I couldn’t believe the headline in today’s Scotsman: “Illiteracy and cheating rife at [Glasgow University].”
SCOTTISH university students have been accused of missing classes, passing off copied coursework as their own, lacking general knowledge and having poor literacy skills, in a critical report by their lecturers.
And I suppose you all read about IBM’s munificent — actually desperately munificent — urging of its employees to quit and become teachers, amply rewarded financially by IBM itself.
IBM has spent a fortune encouraging little nippers to learn IT skills and calling on the government to make sure there are enough science and maths teachers.
Now IBM says the problem is getting so dire the United States is losing its competitive edge. It will financially back employees who want to leave the company to become math and science teachers.— From “IBM backs employees who want to leave to teach,” The Inquirer. (The Inquirer’s banner reads, “A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in Indiana.”)
Can someone explain to me why students in my generation, and earlier generations, learned the basics — and today’s generation is full of kids who can’t? I cannot recall a student in my small town’s high school who could not — for example — write a letter with proper grammar, spelling and polite phrasing. Or who couldn’t add, subtract, multiply and divide. Or, for the love of god, couldn’t read a book, let alone a magazine or newspaper. It baffles me.
And I doubt that throwing more money at the problem will do much to solve it. My high school had none of the advantages of today’s schools, and my mother’s generation attended a one-room schoolhouse with all 12 grades, and every one of her classmates — I asked her just to be sure — were all literate and could do all essential math. What in the hell has happened to children?
I’m not a big fan of public education. I was beleagured by frequently excruciating levels of boredom in school. But at least our teachers succeeded in teaching all students to be basically competent in reading, writing, and mathematics.
When I volunteered at a rural public elementary school two years ago, I was appalled by the percentage of the school day that was taken up with disciplining students. And, I might add, too often for very minor things that could have easily been ignored. But the teachers — even the most politically liberal ones — became crabby, negative, hostile, exhausted and obsessed with controlling the kids.
Is it that the level of discipline that today’s principals and teachers seem to think they must inflict on students is a huge deterrent to learning? Are today’s students that much less “civilized” in their behavior so that most of the day’s opportunities to learn are taken up by yelling at and punishing “troublemakers”?
I also found that the most stern and — frankly — frightening teachers were rewarded the most with the highest status in the school.
Would former IBM employees be better teachers than most in today’s schools, simply because they’ve not been indoctrinated in the discipline-before-education approach? Or will they have to fall into that trap to avoid losing status in the school?
(Note: This is all subjective observation on my part. Anecdotal at best. But I think I’m on to something.)
MOST IMPORTANT: What do YOU think is wrong?
What do I think is wrong? Buck passing – on all fronts; not teaching children to actually enjoy learning; not expecting excellence (ie. the best a child can do and more); less parental involvement etc etc.
I went to public schools and I turned out okay (I think!). As a young child, I used to love looking through our encyclopaedias and also loved to read. I was expected to do well at school by my parents and teachers and I did.
This is a complex question but I do believe if you instill a love of learning (in and out of school), that’s half the battle.
Did that sound like a Miss America answer??
Not quite “Miss America” language. You didn’t use the term”World Peace”.
I think I know the answer, and it is not a happy one. It happened in the ’60s, and it’s called women’s liberation. Up until that point it was a rare woman who ventured into the professions. If you were a very smart and very ambitious woman with a college degree, guess what — you became a teacher. Unfortunately, I think that the siphoning off of a lot of the smartest women into professions with more status and higher pay did not serve children well.
Obviously, there are still really smart and really committed teachers out there, but there are also a lot who aren’t so much. And until we really value teachers both with respect and cold, hard cash, not much will change.
You know, I ended up teaching Montessori elementary when it became apparant my daughter needed more intellectual stimulation than she would get otherwise.
I have a double major in molecular Biology and English Lit, and was doing cancer research before I made the switch. There aren’t many of me out there.
I think I know the answer, and it is not a happy one. It happened in the ’60s, and it’s called women’s liberation.
It can’t all come down to that. So many other factors are involved: race, class etc. In fact, if you look at the loosening of standards as a factor of the timeline of history, you could blame desegregation for that matter (note: I am not making that connection…I’m just saying that you could if you use that type of timing paradigm) because the 60s and 70s marked the beginning of the decline. It’s much more than one single movement. It’s the result of a combination of factors.
