War coverage isn’t helping American young adults know much about geography. Nearly two-thirds of Americans ages 18 to 24 couldn’t find Iraq on a map, and 88 percent couldn’t find Afghanistan, according to the National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs 2006 Geographic Literacy Study released last week. In addition, 70 percent couldn’t locate Iran or Israel, and 54 percent didn’t know that Sudan is a country in Africa. Those surveyed didn’t do much better on American geography: 33 percent couldn’t locate Louisiana, despite all the Hurricane Katrina reporting, and only half could identify New York on a map. How can Americans compete in a global marketplace if we don’t even know where other countries are located?
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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Somewhere or other, I’ve got a button that says “War is God’s Last Hope for Teaching Geography to Americans!” Sounds like that last hope has failed.
When I was a kid, my dad gave me old maps to put in my room. I knew where “Mokva” was located when I was 9.
(Yes, Joe W., more evidence of my Slavic socialist tendencies; hell, my European swamp-mix ethnicity even includes a little Serbian, or so I’ve heard! ;-).
Real men don’t ask directions. Of course, we’re lost all the time, but still . . .
But at least our public schools are doing an excellent job teaching our kids about the real world. I’ll bet they can find weapons, drugs or porn faster then they could find Kansas on a map.
Yet one more convincing example of what cable has done to American society…
Some fifty years ago White kids were learning and mastering Greek and Latin but thanks to desegregation we have resources being wasted on largely uneducable blacks and beaners. third world immigration and desegregation have caused the general dumbing down of all of our children. I am glad that our kinder are being home schooled.
Viva La Raza Blanco!!!
Welcome to the results of our government education system.
People are coming out of the system not knowing the place they live on a map, simple math, and they cannot read.
Something is seriously wrong with this equation. You can blame it on bad parents, low income status, at-risk, ESL, or any number of excuses. But the government education system is a poor way for a child to learn anything.
We are becoming a nation of functional illiterates. Just wait until the Ritalin Generation comes to age.
How do we fix our broken system? More money right? Nah! Get rid of the teachers unions, implement school choice and vouchers.
Let the money follow the kids not the school.
“Stupid in America” should have open the eyes to our leftist style government school system and how it is the wrong approach to educating children.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338
Our kids aren’t well educated. Let’s spend even more money on failed schools. Great logic, Phillip. Must have gone to public schools, too!
My kids did all right in the public schools and universities. Where were your kids?
Public education was invented to build an industrial workforce.
In a recent Eagle commentary Emporia State U biology professor John Schrock tried to equate teachers and surgeons. That’s incorrect. Doctors are selected from the highest-performing student group. Teachers are recruited from the middle group. A 3.2 GPA college student can’t get into medical school, except by going to the Caribbean. A 3.2 GPA college student is considered a fine candidate for teaching.
Of course, if we paid teachers $100k+ salaries, then we’d see very high GPAs for ed students.
A fundamental problem with public education is its factory-emulating standardization ethos. Disagree? Why do you think kids are segregated by AGE? If you want to really educate kids well in academic subjects, this is the last thing a rational system would do. We should be skipping at least 5% of our students to higher grades to give them challenges that match their abilities.
Consider the curriculum. It’s standardized. What do you think “textbook” means? Why do you think that a handful of publishing houses produce 100% of American school textbooks? Why do you think that if a new teacher comes to a school, and says, “I’d like to use a different book from the one you are using,” he or she is told, “This is the textbook we use here, so we can’t accommodate your personal choice”?
How many schools here are teaching algebra I to highly-gifted 11 year olds, or AP calculus to a handful of brilliant 15 years olds? The talent is there folks. If you deny the utility of highly-accelerated coursework for students who want it, and are willing to work exceptionally hard to meet the challenge, you’re locked into an Industrial Age standardization mindset. You may SAY “We want ALL our students to achieve their full potentials,” but you’re deceiving yourselves, children and parents.
What school here allows kids who are highly talented and interested in science and math to study each of these subjects two hours every day, with an extended school day, and NOT take social studies?
No, we can’t do THAT. We cannot INDIVIDUALIZE education. We are not interested in finding out what kids’ best talents are and cultivating their strengths. We don’t have the resources.
Finding kids’ best talents, and giving them extended teaching periods is the real secret to engaging students. Yet our factory-emulating education system cannot do this. It wasn’t designed to do this. It’s fine if gifted athletes get two hours of daily coaching, but we can’t do this in academics.
A few years ago some retired WSU faculty proposed creating a math and science academy for gifted middle schoolers. The superintendent and BOE rejected it, because the concept didn’t correspond to their vision of K-12 education, which alas, was ill-informed, relative to the science-and-technology-driven 21st century global economy. So Wichita kids are held captive by an obsolete educational ideology.
