and often have no concrete correct answer to fall back on.

I remember being somewhat amazed in my college economics class that so many students had trouble with theory and preferred facts. It annoyed me, because I absolutely love theory and prefer learning contrasting theories over boring facts, but the teacher, in deference to the other students, would go easy on theory and not spend a lot of time discussing the ideas behind economics. The theories were "too hard" and the other students just could not grasp why we should even bother with something that was not fact, much less discuss it and debate it.
Too a slightly lesser extent, it was an issue throughout all the soft sciences, which amazed me. You cannot study any subject based on scientific method without understanding theory and the soft sciences tend to have more theory than fact. It was amazing to me since so much of current crop of college students waste their college years on soft sciences and the humanities, non of which are easy on theory.

I'm really not certain what schools are teaching, since they don't even seem like they are teaching a person to regurgitate facts, much less teaching students to think.

[TommyGunn]

Halk - Yon?  Nope, that's not it.

Hal - Kee - Yon?  Also nope.

Hell - Ki - On?  Another nope.

There's a hipster used clothing store in the hipster part of town with that as its name.  Just for giggles once I went inside and, while looking at moth-eaten fedoras, asked the hip young thing in pencil-leg jeans how to pronounce the name of the store.  Deer in headlights look - said everybody he knows refers to it as "That place where James (his name) works."

stay safe.

Halcyon

Hal - see - on.   

[RoadKingLarry]

Close but no ceegar for you.

Hal-see-un.
Based in Greek mythology.

[vaskidmark]

Close but no ceegar for you.

Hal-see-un.
Based in Greek mythology.

After all those years, almost a use for that classical education!

Oxford Dictionaries says - halsēən
and The Free Dictionary says - hăl′sē-ən
while dictionary.com, who never could figure out how to say the "schwa" sound says - hal-see-uh n

If anybody wonders what a schwa is. Wikipedia comes to the rescue

In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (sometimes spelled shwa)[1] refers to the mid-central vowel sound (rounded or unrounded) in the middle of the vowel chart, denoted by the IPA symbol ə, or another vowel sound close to that position. An example in English is the vowel sound in the 'a' of the word 'about'. Schwa in English is mainly found in unstressed positions, but in some other languages it occurs more frequently as a stressed vowel.

In relation to certain languages, the name "schwa" and the symbol ə may be used for some other unstressed and toneless neutral vowel, not necessarily mid-central.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPA_vowel_chart_2005.png

stay safe.

[lee n. field]

My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who – We have failed.

--

(H)ow did we get to this point today when my students know nothing?

They know nothing about art. They know nothing about history. They know nothing about philosophy. And because they have been raised as not even atheists, they don’t rise to the level of atheists, insofar as they’ve never thought about the existence or nonexistence of God. It has never occurred to them. They know nothing about the Bible. They’ve never opened it. They’ve been taught it’s some sort of weird toxic thing, especially the Hebrew Bible, full of all sorts of terrible, murderous, prejudiced, bigoted. They’ve never read it. They have no concept.

My youngest daughter is still at home.  I will quiz her.  She's in theater.  (How she'll pay off her loan, I do not know.)  She reads ancient Greek plays for fun, between semesters.

I know one of her teachers, from when she took classes at the junior college here.  He's an old enough  guy to  have some depth of perspective.  I will quiz him.

I'm wondering if these aren't folks that have always been here.  But now, they're ending up in college instead of going out an being a milkman or a house painter or something.

[vaskidmark]

It's from the NY Effing Times!  How did it get in there?

stay safe.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/?mwrsm=Facebook&fb_ref=Default&_r=1

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

A few weeks ago, I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, ....

....

Indeed, in the world beyond grade school, where adults must exercise their moral knowledge and reasoning to conduct themselves in the society, the stakes are greater. There, consistency demands that we acknowledge the existence of moral facts. If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?

[TommyGunn]

Close but no ceegar for you.

Hal-see-un.
Based in Greek mythology.

Po-tay-to....po-tah-toe.......to-may-to.....to-mah-to....

I don't smoke cigars ... but if I did, I'd buy my own. 

[BlueStarLizzard]

Po-tay-to....po-tah-toe.......to-may-to.....to-mah-to....

I don't smoke cigars ... but if I did, I'd buy my own. 

I'm with you, TommyGun.
https://youtu.be/hNwNNw0u97Y

[Perd Hapley]

I'm with you, TommyGun.
https://youtu.be/hNwNNw0u97Y

It never occurred to me there would be a video for that song.

[BlueStarLizzard]

It never occurred to me there would be a video for that song.

That's the short version

[lee n. field]

Po-tay-to....po-tah-toe.......to-may-to.....to-mah-to....

I don't smoke cigars ... but if I did, I'd buy my own. 

For the ancient greek (Koine) I learned back in the day, there are two (at least) different pronunciation schemes that are taught.

[brimic]

I see it every day. Even in people my own age (53) with college degrees. They have no perception of the world beyond their narrow slice of reality. They don't want to know anything outside their specialty, it is beneath them.
No sense of history, no sense of the true enormity of the world we live in not just it's size but he variety of cultures and peoples that inhabit it.

Worse yet, people who are 'educated in a specialty' are more often than not lacking the self awareness to 'know when they don't know.'
I work with scientists everyday, and can more or less split them into two groups:
-Those that think they know it all.
-Those that say 'I don't know, give me some time and I'll try to figure it out.'

I find the secobd group to be those who are either extremely self aware or have 10-20 years of experience in various different work environments.

[Tallpine]

Worse yet, people who are 'educated in a specialty' are more often than not lacking the self awareness to 'know when they don't know.'
I work with scientists everyday, and can more or less split them into two groups:
-Those that think they know it all.
-Those that say 'I don't know, give me some time and I'll try to figure it out.'

I find the secobd group to be those who are either extremely self aware or have 10-20 years of experience in various different work environments.

During those brief periods where poverty entices me to be kidnapped into working out of state on a customer's premises, I am amazed at how seemingly incapable are my colleagues who have worked only in that industry and to be honest, often have more specialized experience and education than I have.

I quickly become the "whiz kid"  who solves problems very quickly, and in a manner that doesn't cause four more new problems.  They wonder how I do it 

Well, I think that it has something to do with working out in "the real world" for a couple decades as opposed to going directly from college to an office.  Much of that was working for myself, and I didn't get paid for standing around scratching my head, but rather I had to figure things out in order to get back to work and make some money.

[freakazoid]

Halcyon

Hal - see - on.   

That's how I always pronounced it in my head.

[Scout26]

After 5th Grade US History, had you asked Robert, he would have told you that Harriet Tubman defeated Robert E. Lee at the Gettysburg and Sojourner Truth then freed the slaves.

Hence, our going to see places of Historical significance and recreating the Civil War.   We also spend time while driving discussing not only history (and not just US history), but current events and how many things being done today are not completely Constitutional.

[Boomhauer]

After 5th Grade US History, had you asked Robert, he would have told you that Harriet Tubman defeated Robert E. Lee at the Gettysburg and Sojourner Truth then freed the slaves.

Hence, our going to see places of Historical significance and recreating the Civil War.   We also spend time while driving discussing not only history (and not just US history), but current events and how many things being done today are not completely Constitutional.

So how pissed was he when he found out how much bullshit his teachers had fed to him?