Education Falling Behind in the US

[beetlehorn]

A week ago I heard a report in regards to how well our young students here in the US compare to other students around the world. Countries like Japan, Finland, and Singapore well exceeded the US in overall test scores for math, and science. That being said we still have some excellent students. The curricula that is set up in our schools, including colleges is flawed in my opinion. We require students to take classes that really have nothing to do with their field of expertise. For example I went to college to study zoology, but had to take prerequisite courses in English, World history, American history, etc. (which I already learned in high school) including some truly useless classes such as music appreciation. The instructor in that class focused solely on Broadway Musicals. What possible use would I have for Broadway Musicals in Field Zoology? We require our students to make good grades in all classes, cluttering their minds with useless crap that take away their focus on what they would truly excel in. If a student shows an appreciation for chemistry, but is struggling in classes such as algebra, or geometry, we should put more emphasis on helping them with these subjects that directly relate to their preferred field, and not waste their time with learning about Macbeth for example. I had to read and study these things in high school, and I can honestly say I have never had a moment in my life where I had any need for the writings of some long-dead poet or play writer. I sit here writing this as a concerned grandfather, wondering how many wasted hours my grandkids will have to endure in classes that will never help them to prepare for their futures. Perhaps it is time for us all to rethink how we educate our young people.

[jshuey]

I had the same experience - but my take is very different. I entered college knowing I was going to be an "entomologist" even if I didn't exactly know what that entailed. I was forced to take philosophy, history, economics, psychology, geology, geography, even music appreciation (aka - history of rock and roll). You name it - lots of courses that tended to bring my grade average down. But in hindsight - it's those classes that I often fall back on as I ponder the world (or as I listen to the radio).

I think that's supposed to the point of a liberal arts education - to help shape a more complete person who sees connections across disciplines. To get you "out of the box". To help you analyze the world around you - to make decisions that are decisive and insightful. In retrospect, I wish I'd taken more philosophy, and I wouldn't trade my liberal arts background for anything. It has enriched my life. I can honestly say that I would not be effective in my current position without it (I probably would not have been offered the position as an NGO conservation biologist without a solid background in business). I'd still be some robot biologist working on other people's problems.(I spent my first five years of life after grad school as a consultant working on stream ecology across the eastern US, generally in support of EPA and industries that were in trouble with EPA).

Ironically, I'm dealing with a 13 year old who is asking exactly the same questions... "why do I have to take pre-calculus, world history, chemistry, or literature. Why do I have to write essays? Why, why, why??? This won't have anything to do with computer programming..." . I'm trying to explain to him that life is complex - and you need skills that sew it all together... - skills that position you for the challenges that you might face as a 15 year old or something.... And that maybe your career choice will change by the time you get a driver's license...

Then I try not to whack him upside the head.



John

[rjb]

My experience is similar to John's. I entered college knowing I'd be a chemist (with a beetle collection) and that's how I ended up. Back in those days we all moaned about having to take latin, french, german etc. Now that I'm old and retired I look back and I regret none of the learning. Rather I wish I had learned Spanish (useful living in New Mexico!) and Japanese and Chinese. I've never felt that my brain got cluttered with all that learning. A liberal arts broader education served me well.
I don't know why the US is falling behind so many other countries on the international testing, but I notice an increase in our traditional anti-intellectualism. Movies celebrating "Dumb", leaders actively dismissing scientific knowledge in favor of political idealogy. All contributes to a decline in the appreciation of academic achievement.

Rick

[anthony]

An educated citizenry is a important part of a working democracy, hence the liberal arts inclusion.

[wingedwishes]

As technology makes things easier, less is expected of the human mind, then less is produced. Why memorize history when any history will be projected into the lens of your sunglasses the moment you wish for it? It will be up to the individual to make use of the technology to think more deeply or create more grandly. How exiting would it be to you to take a walk, spot an insect you have never seen before, scan it with your IPad to do a DNA analysis, discover it is a new species, name it, dictate a paper on it into your Google glasses, then have it listed on Wikipedia (and everywhere else) with complete data. Additionally, you would have sold five of them on Ebay before you even finished your walk. At the end of your walk you told your spouse that you just named a new dung beetle after her. Seven minutes later, her divorce attorney has documents for you to digitally sign.....

[exoticimports]

Most US students see school as a chore, while overseas they see it as an opportunity. Part of the reason is the teachers (and I generalize) in USA are not that bright, are rather apathetic, and more concerned about their union contract than education.

