Long ago, my friends who are university professors shared their frustration that their students were coming to college woefully under-performing in mathematics—even the math majors. How could they teach the college-level math they were charged to impart to their students, when those students hadn't even grasped the math they were supposed to have learned in high school, or even earlier?
This article shows that non-technical fields have similar problems. (H/T BJT)
When Michael Laser attempted to teach expository writing on the university level, he ran into a major glitch: his students couldn't construct basic, readable sentences.
The teaching of writing has become an academic specialty with its own dominant philosophy, which argues against grammar instruction. But I believe that ignoring awkward writing will prove to be a mistake — an educational fashion that will handicap a generation, until someone shouts, Look at the clumsy writing our students are producing! I’m not saying the current focus on constructing competent arguments is wrong. But many students arrive at college unable to write grammatically correct sentences, and we need to teach them that skill, too.
I commend Laser for his attempts to fill in the huge gaps in his students' educations, but the most important sentence of his essay is this one: Their writing may improve with practice as they make their way through college — but they’ve already been practicing for twelve years!
Bingo. School has swallowed thirteen or more years of these adult children's lives, and disgorged them incompetent in the very basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Colleges are wasting very expensive class time attempting to make up the deficit, but according to Laser, success is elusive. Have we managed to inoculate our children against learning? Have they developed a resistance to education over the years, like antibiotic-resistant bacteria?
I can't believe that so many American children have suddenly become stupid; I have to believe that the system is failing them. Yet even if large numbers of children have started to come into the system without basic competencies—and don't forget, the system gets them younger and younger these days, so they haven't had much time to fall—isn't the end result ample evidence that the system has broken down and needs to be changed? If they can't learn to add, why don't we give them calculators and train them to be plumbers, a profession that is necessary, can't be sent overseas, and almost certainly will earn them more money than they're likely to get upon graduating from college still incompetent in basic academics and with a mountain of debt besides?
And yet, attempts to require accountability from our schools are met with extreme resistance, not only from administrators and teachers and unions, but even from parents. The last astonishes me. What I wouldn't have given for a system that provided a clear measure of what my children knew going into a school year and what they knew coming out, coupled with the ability to make educational choices based on that information! In all the kerfuffle over so-called high-stakes testing these days, I see with sorrow that administrators don't have sufficient faith in their teachers, and teachers don't have sufficient faith in themselves, to keep teaching as they've always taught. Tactics such as teaching to the test, repetitive testing, and making a big deal out of the whole thing don't educate children—they only invalidate the results. This is the equivalent of the college-student trick of pulling an all-nighter the day before an exam, and we all know how much education that engenders.
I'm not denying that there is gold that can be mined from the school system, but there is so much dross, and even the brightest kids are losing, especially when you consider their potential. Laser writes,
A few bright students will quickly absorb the new concepts; the others will fill out their worksheets on subject-verb agreement almost perfectly, and then write things like, The conflict between Sammy and Lengel are mainly about teenage rebellion.
Note that the students he calls bright, the ones who picked up on what he taught them, found those basic skills to be new concepts.
Again, let me be clear: I know there are great teachers—our children experienced several of them—and good schools. I know teaching is a very difficult job, one I could not do. (I'm a good tutor with students who want to learn. Give me a whole classroom, however, or a student who doesn't care, and I'd run away, screaming.) But look around: How can a system with such a terrible time-and-effort to effectiveness ratio not be broken? We have taken away the best hours of our children's childhoods, and given them what in return? Proms? Football games? The chance to sit in the same room as their age-mates for hours on end? A few crumbs of learning that should have been acquired in a fraction of the time?
Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