Then and now: In 1976 the year I graduated High school the education system was geared to prepare the student for college. Today it is preparing the student to work at Mc Donald’s and Wal-mart and failing at that! You would think the schools would be teaching how to count money back, not happening.In 1976 the student was expected to learn as much as was available and they could understand. Today they must learn to be politically correct and not be limited by knowledge.
When I was a student every lesson was judged by me as to why I need to know this? What difference does it make what someone did two hundred years ago? If I have no intent to go there, why should I know where it is? I knew how to add, subtract and multiply and divide, why should I learn any other math? Oh how little I knew of the real world back then. How one can never know what you will need to know in twenty years.
But it would seem that now the education system is being ran by the child I was.
We have an incompetent school board trying to introduce thinly disguised religion into the classroom; and in the meantime schools are failing in their primary task of educating students.
Sad…very sad.
A while back, I made a purchase at a comvenience store. The young girl behind the counter rang up my purchase and gave me the total. I gave her a $10. The power went out. The cashier froze. I asked her for my change and she said, “We gotta wait for the register to come back on. How else am I supposed to know how much change?”
Something is missing at school.
YOu guys make some good points, especially heatlander, but in the case of textbooks there might be a point on something there.
But with the exception of math. In college you have to purchase books that cost $100 for the courses you take. Even in Algebra, Calculas, or any math course you still have to purchase the $100 book for it.
This might be off topic, but what has seriously changed in the last 300 years in math that warrents a new textbook. Same goes for basic rudimentary english.
Paying teachers more doesn’t solve the problem either. People talk about recuriting the best and brightest. If you are teaching, you should be bright enough to teach children already. And most teachers take pride and love what they do. So the recuitment is not the problem.
Heatlander makes a good point. Teachers have no flexiblity to teach in their own way or style. College Professors have this flexibility but not K-12 Government School Teachers. Many thanks to Unions.
Unions were originally formed to protect teachers against their superiors’ abuses (largely female teacherforce vs. male superintendents, principals and school board presidents). It would be great to not have industrial age teachers unions. It would be great to have schools in which unionism would be an irrelevance. We aren’t there, yet. Some charter schools are free of union rules. That’s a reasonable experiment. Vouchers may be a reasonable experiment: they work in higher education.
A lot of math is old, but quite useful. Statistics is a newer field that is being incorporated into the middle and high school curriculum.
One thing that is controversial is a lot of distracting color photos and side-bars that give modern math textbooks a “magazine look”. These leave less room for mathematics presentations. The rationale is to engage students who aren’t mathematically inclined. Okay. What about kids who ARE mathematically inclined? Too bad, we can’t satisfy all students’ needs, so everybody gets the new magazine format textbooks.
Is this dumbed-down math? Of course it is. Just look at a 1960’s Houghton-Mifflin algebra textbook compared to today’s algebra texts. The HM series was designed to produce more engineers and scientists following the Sputnik embarrassment. This isn’t the math-training mission today. Back then some kids were selected to learn a lot of math. Today the focus is on teaching a lot of kids some math.
This is why education standardization doesn’t work, unless you develop multiple “track” standards, but if you do that, minority students will be populationally underrepresented in higher tracks, and this will be claimed to be unfair to them. Schools are in an impossible quandary: they cannot alleviate familial poverty, broken homes and dysfunctional dynamics. But they are under the gun to “close gaps”. Only way to do that is to dumb down the kids who have more home advantages.
But this is counterproductive, in a competitive global economy. Asia isn’t going to dumb down its math and science curricula to be fair to America.
Heartlander! Awesome post!
People of “third-world” countries are much more educated than Americans because in third world countries, we do not have the convenience of having as much resources as modern-industrialized countries. It will be okay, since once we bleed this country’s resources dry, our children will be much more competitive than your lazy, spoiled, undisciplined children.
I was betting it would be less than ten posts in when Joe would blame this on leftists. Alas, I was right. Also, the racist Ian Santiago and people like him are the reason why Kansas is a laughingstock to the rest of the nation. Ian, you are a shameful person. However, judging from your posts, shame is a foreign concept to you (’Foreign? Must be bad!’)
But seriously, I think you guys have some good ideas here. I think the idea of not separating kids according to age but instead according to where they are at in their own learning process is a good one. Good luck trying to accomplish anything with the mountains of red tape that exist in our education system, though.
Lawrence,My kids went to Isley back when it was an open magnet school. It was set up without age segregation, and had a variety of study environments and as dedicated a faculty as I’ve seen anywhere. It was a marvelous place for kids to learn!
Removing teacher unions from schools would be a grave mistake. But it is not surprising that Joe Williams will use any thread to bash unions.