For one thing, the effects of women’s liberation weren’t being felt at all until the ’70s. Most of the ’60s were basically an extension of the ’50s.
And back in the day, plenty of “smart, ambitious” women became secretaries and retail clerks rather than teachers. Many smart women got married and never had careers. And a lot of not-so-smart, not-so-ambitious women taught while they were waiting for a husband to come along. Some of them never did find husbands and never did become good teachers.
Also, a smart, ambitious woman who doesn’t want to teach is going to make a lousy teacher. So the “pink ghetto” days of the teaching profession didn’t serve anyone well.
So it’s not as if, but for women’s liberation, the schools would be crammed to the gills with excellent female teachers. There have always been good teachers and bad teachers–of both sexes.
I do agree that the pay needs to be sufficient to attract well-qualified teachers who want to teach. But I don’t think you can put this one on the shoulders of women’s liberation.
I’m not trying to put anything on the shoulders of women’s lib. I just think that our entire capitalistic system has always depended on the exploitation of, first, slaves and indentured servants and then, when that became unfeasible, the exploitation of those with fewer choices: immigrants, women, minorities, and now illegal immigrants. The education system relied on the second-class status of women, and, when that shifted, education felt the loss.
My sister is a case in point (although, I realize, only one). She graduated from college in ’62 with a degree in English. Why English? She liked to read. She says today, “I was really intrigued by medicine, but I had never even heard of a woman doctor, so I just majored in something that seemed interesting.” Armed with an English degree, she became….. an English teacher. When she retired 32 years later, in 1994, she said, “It’s really scary. With my retirement, there is only one teacher left in the entire high school English department who even knows how to diagram a sentence.”
Listen, there are lots of good explanations that people have mentioned in this thread for why our students aren’t learning; I happen to think this particular reason is one of them.
Well, when you say that “the answer” to why children aren’t learning is women’s liberation, it sure sounds like you’re trying to put in on the shoulders of women’s liberation.
I just don’t think there’s any logical connection. Pre-liberation, not all women who were capable of being good teachers were teachers, and not all women who were teachers were good at it. And there were plenty of women who were teachers and were resentful that their choices were limited–I’m betting they weren’t very good teachers, either.
Also, back in the day there was a strong bias against men teaching at the elementary school level (although certainly not at the high school and college level). So nowadays the field is more open to good male teachers.
In the long run, it’s better to have teachers of both sexes who want to teach as opposed to having mostly female teachers who may feel forced to teach. The problem is paying enough that people who want to teach don’t feel like they’re cheating their families by working for a teacher’s salary.
I think we’re really pretty much saying the same thing here; maybe my communication skills are insufficient.
My 23-year-old daughter has a degree in bio-engineering. She has given serious consideration to going into teaching because she feels very strongly that girls in high school need good female role models in math and the sciences, and I have no doubt that she would make a wonderful teacher. But make no mistake that this would be an act of pure altruism on her part; she would have to spend a year getting a credential, and then she would take an immediate 50% pay cut (and the disparity would probably increase as time went by) by going into teaching. Will she ultimately make this decision? We’ll see.
But put her in the time machine and send her back 45 years, and a) she would very likely never have majored in engineering, and b) she would never have been hired as an engineer. Presto, instant teacher, no need to weigh the matter.
But women have found many new and improved options that were not previously available to them to be validated, both intellectually and financially. So as I said above, “until we really value teachers both with respect and cold, hard cash, not much will change.”
Low expectations and an anti-intellectual society. Plus, many parents don’t back up the schools, come to conferences or even make sure the kids do their homework.
is a huge issue. Lack of parents being at home is also a problem. I am not carping on parents who have to have two incomes and work long hours to pay the bills. That is a given in this society and economy.
What the family values crowd doesn’t want to accept is their policies — which have destroyed the middle class — have lead to this.
Or, is it that todays parents aren’t up to parenting? The youth cult I think have something to do with this. Parents today want to be hip and buddy-buddies with their children. Such a mindset lets the children lead. I think that’s why there’s so many problems with disciplin in the schools of today.
The anti-intellect slant in society is a huge problem, and when combined with the economic shift that occurred in the early 70’s that made it increasingly difficult for a family to remain in the middle class with a one parent salary, the results are devastating.
