The funny thing is, every generation since Adam has been absolutely convinced that ‘kids these days’ are learning absolutely nothing compared to how it used to be when they were kids, but over time, the sum of human knowledge has shown the exact opposite of such a decline. If you think kids these days know nothing, all it means is that you are middle aged. The kids are as alright as they ever were.
The only thing that’s different is that people stay in school longer, partly because the world is more technical, and partly because we have largely abandoned the apprenticeship model of training. This means that students who’d have been shuffled off to technical school into a trade now goes to college, where they can with convenience appall Jim, but each cohort has about the same number of smart, less smart, ordinary and stupid people as at any other time.
s1m0n, I believe you’re right about that, though it’s hard to admit, as I’m a geezer myself. The truth is, the kids ARE alright, as that famous now-geezer band made clear back in its glory days. The kids are ALWAYS alright, and they somehow manage to build on the best of what came before. That’s the way of the world.
Things do advance, but just not in the way that the ‘old guard’ would expect and promote. And I’m here to say, keeping one’s mind truly open gets harder with age!
C’est la vie, say the old folks. It goes to show you never can tell.
When I was in undergraduate college (1961-1965), you brought your blue book (a blank book of maybe 50 pages) to the test. There were no multiple choice questions. The tests consisted of a series of questions that you needed to answer in essay form. In graduate school, as a graduate assistant in geology, it was my job to grade the tests. Accordingly, I had to fail students that could not express themselves in writing. I saw a lot of tears in the interviews with students who were doing poorly, but the truth of the matter was that many of them were just not prepared to function at a college level. They wanted to be in college, but they didn’t have the necessary skills. Twenty years later, as a high school teacher in mathematics, trying to teach 3rd track students algebra and geometry, I had to lower my standards quite a bit. If I wanted to keep my job and be successful as a teacher, I had to present material that my students were able to comprehend and demonstrate some level of competence on a test. I’m sure that the teachers of the better math students in the the first and second tracks presented material at a more difficult level.
The same thing the generation after typerwriters did when they stopped teaching copperplate.
And they’re likely to be a whole lot more adept than you think about reading it. After all, you and I went through school looking at a grand total of about three different typefaces. Five if you count the Italic and Roman balls on the school secretary’s brand new selectric. Anyone growing up in the past 15 years has seen and coped with hundreds. To them, cursive is going to be just another font. They’ll get it.
The other way around. If you do not possess coherent thought, you will find it difficult to write coherently. On the other hand, a receptive mind will observe examples of coherent thought and emulate it as being more efficient. To put it another way, coherent thought can be taught.
The overmanning of universities may be a factor in the dumbing down. To a European observer, there is a more obvious one. There is an approach, deeply embedded in U.S. culture, that the will to succeed is more significant than the ability. If you have the will, the ability will come, is the belief. The will, or the wish, is cultivated to a much greater extent than the ability. Along with this, and in a corollary fashion, moderate ability is dismissed. Anyone who is not a winner is a loser. Competitors are not praised for playing the game, but denigrated because they did not get first place. This in turn leads to situations where ebullient individuals argue their way into pass-marks they otherwise would not have managed.
What is functionally literate? Using big words? Proper spelling? I use spell check to wish my mother happy birthday. ASL was tough enough without the finger spelling parts. Is it like the different languages that I cannot speak and print?
Personally I don’t think today’s kids are alright. Males are dropping out of college at alarming rates. More women are going to college and graduating. Yet the market place is still paying them lower wages compared to their male counterparts for the same or better work.
When our youngest went off to college his first roommate was a second year senior who dropped out that Fall semester after the football season. Two years ago our former state Governor gave a commencement speech at our local university. As the students were filing into their seats he made an observation and asked a question to some on the dais. Where were all the men?
The claim isn’t that kids know nothing or that they aren’t alright. It’s that the chief problem for many graduating
seniors in the USA these days is functional illiteracy. The difference between functional illiteracy and simple
illiteracy is this: the former can write their name and a few words, but they can’t write grammatical sentences
or intelligible paragraphs. The latter sign their name with an X. The former are reading at a sub-junior high
school level. The latter can’t read at all.
