As in, less time being spent having students master ever harder topics and learn more facts, analysis, etc. and more time in class making sure kids feel better about themselves, giving them bogus exposure to topics, etc. Replacing rigor with the new shibboleth that education must be ‘fun’ or it must be sacrificed, and so forth.
As in, ‘challenge’ and ‘discipline’ are not popular words in school (and not ‘discipline’ in the sense of getting paddled).
This is more of a problem in higher education, but seems to be slowly creeping into lower levels.
[quote]T-Raven wrote:
I teach at an excellent public school, and I see great students and teachers every day. My daughter is a junior at another public school, and she has received an excellent education. I can tell you, and all of the other knee-jerk critics of public education, that there is a great education waiting in our public schools for anyone who wants it. Lots of studies have shown that we have some of the greatest teachers and students in the world. You don’t hear about that because it doesn’t make good press. [/quote]
for students that take school seriously, a great education can be obtained…
but, this reminds me of the old phrase:
“you can lead a horse to water, you just can’t make him drink”…
I think it has a large cultural component; coupled with an underachieving and egalitarian school system.
The facts in and of themselves might be trivia, but look at how systematic the wrong responses are. Americans overestimate their population systematically, and the predominance of English in the world. The US might by far be the most important, powerful country in the world, but that doesn’t mean it is the only one.
Learning a second language might not really help American individuals. Our culture (for right now, at least) is set up to be monolingual. Considering large portions of the world are bilingual by default in English, means that there are some rough economic transitions in store. It’s also insulative; though I know bilinguals who are stubborn and chauvanistic.
I don’t think this is a uniquely American phenomenon, but coupled with the fact that we essentially dictate the rules to the rest of the world, we haven’t had to worry about it.
Philistinism doesn’t seem very active on T-Nation. Besides the fact that the vast majority of us are physiology/nutrition wonks, the average T-man seems quite studied in multiple other areas. The jobs thread and the books thread evidence this quite well.
Philistinism is definitely on the march in our culture, but its hard to tell how recent a phenomenon this is.
No Child Left Behind is extremely unpopular among educators that I know, but I don’t know how many of them would blame the results of a test like this on it.
Kidding, but who gets made fun of on this board because they are smart?
Yeah, I’d be interested to see this as well. [/quote]
I don’t think that smart people in themselves are being made fun of on here. What I see happening is that when someone has a post on here that some others don’t agree with, many times the question of what that poster does for a living comes up. If the person responds with an occupation that is perceived as having a high degree of intelligence in order to perform the job, then that’s when the ridicule starts. It has to do with the people that disagree with the poster having an image of what a person in that specific occupation should post in response to the topic at hand. When that person posts something that doesn’t match their preconceived notion, many of them can’t handle it because it screws with their image of that occupation. The response is that they start ridiculing the person that posted the comment rather than actually discussing the topic. Many of us are guilty of it at one time or another. I’ve done it with people that speak in areas in which they have no experience but act like they are experts in the field. It has also been done to me on many occassions. As I said, I don’t think that it has to do with just being smart.
zarathus, nice $5 dollar word. Not sarcasm either, I like learning different words to add to my vocabulary. For the the benefit of those who don’t know what this means, I looked it up for us all
Philistinism:
n.
An attitude of smug ignorance and conventionalism, especially toward artistic and cultural values.
n : a desire for wealth and material possessions with little interest in ethical or spiritual matters [syn: materialism]
I didn’t know off-hand what it meant either. I’m a scientist, it wasn’t technology-related enough for me to understand what it meant.
Our schools are an absolute embarassment. If we actually TAUGHT something in schools we wouldn’t need to teach to the test. Instead our schools are full of fluff…
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I teach at an excellent public school, and I see great students and teachers every day. My daughter is a junior at another public school, and she has received an excellent education. I can tell you, and all of the other knee-jerk critics of public education, that there is a great education waiting in our public schools for anyone who wants it. Lots of studies have shown that we have some of the greatest teachers and students in the world. You don’t hear about that because it doesn’t make good press.
You can’t honestly sit here and tell me on average that we have some of the best schools and students in the world(not including college…which we have by far the best schools). Do we have some? Sure…i have no doubt that we might have the best students and teachers. However, i wouldn’t say that your average american student is better than anywhere else in the industrialized world…our woeful test scores show otherwise.
I had a professor in college who loved to talk about that subject. He thought it was ludicrous that people would admit that our university system was the best in the world, but then purport that our secondary schools were somehow not getting the job done. If our colleges are the best, and our high schools are the feeder system for colleges, then how bad can the high schools be? [/quote]
Maybe i should rephrase. Our best colleges are by far better than every other countries best colleges. Harvard, yale, princeton, mit, cal tech, etc etc…there are very, very few schools in foreign countries which deserve to be long in the same breath as those.
We have a lot of shit colleges too, however. Most our students feed into crap schools…not into the best.
[quote]Diomede wrote:
We have a lot of shit colleges too, however. Most our students feed into crap schools…not into the best.
[/quote]
Not everybody can be on top of the shit heap.
[quote]vroom wrote:
I’m not claiming that I’m smart, but surely you folks have seen references to ivory towers, thinking trees and elitism around these parts?[/quote]
This has nothing - repeat, nothing - about critisms of being intelligent. It has to do with attitude.
In fact, it is usually the opposite - the claim is usually that those in the ivory tower are not wise.
You can be the smartest guy in the room and not be an elitist.
Yesterday, the prof. in my geography class handed out the 20 question quiz. Sadly, the class was divided into two groups: those of us who scored 19 or better (most missed the immigration question) and those who got less than 10 correct. I know you will all be surprised to learn that the only one everyone got correct was the CSI question…
[quote]LBRTRN wrote:
Yesterday, the prof. in my geography class handed out the 20 question quiz. Sadly, the class was divided into two groups: those of us who scored 19 or better (most missed the immigration question) and those who got less than 10 correct. I know you will all be surprised to learn that the only one everyone got correct was the CSI question…[/quote]
I got that one wrong. I think that’s a good thing.
I got that one wrong. I think that’s a good thing.[/quote]
I dunno, I bet you don’t even know where the TV show ‘Dallas’ was set.
But seriously, I work with Ph.D.s who don’t know the least bit of pop culture. When a Ph.D. asks me ‘Do you know the woman they’re talking about?’ upon hearing a ‘Desparate Housewives’ discussion, I can’t say it’s much better. Not to say that I could lay out plotlines and match character names to actresses, but when you mention ‘The Unit’ and the Laurel and Hardy sketch ensues, you have to laugh.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
Yesterday, the prof. in my geography class handed out the 20 question quiz. Sadly, the class was divided into two groups: those of us who scored 19 or better (most missed the immigration question) and those who got less than 10 correct. I know you will all be surprised to learn that the only one everyone got correct was the CSI question…
I got that one wrong. I think that’s a good thing.[/quote]
That was kind of my point. Half the kids in the class thought the US had a population of 1 bil but they sure as hell knew all about CSI…
