If our teachers can't identify world leaders, do you think they know what Memorial Day commemorates?
This is an interesting story about education...or lack therof. And it's not about the lack of knowledge from the students, it's the teachers who might need to be schooled in history.
From some of the commentors:
I tutor high school students in Boston. The week of president's weekend I decided to have my group of five read The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. None of them heard of Paul Revere, Longfellow or of North Church, which is mere miles from their school and despite the fact that the Boston Marathon traces the ride of Revere. What bothered me though is that none of them knew the War of Independence and only one knew that the U.S. was originally a British colony.
Basically, if it isn't on an MCAS state test, there is no need to learn it. Which is why the ace college student/future teacher can't recognize Churchill- it isn't on the teacher licensing test.
and
This is rich testimony to refute the myth that centralized/federalized standards improve outcomes. We "lean forward," building a nation of super credentialized, super cretinized young citizens.
Welcome to the world of school standardized testing requirements. If it's not on the test, chances are the teachers don't have time to talk about Churchill's importance in WWII. It may be more important than ever for parents to take the responsibility for educating their children, either by supplementing public educuation material, homeschooling or private schooling. Apparently the main players in WWII are not important enough to teach to recent education major graduates, so it is probably safe to assume your child is not being taught this information either.
"None of them heard of Paul Revere, Longfellow or of North Church, which is mere miles from their school and despite the fact that the Boston Marathon traces the ride of Revere. What bothered me though is that none of them knew the War of Independence and only one knew that the U.S. was originally a British colony."
ReplyDeleteThat CAN'T be true. :\
Winston churchill the priminister of England during WW2. I obtained my GED in 1984, so much for public Ed. huh!
ReplyDeleteWhy should the American students know about Winston Churchill? After all, they may be following the lead of the Community Agitator in Chief, Barack Hussein Obama who sent the bust of Churchill that was in the White House back to England.
ReplyDeleteI think that, even though standardized testing is in many ways narrowing what is happening in schools, we do need a system for determining a) what we want children to learn, and b) whether or not they are learning this, and so when someone has such a system to suggest that is better than how we're doing that now, feel free to share : D
ReplyDeleteAll that aside, being an about to be Junior in college that is about to spend a year in China, I can't tell you much about WWII that I learned in high school, but I can identify the axis and the allies, I understand its relation to the Cold War, and I can even detail to you the parallels between the Cold War and the Peloponnesian War. And maybe these are more important concepts than recognizing Churchill's face? I challenge you to identify a picture of Kurt Gödel (one of the greatest Mathematicians of all time), Michael Farraday (who is the reason why we understand electricity and a good deal about magnetism), or Jospeh Lister (who introduced antiseptics, making modern surgery possible). It really just comes down to what field you've been trained in/are interested in.
There are really smart students out there, and there are plenty of just smart students out there, and however tragic it may be that this doesn't translate into knowledge about Paul Revere (and face it, knowing one lamp for a land invasion and two lamps for a sea invasion doesn't quite do the same thing as knowing how to use Word Processing software in our culture today), we still need to keep a perspective about what these students DO know. And face it, if we're lodging complaints against standardized testing, why are we assessing its failure by asking questions like this?