Even if every generation has been absolutely convinced that the kids are illiterate or whatever,
the claim made by this generation could still be true. Note the research reported at the beginning
of this thread:
“[M]ore than 50 percent of students at 4-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.”
It is very hard to believe this just reflects the fact that the researchers are middle aged.
In my own case I found that seniors who took my freshmen level philosophy class dropped it or failed it,
because they couldn’t write anything down. Entering freshmen often wrote better than graduating seniors.
Literacy appeared to degrade with time spent at my university, since students weren’t writing.
In upper division courses, given a take-home essay exam,
‘Compare and contrast positions A and B, state them clearly. What are the chief arguments for A?
What are the chief arguments for B. Of the two positions, which do you favor? Why?’
many graduating seniors would hand in a single paragraph composed of four or five unintelligible
non-sentences and consider it a job well done.
When I arrived in the early 80s we had open enrollment. Anybody who graduated high-school could
attend. The first exam (I gave the students the questions in advance and told them the answers)
would come back with just the student’s name on it. Nothing else. We lost 50 to 60 percent
of the freshmen class the first year, each year.
I described how the graduating seniors in education at a local university all failed a teacher
competency test that was later published in the paper. It consisted of paragraphs about the French
revolution, say, and multiple choice questions about what the paragraph said. Anybody who could
read at a high-school level could ace that test.
My university isn’t a bad one by most standards. I had illustrious colleagues like
the historian, Steven Ambrose. Numerous graduate programs.
This is why I think many graduating seniors in the USA today are functionally illiterate.
The research buttresses my view.
As was pointed out there are fewer alternatives for the “non-traditional” student. There is actually a very good Apprentice School run by Northrop Grumman in our community.
But it seems younger males are maturing slower in our current culture. For those who opt not attend college right after secondary school, there are fewer options for them to attend better schools if they so choose later. Many of these kids are much better prepared for college after a few more years of aging.
I have a family member who went back to school,(pre-med), at fifty. When she first went to school back in the '60s she was a total hippie and her academic performance, in art no less, was miserable. She graduated with honors and a perfect GPA this time around. Her instructors loved her for her intensity and the work ethic she showed and shared with the younger students. Personally I would prefer to see campuses with broader student diversity in regards to age and experience.
A functionally illiterate person may be able
to read out the words to you and take
dictation, but they can’t communicate their
own thoughts in writing or comprehend what
they are reading. They may technically be
literate, but are not functional,
communication-wise.
The same thing is happening here in the UK. In general, the education system is failing for males.
Here is my opinion on why this is.
Educational practices are geared for females. It’s more obvious to me and to my family, because as High-Functioning Autistics, the males are hyper-males in terms of sensitivity and the females are hyper-females in terms of sensitivity.
When I was a child, there was no problem for me. The desks were arranged in rows, there was no talking in class unless expressly granted permission from the teacher, and you stayed put. The lessons were demonstrated on the blackboard and the homework was clearly stated, usually on the blackboard too. This is what suits boys.
Nowadays, the classes are arranged around tables in an informal fashion. Pupils are encouraged to work in groups. Homework declarations are vague, to say the least. The lessons learned are not run-through in class, so the teachers have no sense of who may not be taking the subject in. (One particular teacher gets the class to mark each-others homework! He has NO idea who is failing in his class. In my opinion he needs a boot up the arse/to revise his ideas sharpish/fired. ) Classes tend to work steadily on one prject throughout the year and hand it in at the end of term.
But in general this state of affairs suits girls.
It’s time someone blew the whistle on this. There is an ordered formal approach which suits boys, and an unstructured casual approach which suits girls. Twenty years ago, girls found school difficult, and boys did better. Now it’s the other way around. It’s not that girls are smarter now – it’s the fashion of teaching. It would be interesting to see the two fashions carried out in parallel in the same school – one ordered class for boys and one informal class for girls.
Heck, even I can grade the objective portions to streamline it for him. Those essay portions & papers…