The current drift was teachers and their individual teaching styles? It is regulated curriculumn that restricts that. I’d argue that unions would inherently protect the best of teachers. Those being the ones that dare to step outside the box. As in any workplace, unions work to protect not restrict.
If the concern is georgaphy I say why bother? It appears that in matters economic we are resigned to a global economy. There seems little interest in the economic or literal enforcement of our own borders to that end. But if we do need to teach geography, let’s throw in a little reality.
Class? THis is China. It is where almost everything you use is made because it’s cheaper to make it there than in the U S.
Over here is the middle east. This is where we get a lot of the oil for our cars. Some of you may get to go to the middle east some day to make sure we keep getting the oil for our cars.
Kids? Down here is Mexico. It has a border with us. But borders are just lines on the map. You can’t actually see a border. Mexico supplies us with artificailly low wage labor.
And finally here is the United States of America. We make…..Um well some people grow lots of things. We export……food yes, we export food. We also export capital. See all we have to trade is food. So we have to export lots of money too. In America, you can grow up to be…um…..uh…You can grow up to help people at the big Walmart store! Isn’t our country wonderful kids?
Why do you think the fedral wants to control the education system?
Don’t you all know an uneducation society is easier for the fedral government to control?
When your education system produces nothing but idiots they vote for nothing but idiots.
Thats the way-thats the way they like it, thats the way- thats the way they like it – - – -
There seems to be a general consensus about the state of education today. We have kids who can’t add and subtract, kids who couldn’t find their home state if they sat on it, a dumbing down of the general curriculum taught in schools and a plethora of blames.
This whole education mess has gotten to the point where it doesn’t matter anymore who is to blame. It simply doesn’t matter. What does matter is what are we going to do about it? How are we going to get people elected who can bypass the partisan nonsense and bring the public education system back up to the college preparation level it needs to be in this country? Who out there, among the myriad professionals, has the charisma and intelligence to do what needs to be done? This garbage we’re trying to teach the kids now certainly isn’t working.
What we need is a national referendum, devoid of party politics, with the idea in mind that this problem can be solved and the players will stay and work it at any cost, regardless of what it takes. This nation won’t last long putting students on the street who need a calculator to make change for a $10 bill. Every other country in the world will look at us as a laughing stock filled with idiots. And deservedly so.
The Unions aren’t protecting anything. They are an interest group looking after the interest of teachers, NOT children.
There are three goals that teachers unions have. !. Increase teachers pay as much as they can. 2. Increase the number of teachers. 3. Develop labor contracts to allow teachers to work as less hours and days as possible.
One thing I don’t understand. If Unions are there to protect, why are the largest unions in America for government employees? I guess the Government is worse than Corporations when it comes to labor issues.
Once you’re a teacher, you are one for life. That has nothing to do with unions, but because you are a government employee. There is no such thing as a ‘bad’ teacher in the government education system, unless you are having sex with your kids.
JM Walker.
I believe it comes down to what people natually do about their elected representatives.
People think the public education sucks, but the public school that their children goes to is just perfect.
Same goes to people who think Congress sucks, but their congressperson is good.
The reality is, that the public school their kids go to actually do suck, but they don’t want to know that. Nobody wants to hear that the school their children are forced to go to is substandard.
We also have to look at the rural areas. Many only have one school for the entire town children population. Those people have no choice.
Joe, you missed the point.
Joe,Do you really want to entrust your kid’s education to the lowest bidder? That’s exactly what’s happened to teaching. Students graduate today with ever higher loans to pay off, which means they will go where the money is. When teachers make less than almost any other group with similar education levels, only the ones who can’t find employment elsewhere end up in the public schools. You get what you pay for!Schools ran for generations on the cheap by hiring women, who were shut out of most other professions. That’s no longer true. Schools are going to have to pay equitable wages if they want good teaching staff.
You are saying that teachers are the lowest paid graduates in the job market? I really would like to see the rearch on that. Because I seriously doubt it.
People graduating from college do not make 100K a year. Most only make around 30K, and teachers are along side them.
Teachers get good pay and benefits now. Women were teachers because it was the tradition of that time. In the agrarian society develop that tradition. Believe it or not, we still have the remanents of it today. Such as summers off and schools during banking hours.
You talk to kids from other parts of the world and they go to school year around.
Joe just wants to bash unions. Probably he has never had one. That’s generally the case with folks who are against them.
But I digress.
Why do we expect any different from our kids than we do ourselves? America at large has a prejudice against intelligence. Intelligent people are seen as aloof (John Kerry) or egg headed (Al Gore) . Too, girls are demeaned if they are seen as too intellectual or vocal. If we elect people in our culture because they would be “pleasant to share a beer with”; If we elevate those who shoot a basket instead of shooting for the Moon, who can blame kids for being dis-interested in education?
And who can blame teachers for failing to reach them?