Society values cleverness and ambition and the ability to deceive far more than it does intellect and understanding. This is why our American culture is in such rapid decline.
Would have to see statistics to believe it. Obviously things aren’t like they were in the good old days when the sky was bluer, the grass greener, and the people more cultured. But the fact is that today’s schools deal with students that in the 1950s would simply not have been in school at all. I would bet that the standards for today’s successful kids are higher, but that the average achievement is lower because of the broader cross section of students.
I’m with Catnip. That IS a good point. Where I grew up, in Eastern Washington state, we had lots and lots of migrant workers but only rarely did their children attend school with us. And, when they did, we kids didn’t associate with them … sigh.
I recently read — in of all places, The Guardian — about my hometown’s superintendent who was remembered as a strong advocate for the right of migrant children to learn. It was such a surprise to read about someone from a town of 3,500 people who was acknowledged as being an early pioneer in migrant education.
(Btw, when I was in — I think junior high — he went to the basement of his home and shot himself in the head. No one ever knew why.)
I agree that there may be many kids going to school now that wouldn’t have in the 50’s, but that doesn’t explain why those same kids, after 3 years of schooling, remain basically 3 years behind on average.
Even if there are language problems, if schools address these problems in first grade, then by the third or fourth grade those students should have overcome those basic obstacles. But that is not what happens. The longer they stay in school the further behind they get. And it’s not their fault.
The schools are failing to perform adequately to the task at hand, and the government goes out of it’s way to prevent real improvement in quality from ever coming to pass. Poor pay, crappy infrastructure, inadequate supplies, and rigid, often times unproductive, inadequate or politically motivated curriculae all conspire to undermine any real environment conducive to providing students with the incentive and the excitement to learn.
Teaching doesn’t pay enough, which means
Less qualified people tend to become teachers, which means
Students don’t get the same quality of teaching, which means
Adults get nervous and pressure Congress to do something, which means
Instead of a fix we get stupid standardized tests, which means
Teachers have to start teaching to the tests, which means
Students learn even less.
Conservatives have been assaulting public schools since the 70s, which means
They’ve gotten themselves on local school boards everywhere, which means
They’re pushing their Sanitized World Playset on children, which means
Many schools have become conservative social experiments, which means
Kids get treated like hardened criminals for minor infractions, which means
The psyche of today’s public school students is in very serious fucking trouble.
Healthcare is a commodity of capitalism, which means
A lot of working to middle class families are going without, which means
Kids don’t get proper care & are both over & under drugged, which means
They can’t function in an institutionalized educational environment.
American culture is a corporate wasteland that values profit, which means
There’s no art or music and no teaching kids philosophy or logic, which means
Kids wind up shuffled into the CEO track or the worker bee track, which means
All of this? Is going to get much worse if we don’t pull a switch on these train tracks soon.
And more stuff just like this.
Today our economy demands a lot more preparation of the worker before they get a job. At the same time, the employers themselves are doing a lot less basic training of employees. This has shoved a lot of less qualified students into schools, and put much higher demands on the schools.
But since the schools don’t create profits, they are social cost centers and the only management possible for a cost center is to cut costs. The most easily cut cost is labor. That means teachers get paid less, even as more is demanded from them.
This is less important for students who come from families who prepare the students for school. Such preparation takes a lot of the pressure off the schools and the teachers. [Guess which teachers get paid more?] “Good” schools are those which select good students.
Poor students are then “selected” into poorer schools, where the pay rates and facilities are not as good. Since we do this largely by city zoning now instead of formal segregation, the connection is obscured, but it is part of the idea that the more well-to-do don’t want to live near the less well-to-do [or, God forbid, those of color or foreign.]
Interesting analysis. I agree with much of it. I honestly do think it’s about a thousand different things coming together to churn out docile bodies for the state to use, but that’s a rant that far exceeds the scope of my energy today.
It’s not so much the state as it is the unrestricted market economy.
The effect of the factory system, which created most of the productivity of the Industrial Revolution, was to change society and government as adjuncts to the economy rather than the previous situation in which production was a social product. This occurred in Great Britain about 1830 and in America mostly after the Civil War.
The key is that the factory cannot exist without unrestricted markets to feed it land and raw material (as commodities), labor (as a commodity) and capital as a commodity with a price we call interest. Then there has to be a similar unrestricted market to carry away the products of the factory.
