April 2, 2008 6:01 PM
Teens losing touch with cultural history
Teens losing touch with common cultural and historical references By Greg Toppo USA TODAYBig Brother.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.
Read entire article here.
The report on which this story is based was recently released by a new organization - Common Core, which states:
We believe that a child who graduates from high school without an understanding of culture, the arts, history, literature, civics, and language has in fact been left behind. So to improve education in America, we're promoting programs, policies, and initiatives at the local, state, and federal levels that provide students with challenging, rigorous instruction in the full range of liberal arts and sciences.
First we create a bunch of jobs for people to push No Child Left Behind, then we create another bunch to fill in the gaps created by NCLB. I dunno, I just think that if we just went back to basics and stopped changing textbooks every couple years we'd do just fine.
Posted in Public schools, Teens and Tweens | Permalink
Comments
My goodness. Doesn't it seem like the more they try to fix it, the worse it gets? It reminds me of an article I read by Michael Crichton about the National Parks, and how the more they tried to manage the wildlife, the more they ended up putting one species or another in danger.
I hope I can say this without making anyone feel like I'm questioning their decision to send their child to public school, but it just seems to me like a bureaucracy isn't the best choice to run the schools -- or much of anything for that matter.
Posted by: Michelle Potter | April 2, 2008 7:23 PM