Here's your answer why junior has to take math and calculus- because it exercises the brain and teaches one to solve problems. Computer programming is highly problem-solving based.

Art too can be important. I recently completed a survey for my daughter's art program and I told them they need to concentrate on real skills- copying images, drawing, etc and skip the cutsie art stuff. Drawing is a skill required across many disciplines, including high tech. I can draw an idea on paper in 20 seconds that would take hours to do with Visio.

History COULD be useful if it were targeted and holistic. But US history is rife with politically motivated gibberish. We should have a course called "why every democracy to date has failed and why USA is going right down that same path." We should tell the truth:

Teddy Roosevelt, who sold out Korea and set up Japan (in violation of US Constitution) as a proxy that decided they didn't want to be a proxy and thus came WWII.
Abraham Lincoln, killer of the greatest number of Americans in a single war
Nelson Mandela: adulter, avowed Communist, and leader of the terrorist organization Umkhonto we Sizwe which struck as soft infrastructure targets.

Meanwhile, we some how know that biology is important, but some get a pass dissecting a frog. Uh huh.

An educated citizenry may be important to a working democracy, but ours isn't working, and the education is garbage.

I must say though, "classic" literature was garbage. I had better things to read than The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird. My 11th grade teacher let me off reading some other stupid novel when I explained I was too busy reading A Canticle for Leibowitz.

My stepson came home grumpy one day. His reading assignment was some cutsie book about cats. I told him he didn't have to read it, and told him to tell his teacher that I said so. I then contacted the school and suggested that they might improve young boys' reading levels if they gave them something interesting to read.

Frankly, even at top performing schools, the teachers are the pits. The garbage that is sent home is rife with misspelling, poor grammar, no punctuation, etc. I had to mark up an exam in red pen (the exam, not the student's work) and send it back with a "D".

We reap what we sow. Crap teachers begets crap students.

To a person, everyone successful I know will tell you they became that way by self-education, no thanks to pre-12 academics.

[myotis]

"We reap what we sow. Crap teachers begets crap students."
exoticimports- I completely agree with you. I worked as a substitute in several local school districts for 7 years. A "C" used to be average, but no one is allowed to be average anymore, it might hurt their feelings. But nothing will ever change as long as "teachers" hold the high ground. You were probably one of the most hated parents in school to dare grade the teachers work. After all, what local televsion/ radio stations crowning award doesn't go to a local teacher. And who in our community doesn't know that teachers are overworked and underpaid (one of the biggest loads of nonsense out there) But nothing is going to change until we quit celebrating mediocrity, make teachers, parents, and students accountable for their own success/ failure, and quit believing that the way to fix a problem is to throw more money at it or pass a law.

[beetlehorn]

Some very interesting replies. I fully agree that there are some teachers out there that should be doing something else. Then there are some students that absolutely hate being in school, and feel like they are being forced into something that they are strongly opposed to. I remember the kids that disrupted class as a distraction to us all because they were somewhere they didn't want to be. A student always does better when they truly want to learn, and they are in a class that they truly enjoy. The idea of forcing someone to learn something they don't give a damn about is illogical. There are parents that won't take no for an answer when it comes to their kids going to college,("you are going to college, and I don't want to hear anything else!"). Most of these kids are there because of someone else's dream or expectations, and they just drift through barely getting by. The same goes for high school students. The ones that truly applied themselves to school, did well generally speaking, and the ones that didn't care, usually did poorly on tests, and overall grades. How do you make someone care about education if they don't want to. Well....you can't! If Johnny doesn't want to be a doctor, but would rather be a policeman, then you should encourage him there, instead of putting pressure on him to get a doctorate degree. There are plenty of occupations that don't require a college education that hold their own degree of honor. The idea that you won't be able to get a job unless you have a degree of some kind is false. I don't hold a degree because I just couldn't work and continue going to school on my budget at the time. So a few years later I started working on cars. I did go to a technical school to learn all about suspensions and alignments. I passed with an A+, (second highest score of my classmates) and got my certification. Now I make pretty good money doing what I learned simply because it was something I actually wanted to do at the time. I think we need to focus more on what the young mind truly wants to accomplish, not what we think they should because of our ideas.