Both society and the state became adjuncts to the factories and their markets when the factory system took over. That was the core of the Industrial Revolution, and it has now spread world-wide. We call it “Modernity.”
As an aside, the one part of the world which has not yet succumbed is the Muslim world, and it is that battle against modernity that has caused many Muslims to attempt to return to the fundamentals of Islam and to reject the West. Since fear is driving them to that rejection, they have a lot of energy to fight with. Clearly nothing else has worked. While a lot of Muslims (probably the majority) prefer to accept modernity, they aren’t motivated to fight. Instead they work to raise their children so that they can take advantage of modernity.
But back to my point. It isn’t in the service of the state. It is in the service of the factory, which the state also serves.
I didn’t mean to imply a tunnel-view of the state as the sole agency behind the problem. I was making an oblique reference to several dense books by Michel Foucault wherein he dealt with everything you mention and more. Sorry for being too obscure/terse and creating confusion.
Actually I am currently rereading an outstanding book called “The Great Transformation” by Karl Polanyi, written in 1944 and you just walked into my nascent understanding of what the Industrial Revolution really means.
Sorry. My child no longer listens to my lectures. [Grin]
I’m reminded by your remarks of something someone (I forget who) said some years back. He said, (paraphrase); “It used to be that Wall Street served industry and the economy as a whole. Now industry and the economy serve Wall Street.”
We really have been serving the market for a long time rather than the other way around. when we were serving industry, a factory worker could own a house, raise a family, save money for retirement, and take vacations, all on one person’s salary.
Now that we’re exporting factories and destroying unions so the average low-skilled worker will never earn enough to rise above the poverty line, economically disadvantaged students have far less incentive to learn these days because they see less evidence that the sort of education available to them will not really get them anywhere in the labor market.
This is one of the biggest crimes we’ve allowed to become SOP in our culture, undermining the opportunity of the next generation.
The answer is really rather simple. It’s not an individual characteristic. It is a social one.
Self-selection.
The people you knew were those who were doing well in school. The ones who were not doing well either dropped out or (essentially) dropped out in place and had little to do socially with people like you. That is usually their choice – people who feel they have failed are less likely to socialize with those who have not. This is especially true of adolescents. “Dweebs”, “Dorks” and “geeks” are often the marginal students who are almost not making it, or aren’t making it the same way as everyone else seems to.
The self-selection into strata can usually be seen in the cafeteria by who sits with who. What isn’t so obvious is who drops out. The problem students are more obvious now because there is no longer economically any place for them to go if they drop out. so we keep them in school and then bitch that they aren’t learning like those who fit into the factory school system.
The number of children who didn’t learn well isn’t that much different than 30 or 50 years ago. It’s just that those who dropped out could get decent jobs then and did not become visible. Girls got pregnant and dropped out to get married (mostly.) Guys dropped out to get jobs as laborers, some becoming skilled labor because you could do it without a lot of school. Some became auto mechanics, which can’t be done without a year of technical school now – and now you need the high school diploma to get in. No more learning as a shade tree mechanic.
It isn’t so much the difference in the students. It is a lot more the different needs of the economy.
Have you noticed all the propaganda material in recent years telling people that they can no longer depend on having a job for life, that they must get a lot more flexible? This is an extension of the same process, except that now it is hitting those who succeed in school as well as those who don’t.
Real, quality education is never a priority in countries where the government’s main strategy for getting the public’s support is to deceive them. Smart people are usually harder to dupe.
This decline we’re in now started in earnest during the reign of “Tyrannosaurus Nix” when the economic feasability of one stay-at-home parent was abandoned. Needless to say, the slide into ignorance has been accelerating ever since, especially these last several years.
to work at Wal-Mart or Abu Ghraib.
Well, a good chunk of ’em anyway, according to the (excellent) teachers I know. Many don’t care, many are just plain duds. This is 7th/8th grade age-groups.
Quite right, by the time they get to middle school, they could give a rat’s ass, and that is not their fault either.
I see the kind on mind-numbing bullshit these kids are exposed to everyday, and it took me a lot less time not to give a shit (3rd grade) — I spent kindergarten and first grade in German schools, back to the states for 2nd and by the time I was in third, I didn’t give a shit either. Thankfully, I had parents who knew the deal and told be school was all about getting your ticket punched and if you wanted to actually learn something, you had to do it on your own time. this is something I have found to be true all the way through to graduate school. Schooling is NOT education.