Maybe we should all be paying respects to teachers instead of bashing on them. They do the best they can with what they are sent.
As to soultions? My Great Aunt voulteers as a “grandma” at a school. She is paid nothing. We have an aging population with expertise across all fields. Why not use that? It is a tremendous resource. Maybe even compensate it a little.Those folks made America great. Maybe they could share that with kids who even when they do think about the future, see it as pretty bleak.
I don’t think anybody is bashing teachers. People have complained that the teachers are actually stranglehold by some means. We can aurgue that point. I will say that Teacher Unions are one but many problems in our education system. But I’m not bashing teachers.
And for your information, yes! I did work under Union Contract for 3 years and absolutely hated it. Senority and standardize raises suck. It’s demoralizing and it’s not a system for successful ambitious people.
It helps those who love the status-quo or don’t want to be shakin up by techonology and change. But for the most part, it’s not a welcome employement enviroment.
Maybe the problem is that Geography is thought of as a elective kind of like history.
“I think the idea of not separating kids according to age but instead according to where they are at in their own learning process is a good one.”
The public elementary school I attended in the early 70’s adopted a system like that when I was in the fourth grade. It’s a hardly a new idea; just one that needs to be done more often!
Joe,People who graduate with masters and doctoral degrees only make $30K? Only if you are a poet or a teacher! Further, when my daughter-in-law graduated with a masters in education from Michigan State, she was told not to even apply for teaching jobs in Kansas, that she could do better anyplace else. She went to Texas, and started at a higher salary than a teacher with a doctorate and twenty years experience makes in the Wichita system. If we continue to offer bottom-of-the-bucket wages, we can expect bottom-of-the-bucket applicants. It’s as simple as that! Is it any wonder that we have a bottom-of-the-bucket system?
The reason why american children have become so, to be blunt, stupid, is because of apathy. Other things grab their interest and they abandon their studies to be cool, or whatever word is being used to describe popularity today (last i was told, it was trill…). School isnt “trill,” so they pay less and less attention to it. Notice this, most children that excel in education are considered outcasts, or losers, so they focus on school work, instead of being with the in-crowd. Most kids in high school (and trickling down even to elementary schools) are preoccupied with aalcohol and getting laid that they disregard their work and focus on the things that appeal to them. American society doesnt exactly help, either. With the constant barage of television, music and movies and the contents within them, they think of school as a place the have to be before they can consume more and more. That is the problem, not lack of money. Giving more money to schools is just giving the students more things to play on (for those who dont understand my meaning, im refering to computers). Dumbing down the curicculum will only hinder the progress of students activly seeking an education. My problem is with entertainment industries. Although, what can be done to stop them when they have the right to “express” themselves in their own artistic fashion? It is up to the parents to limit both what comes into the home and how much.
Mark,School was much the same when I was there fifty years ago, and my generation seems to have survived. The slang was different, but the “in crowd” was pretty much focused on alcohol and cars and dates (getting laid was done, but not talked about as much).The Roman writer Juvenal spent quite a while bitching about the younger generation, as has every generation since. If each generation is so much worse than the previous one, either those Romans must have been godlike, or yes, the younger generations ARE lazy and idiotic, but they manage to improve enough over time, and have convenient enough memories, that they can complain about the next one!
In many ways, school has not changed, but the overflow of filth upon our youth has never been so immense and thoughtless. Songs about sex, money, drugs and killing. This is what fills their heads today and that is why they refuse to educate themselves. The media (so called “artists”) tells them that school in unimportant and that they didnt need it and look how sucessfull they are. I am quite sure that, fifty years ago, you had the very same people, although I am also quite sure that they were not even close to the majority. In todays schools, they are.
I would suspect that ignorance about a wide spectrum of topics goes beyond just young adults sampled in the survey. But is across the board I would bet that their are 50yr olds that don’t know where Iraq is on a map or the capital of Montana. Being smart and doing good is school has always been treated as an affliction was that way 10years ago when I went to school and 30years ago when my dad went. If you want to be part of the in-crowd you have to be a dumbass that only cares about sports, the way you look and getting laid.
It’s the in-crowd doin’ time, pushing shopping carts, flippin’ burgers, and fathering and mothering one parent children who don’t stand a chance in hell of making it in the real world.
It would be nice if this generation could learn the lesson of responsibility, but sadly our generation had a difficult ime learning it ourselves. What can we teach that we never learned?
I would suspect that ignorance about a wide spectrum of topics goes beyond just young adults sampled in the survey. But is across the board I would bet that their are 50yr olds that don’t know where Iraq is on a map or the capital of Montana. Being smart and doing good is school has always been treated as an affliction was that way 10years ago when I went to school and 30years ago when my dad went. If you want to be part of the in-crowd you have to be a dumbass that only cares about sports, the way you look and getting laid.