[jshuey]

These are interesting comments - and I think everyone has solid points. I have to agree, that public education in the US can indeed suck. My son, a gifted student with ADD, was in danger of flunking out of grade school - he was bored and can't sit still - a deadly combination in classrooms that are run on the principle of conformity and synchronized learning. We pulled him out in the third grade and started using alternative schools that blended classroom with home learning that allowed him to work at his own pace. In some cases, 4 months was all it took to complete a year-long course. In other cases, (like Spanish) we will be working with him the entire year to complete a 9-month course. Luckily, his mom is reasonably fluent, Otherwise he would just learn how to ask where the bathrooms are and how to order a beer or two (the extent of my mastery!).

That said, if a student fits the mold, they can succeed and do very well. Public schools in my region are still turning out students that are ready for the workforce and college. If you can succeed in high school you will probably do ok in life as well. More and more, you see schools that are working with local industries to turn out the employees that have the skills they want. Industry donates high-tech equipment for hands-on training that gives kids opportunities to work with real tools, as found in both high- and low-tech industry. For high-tech students, many colleges have partnered with local communities to help students attain the skills they need in preparation for college life. For example – my son attends monthly meetings hosted by Rose-Holman, a tiny little college with the top ranked undergrad engineering program in the US, to hear how students and graduates have applied their skills to real world situations. Last night he learned how some 22 year olds found the venture capital to start a company that is developing a user-friendly communication platform for the low-tech geriatric community.

But back to my point - schools really do fail students who don't fit the mold.

Someone commented about the availability of info on the web, and how technology makes it less critical that you know about various subjects (when you can just look everything up on the web). (as an aside – when I was in college in the 80’s, my advisor thought that the key to being an entomologist was understanding how to access information – you couldn’t know everything but you had to know how to find out. A major portion of his entomology class was devoted to using library indices to dig out that info from the stacks. Nothing much has changed – just the tools we use to dig through vast amount of knowledge out there). The missing ingredient is that you have to be able to make the connections in your brain first, that there is a novel relationship that might be useful to bring into the mix. If you don’t have a rudimentary understanding across disciplines, you will never see the relationships to begin with. The really successful people I know think way outside the box and bring new ideas based on unrelated subjects to the table [/i](I wish I had this power!)[/i]. The internet is just the tool that gets you the details; it’s your broader understanding of the world that makes them relevant.

Finally, I just have to rail a little about the dissing of the Grapes of Wrath and To Kill A Mocking Bird. I don’t know if I could have appreciated either of these as a high school student either, but I have read both books twice over the last decade (and will probably plow through East of Eden a second time as well – this is perhaps the best book I’ve ever read!). These books (and the Kurt Vonnegut volumes I did read in high school – probably because he used the F-word so much) actually make you think about them long after the fact. Full of interesting nuances and truths that help you understand the human condition a bit.

John

[joee30]

I believe since I was an average student in the inner city of Los Angeles, that the system fails it's students. Honestly, I was a B student that ditched the classes where the teachers wouldn't help me understand or "teach" me how to solve a math problem, or how the judiciary system in the U.S. works, but rather just tell me to "read the book", and they get back to reading their newspaper. When I ditched class, I went to go do something stimulating, which was skateboarding and insect collecting. I still showed up to take my midterms and finals, and passed. A lot of the other students weren't happy there, or were into the thug/ghetto lifestyle, so many dropped out to become lowlifes and welfare hounds. The ones that did make it, either went to the military, a technical school, or to junior college, and the geeks, all went to UCLA,USC, or other universities. I'm guessing it can be better, or worse wherever you are from, but I really think the system is failing the students in getting them somewhere they feel comfortable. The skills they need to learn so they can at least get a job, and or go to college if thats where they want to be.

[wingedwishes]

I was holding off until I saw a recent article which seems to validate my thought:

newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/24/spelling-bee-ends-in-tie-because-organizers-ran-out-of-words/?xid=rss-topstories

Free countries are free for people to go beyond what is expected (or never live up to anything) if they are self motivated. This being said, America has some of the greatest thinkers and innovators as well as the greatest deadbeats you will ever see.

[Deleted]

I sat this out for quite a while and I should probably not even have posted on this sick topic.

Where do I begin? First, yes, today many of the students are not as well prepared as they should be. While I see several points made and agree, the reasons might surprise you. First, one should know that I have taught for 32 years, won 9 teaching awards, have a BS and a MS in curriculum and instruction with 40 hours past that. I have also been on the negotiation team for our union for 26 years. And...I teach in Illinois:( With that having been said, several points need to be made along these lines.

