Teens losing touch with common cultural and historical references

[witchcurlgirl]

Big Brother. McCarthyism. The patience of Job.

Don't count on your typical teenager to nod knowingly the next time you drop a reference to any of these. A study out today finds that about half of 17-year-olds can't identify the books or historical events associated with them.

Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of "a complete education." And, its authors fear, the nation's current focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities even if children can read and do math.

"If you think it matters whether or not kids have common historical touchstones and whether, at some level, we feel like members of a common culture, then familiarity with this knowledge matters a lot," says American Enterprise Institute researcher Rick Hess, who wrote the study.

Among 1,200 students surveyed:
•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.
•52% could identify the theme of 1984.
•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature, though the survey suggests students do well on topics schools cover. For instance, 88% knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led the USA into World War II, and 97% could identify Martin Luther King Jr. as author of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

Fewer (77%) knew Uncle Tom's Cabin helped end slavery a century earlier.

"School has emphasized Martin Luther King, and everybody teaches it, and people are learning it," says Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank. "What a better thing it would be if people also had the Civil War part and the civil rights part, and the Harriet Tubman part and the Uncle Tom's Cabin part."

The findings probably won't sit well with educators, who say record numbers of students are taking college-level Advanced Placement history, literature and other courses in high school.

"Not all is woe in American education," says Trevor Packer of The College Board, which oversees Advanced Placement.

The study's release today in Washington also serves as a sort of coming out for its sponsor, Common Core, a new non-partisan group pushing for the liberal arts in public school curricula. Its leadership includes a North Carolina fifth-grade teacher, an author of history and science textbooks, a teachers union leader and a former top official in the George H.W. Bush administration

USATODAY.com

[KrisNine]

One of the twits I worked with asked me if there really was a West Virginia or if it's the western part of Virginia

[witchcurlgirl]

^^ that's funny

[Tati]

Issues like this are a little tricky... I agree that it's important to have an awareness of matters of cultural and historical importance, but we need to keep in mind that that awareness will be much more solid if one has actually lived through the experience. Learning about something in school is useful and important, but I just don't think the level of retention is comparable. We'll likely absorb something about the issue through our study, but may not hang onto all the details. Our parents and grandparents lived through WWII, McCarthyism, etc., so of course their knowledge base on those issues will be deeper. I know that there are plenty of things I learned about Canadian history in elementary school that I just do not remember now, and might actually fail a quiz on. You can't rehash every subject every year, so by the time of high school graduation you just very well may not recall something you learned in grade 7. Dates and names in particular can be almost impossible for some people to hang onto, and it's possible that quizzes like these are largely composed of that stuff since it's easy to test for.

52% could identify the theme of 1984.

Statistics like this are interesting. Had all the students tested read 1984 at that point? If they hadn't, it doesn't mean they weren't going to, it may have been on the curriculum for the next year. When I was in high school our literature classes seemed to be themed - in Grade 11 we focused on American classics, such as Gatsby and the like, in Grade 10 it was Dystopian literature, which included 1984, Brave New World, The Chrysalids and others. And we did one Shakespearian play each year regardless. It ended up being pretty well-rounded, but had you tested me at one specific point there would have been a lot I hadn't yet read.

It could also be argued that as the years go by there is more and more history to learn; eventually it will reach a point where we simply can't spend the same amount of time on events of the 1800s as our parents did. I'm not saying the current generation is at that state - just that at some point, our children's children's children or whatever will be. There's only so much information you can cram into a brain or a textbook, and we are living in very rich times in terms of new developments and (what will be) historical events.

I actually think literature can be the most effective tool in addressing this problem. When I read historical fiction I find it gives me a much better grasp of the subject than I might have gotten from lecture alone. And then I get to experience the literature at the same time, which has cultural value. Of course you need to get the facts too, but I always found that when a subject in school had a follow-up film or novel it made the subject much more real.

[missjuicy]

i am a high school teacher and i will say this is sooo true they dont even know basic knowledge anymore....what is going on!

[Fluffy]

^Actually, I'm going to have to agree with this. I remember reading a newspaper column on this several months ago where the columnist quote a high school teacher on his opinion of the situation.

American kids, dumber than dirt

Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history


By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.


And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.


His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.


My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.


Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.


No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.


We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.


It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.


Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.
He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."


But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.
It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.


It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.
Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.


Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.


This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.
I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.


Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?


My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?


As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.


What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.