My son, who has known his right from left since he was 4, brought home his homework last Wednesday (he is now in first grade) and it was an infantile worksheet that had nine apples on it with a pair in each and the directs were, color the picture on the left in each apple. After three of them he looked at me and said, why do I need to keep doing this? I said, because it is your homework, don’t worry about it, we’ll do something fun after…
This is a kid who has been playing Uno with us since he was 3, who beats both his dad and me at memory games every time, likes to draw, color and do mazes, and who used to like writing stories until they started telling him that he had to make his letters in their particular system (I wish I could show it to you, it looks like freaking ITALICS) and he USED to love to read (only a year and a half of public school and he has to be dragged to it kicking and screaming now)…yeah, public schools are just freaking grand.
I taught at an elite private school in Santa Monica. My students lived in Brentwood and Beverly Hills. You’ve seen the movies and television programmes starring their parents. Right now, you are probably using software sold to you by one of their parents’ companies.
Most of these children of privilege were, in my opinion, semi-literate.
Why?
It’s not just the lower classes who don’t gain a decent education. Mind you, class warfare is a HUGE component of this–education is the great leveller, and destroying the public education system is one of the best ways to strengthen and perpetuate class stratification (which runs to the advantage of the ruling class).
But my children of privilege, who flew on private jets to second and third homes in France and Hawaii, also couldn’t write a coherent essay to save their souls.
However, they and their parents insisted they receive “A” marks for their work. Teachers were bullied by rich parents who didn’t care about achievement, but rather the appearance of achievement.
When you think about it, I’ve just described a country that would elect and re-elect George W. Bush as its President. The United States now has a culture that no longer values achievement, and has instead substituted the appearance of achievement.
Bush never achieved anything on his own–he’s all smoke and mirrors. The US went from poor-boy-turned-Rhodes-Scholar (Bill Clinton, the embodiment of the American dream and can-do American character if ever there was one) to George W. Bush, who never read any book in his life except “My Pet Goat”.
A great number of Americans–not all–want Mr. Bush in office. He is THEIR President, and just is blissfully proud of his ignorance as they are.
Wait, it gets better. The same attitude is spreading in the United Kingdom, particularly in England. That’s why when my wife and I decamped from the US to Europe, we chose Switzerland rather than England as our home.
Make no mistake, there are institutional reasons why public schools are failing to educate their students–but those public schools exist within a culture that does not value education. That is why the fall and decline of both public and private education has been not only tolerated but encouraged by a stingy public who refuse to have their taxes raised to pay for teachers’ salaries and decent school campuses–frankly, my dear, they don’t give a damn. It is the culture that is ultimately to blame–a culture not created by Bush but one that created him. What other powerful, important nation would elevate such an obviously boorish barbarian to its highest and most esteemed office?
Thus is the doom of the American Empire sealed. The rot grows within, unchecked, while other nations grow strong. Gaze back through the corridors of time to other civilisations and you will see that they, too, committed suicide.
Perhaps America will revive itself. But anti-intellectualism has always run strong in America, and I see it growing, not subsiding, with each passing year. That’s why I resigned as a university professor and chose to teach school in Switzerland instead.
Are now talking about “Helicopter Parents”; those who “hover” around their “college students” to a degree never heard of in earlier generations. These parents contact professors about grades on papers, ask for “make up lectures”, because son Johnny overslept the 8:00 class and missed the “review for the final”, want to know how many students “aced” the last test and the like.
Some colleges are including meetings with incoming freshmen parents to discuss what the school’s response to these behaviors will be. Apparently a new trend at college over the last ten years or so, but a “way of life” for k-12 educators for quite some time.
Our children is not learning… because of an anti-intellectual atmosphere as many have said, and because no one reads books for entertainment anymore.
I have two children in college who went through the public school system in MA. Though they were in honors and AP classes, they were required to read very little compared with what I was required to read in public school from 7th through 12th grade. They were asked to read perhaps 3-6 classic novels in the entire 6 years, whereas in school I was required to read at least 6-10 per year.
I tried to make up for this failing by reading complex books aloud to them.
TV and computers do not make literate consumers. Books do.
Tee. Vee.