Are there poor teachers out there? Yes. Ok, now let's examine some facets of why America is so lacking in education. I was taught/trained to encourage higher thinking, creativity, and individual growth for students of all levels. Today, we have a 'teach-to-the-test' mentality which is effectively killing education. All is based on the all-important test they take once a year. Teaching to the test is limiting, stifles true growth, and is not a reliable means of measuring learning.

How has this all happened? Well, today, schools are run not by educators, but by the legislators and judges. It is like having some body of gov't. tell a dentist how to do teeth. These morons have NO understanding of learning, yet THEY make the decisions we have to abide by. No imput from us teachers in the trenches is factored in. Griping about teachers is parhaps partially correct, the larger blame lies with people making decisions about education who shouldn't and are not even remotely qualified.
When parents complain, the administrations 'cave' and when teachers speak their professional minds, they are reassigned to new positions for punitive reasons. Schools are in dire need of $, so the gov't bribes them with crap like "Race to the top" where those who comply with all the standardized testing and new anti-teacher methods of evaluations get $. One fine example of 'learning' happened recently....we had 7 standardized tests to give our kids in the last 15 days of school. How much 'learning' is being done with that kind of waste of time.

But don't worry, if one thinks things are bad now, wait a bit. What in the world is happening to attract good teachers to the field? Nothing. Had I been in the middle of my career instead of the end, I would have switched careers. Illinois is currently trying to have us who have paid into the retirement system for decades pay for the money woes of the state by reducing our pension. What about the new teachers? Well, simply put, there likely won't be many(at least good ones) because recently Illinois has changed benefits for new teachers. They will teach longer, pay more into retirement, get less back at retirement, and get nothing for sick days not used. Teachers are THE lowest paid college graduates and have had all their job protections removed and are now targets of administrators who want to remove 'non-yes' staff or those with advanced education who get paid more. Teachers take home work to do after the teaching day ends...........how many people out there punch out and then contuinue to work during family time? Come on. Teachers have to deal with kids who have parents who have given up on them, provide a less-than-ideal home life, and teachers have classes of 32+ kids with ADD, ADHD,ESL, BD, gifted, abused, mal-nourished at the same time. Teachers will be evauated partially on the test performance of these very kids. It is like having prisoners rate law inforcement for raises in law inforcement....really.

That is where education is today. Sad....yes. While there are indeed teachers out there who should not be, the vast majority are doing their best with their hands tied behind their backs. The US is compared to countries with higher test scores in reading and math and science. Ha ha.....many of those countries are testing only the cream of the crop and do not include all the kids who don't get an education at all.

So, in 14 months and 23 days, Illinois will not have to deal with me as I bow out and my blood pressure lowers. In ten years, there will likely be a shortage of teachers(especially the good ones) big time. If people are concerned about education, they should aim their frustrations at the new 'ways' of education. Since when should a one-time taken test on paper and pencil that is one-size-fits-all in nature be THE way to measure education? Since when should the gov't tell us how to our jobs? Since when should the gov't (which is behind in what they alread owe) bribe districts to swallow the "Common Core" joke of a system to get more $ ?

Ok, sorry for the rant. I must agree, 'Education is falling behind' yes, yes, and yes. At least now some input to this thread comes from a member of the targeted profession. If you still feel that education is heading south......you better believe it is. The reasons for such, however, are not because the vast majority of teachers trying to do their jobs are failing, but for the 'pseudo-intellectual' leadership with all the power.

[wollastoni]

Interesting post Bill, and very true indeed.

[Deleted]

Well said Bill, very well written piece, my children are aged between 15 and 27 and the one thing I have noticed more than anything is how stifling school has become now. In my school days children were allowed to have a childhood and have some fun at the same time as being educated, thus making learning enjoyable, everything is so serious now, the demands and pressures that are put on younger children here in the UK is getting silly, exams for children at 7 years of age!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, the system needs to get a grip, there is plenty of time for being serious and having stress later in life, let kids be kids and enjoy what should be the best time of their lives.

[beetlehorn]

I couldn't have said it better Dunc! The need for playtime is probably more important than the so called "experts" realize. I personally believe that when a child is allowed to play more often, and let a kid be a kid, they are developing creativity, imagination, and their own personal values such as self esteem, and self confidence. The more emphasis we put on making our kids perform in school, the more we need to let them just be kids. In fact I think there should be more time for recess, at least in the early years. With all the stresses we put on our children these days, there's no wonder kids have problems with ADD, anxiety, depression, and other disorders that they are being over-medicated for. Just my opinion. Tom