SEMI-LITERATE FRESHMEN

Today’s college freshmen are ready to use computers, they look forward to an active social life in college, most have participated in community service and several extracurricular activities, and they have taken the new SAT with its writing test. How ready are they for the academic demands of their college classes? In Massachusetts, which is usually mentioned as among those having the highest graduation standards, 34% of freshmen at state 4-year colleges and 65% of freshmen at state 2-year colleges are enrolled in remedial classes, according to The Boston Globe, and they will not be able to engage in regular college classes until they finish the remedial ones.

Of course we want our high school students to be athletic, social, popular, and involved in their communities, but this spring the Indiana University Study of High School Student Engagement surveyed 90,000 students and found that more than half (55%) spend three hours a week or less on homework, and a Kaiser Foundation study this spring reported that the average high school student spends more than 6 hours a day with electronic entertainment media of one kind or another.

Naturally we want our teenagers to be free to deploy their $billions in discretionary spending as they wish, and we need their support, as consumers, for MTV, Electronic Arts, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc., but in the meantime, are they doing enough hard academic work in high school to get themselves ready for college?

A study done for The Concord Review in 2002 found that the majority (62%) of our high school students no longer write a single 12-page research paper in school, and it seems likely that a majority, at least of public high school students, may no longer be assigned a single nonfiction book while they are in high school.

Laura Arandes, a 2005 Harvard graduate, recently wrote that when she got to college, “I had never written more than five paragraphs for any essay or paper in my entire academic career prior to entering university...Modern (U.S.) public high schools have an obligation not to simply pump out graduates at the end of the year, but also to prepare their students for the intellectual rigors of college.”

Nicole Lefebvre, a 2005 graduate of Mount Holyoke College, wrote: “High school taught me how to get into college, but it did not teach me how to succeed once I got there. Just a few weeks into my first semester, I realized that while I was fit to compete on a college track team, I was grossly out of shape for the classroom. Even worse, I didn’t have any concept of what academic fitness was! And I had been an A student in high school—what happened!?”

Perhaps there is good and growing reason to be concerned about the academic competitiveness of students in Singapore, Taiwan, Finland and Ireland, not to mention China and India, and we could decide to re-consider our high school academic culture, which celebrates athletics wholeheartedly, yet allows for 3 hours a week of homework and 44 hours a week for video games, etc.

As it stands, our high school students are going to college, ready or not, and the benefits they can derive from that expensive experience depend a lot on the level of academic preparation they bring with them from high school. It will be argued that most students eventually make an adjustment, even if it means some dumbing down of their courses by the professors to accommodate them, but it must be understood that because so many arrive unready, they cannot hit the academic ground running, and whatever benefits they may achieve will have been sadly delayed by their lack of academic readiness. Do we care enough to compete with Grand Theft Auto, the last version of which sold 1,000,000 copies in the first week at $50 each, in order to give our high school students the background in nonfiction reading and in academic writing they need to arrive at college ready to go?

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DOGMA RULES IN EDUCATION

"By their fruits ye shall know them" may be an ancient adage but results take a back seat to dogma when it comes to the education establishment. That is why there has been so little to show for all the additional billions of dollars poured into American education during the past three decades. ..... there was another report issued recently, this one giving results of opinion polls among professors of education, the people who train our public school teachers. It is also very revealing as to what has been so wrong for so long in our schools.

Take something as basic as what teachers should be doing in the classroom. Should teachers be "conveyors of knowledge who enlighten their students with what they know"? Or should teachers "see themselves as facilitators of learning who enable their students to learn on their own"?

Ninety two percent of the professors of education said that teachers should be "facilitators" rather than engaging in what is today called "directed instruction" -- and what used to be called just plain teaching. The fashionable phrase among educators today is that the teacher should not be "a sage on the stage" but "a guide on the side."

Is the 92 percent vote for the guide over the sage based on any hard evidence, any actual results? No. It has remained the prevailing dogma in schools of education during all the years when our test scores stagnated and American children have been repeatedly outperformed in international tests by children from other countries. Our children have been particularly outperformed in math, with American children usually ending up at or near the bottom in international math tests. But this has not made a dent in our education establishment's dogmas about the way to teach math.

What is more important in math, that children "know the right answers to the questions" or that they "struggle with the process" of trying to find the right answers? Among professors of education, 86 percent choose "struggling" over knowing. This is all part of a larger vision in which children "discover" their own knowledge rather than have teachers pass on to them the knowledge of what others have already discovered. The idea that children will "discover" knowledge that took scholars and geniuses decades, or even generations, to produce is truly a faith which passeth all understanding.

What about discipline problems in our schools? Fewer than half of the professors of education considered discipline "absolutely essential" to the educational process. As one professor of education put it, "When you have students engaged and not vessels to receive information, you tend to have fewer discipline problems." All the evidence points in the opposite direction. But what is mere evidence compared to education dogmas? We need more "teaching to the test" so that dogmas can be subjected to evidence.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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