Hey kid, why are you such a moron?
U.S. prof says his students are ignoramuses, and he has evidence to prove it
This is not an uncommon complaint of university professors. They won’t say it to your face, because they’re generally decent people. That, and damaging your self esteem was recently reclassified as a mortal sin. And they certainly don’t think it about all of you. Maybe not even most of you. But they often think it about some of you, and share their pain with colleagues, friends and non-student acquaintances. We’ve published them saying it before, chapter and verse.
But even if one believes that the latest crop of 17-23 year olds is intellectual Coke Zero, Case Western Reserve journalism professor Ted Gup’s analysis of his students’ knowledge of history, current events and the world makes for depressing reading. (Gup’s article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is a registration-required site).
Among Gup’s findings:
* “I teach a seminar called “Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge.” I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word “rendition.”
Not one hand went up.
This is after four years of the word appearing on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, on network and cable news, and online. This is after years of highly publicized lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and international controversy and condemnation. This is after the release of a Hollywood film of that title, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, and Reese Witherspoon.
I was dumbstruck. Finally one hand went up, and the student sheepishly asked if rendition had anything to do with a version of a movie or a play.”
Gup went on to explain to his students the great secrecy that surrounded such practices as part of the War on Terror; the journalistic reports that uncovered them; the years worth of very public and international controversy surrounding rendition, and so on. “The students were visibly disturbed,” says Gup. They’d apparently never heard about any of this, though it’s been on the front page of The New York Times on umpteen occasions. “They expressed astonishment, then revulsion. They asked how such practices could go on.”
I have lived in many countries and changed schools in many places, one thing I tell you about the North American system is that they lack discipline.
Who the hell are the students to complain that the class is boring?!! Yes , I am pro creativity and democratic learning but common, it became something intrenched in the culture that everything should be FUN!
My peers at university thought goethe was a cheese.
How much of this can be attributed to the advent of the internet as an immediate reservoir of factual data? Give any of those kids a browser and they could get those answers for you within seconds. Much like cloud computing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
Scary.
Not knowing who Goethe is just means that you’ll probably suck at Trivial Pursuit. It doesn’t make you a moron.
Before blaming the media, did you think about the school system? The media shows the people what they want to see and everybody can chose from offers ranging from FOX to C-SPAN. Nowadays people also can use the internet to get all kind of information as well as knowledge, libraries are still everywhere.
But people need to learn to distinguish between junk and ken. This should be provided by parents and school. If the parents are already uneducated and confused that leaves only the schools. The real problem is that most Americans go 12 years to a public school and when finished, have never seen a world map or read a book from cover to the end, for sure they will not speak a foreign language. They are filled with a lot of drizzle with the quality of a fairy tale and some nice memories about growing up the conventional way.
Blaming tele is a futile waste of time, a diversion. Television programmes will get better if there will be people watching the improved ones. The answer is better funding for schools, better pay (and education and respect) for teachers and a culture of learning: hammer the truth into the people that only knowledge will get them anywhere in life.