American kids, dumber than dirt / Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

[Daphne]

There are a lot of stupid adults out there too; in fact, they're probably the parents of the stupid teenagers.

[sputnik]

i think the problem is that people in general value general knowledge a lot less than they used to. and that's reflected in schools (especially in the US), where they put more emphasis on stuff like standardised testing and more 'useful' things like science.
in my 4 years of high school, it wasn't just maths, chemistry and physics thate were compulsory, we also had 4 compulsory years of literature, history, art history and philosophy.
i think another problem is the way things are taught. in most systems, it seems like kids are just taught stuff to memorise, and not enough emphasis is put on teaching critical and analytical skills. when you're expected not just to rehash facts but to analyse them and write proper essays, stuff 'sticks' a lot more and you're less likely to forget it, even years later.

[Tati]

^ Agree completely.

[crumpet]

I agree that it's important to have an awareness of matters of cultural and historical importance, but we need to keep in mind that that awareness will be much more solid if one has actually lived through the experience. Learning about something in school is useful and important, but I just don't think the level of retention is comparable. We'll likely absorb something about the issue through our study, but may not hang onto all the details. Our parents and grandparents lived through WWII, McCarthyism, etc., so of course their knowledge base on those issues will be deeper.

Well, I wasn't born until 1971 and I know about all those things. I also know all the songs of Elvis and The Beatles and I know who Lloyd Price and Etta James are. You know what you care to know and most kids are content being dumb and knowing more about Paris Hilton than Harriet Tubman.

[Tati]

^ I agree, I just think the level of retention is probably a bit different. When you live with something you'll probably just know it fairly innately, whereas if you need to make an effort to learn it, the facts might be more likely to get jumbled and you may forget details over time, that's all.

I mean, I know a ton about Paris Hilton now without ever actually trying to, just because it's around me all the time. I'd love to wipe that knowledge from my brain, but it's just there, you know? Whereas I did learn about Harriett Tubman in school, but I'd be hard pressed to give specifics (it was elementary school).

[sputnik]

I agree that it's important to have an awareness of matters of cultural and historical importance, but we need to keep in mind that that awareness will be much more solid if one has actually lived through the experience. Learning about something in school is useful and important, but I just don't think the level of retention is comparable. We'll likely absorb something about the issue through our study, but may not hang onto all the details. Our parents and grandparents lived through WWII, McCarthyism, etc., so of course their knowledge base on those issues will be deeper.

i disagree. i wasn't alive for the french revolution, ancient rome or world war II but i had to study those subjects pretty thoroughly and they sank in pretty well. it all depends on how something is taught - again, if you're only given dates and names to memorise and are just taught random events without putting them in context, then yeah, you'll forget it the minute the test is over, but if you're taught things with an analytical approach, and are shown how these events are relevant and important even today and helped shape modern society, it will create more awareness.
the french revolution was a key moment in the shaping of modern societies, the napoleonic code is still in place in lots of countries, most of our legal systems are derived from roman law, and the consequences of world war II can still be felt today. you can't understand the present without studying the past.

[Dixie Normos]

How about they stop changing the curriculum twice annually? Lets face it, our world is speeding up, and you can't teach them EVERYTHING, so why not teach them the basics and let them decide to further their education? It would give the teachers less to do in terms of class assignments, and more time for one on one education.

[witchcurlgirl]

Originally Posted by sputnik

i disagree. i wasn't alive for the french revolution, ancient rome or world war II but i had to study those subjects pretty thoroughly and they sank in pretty well. it all depends on how something is taught - again, if you're only given dates and names to memorise and are just taught random events without putting them in context, then yeah, you'll forget it the minute the test is over, but if you're taught things with an analytical approach, and are shown how these events are relevant and important even today and helped shape modern society, it will create more awareness.
the french revolution was a key moment in the shaping of modern societies, the napoleonic code is still in place in lots of countries, most of our legal systems are derived from roman law, and the consequences of world war II can still be felt today. you can't understand the present without studying the past.

Because what's past is prologue- William Shakespeare

Of course, your average teen of today would have trouble telling me who Shakespeare is.

[Fluffy]

Originally Posted by Dixie Normos

How about they stop changing the curriculum twice annually? Lets face it, our world is speeding up, and you can't teach them EVERYTHING, so why not teach them the basics and let them decide to further their education? It would give the teachers less to do in terms of class assignments, and more time for one on one education.

I think the problem is too much standardized testing. Teachers do have to teach to the test or their schools could lose their funding.