Common Core, an organization that describes itself as a "new research and advocacy organization that will press for more teaching of the liberal arts in public education", commissioned a survey in which they asked 1,200 17-year-old teenagers "basic" history and literature questions. Some results:
- fewer than half of the teenagers surveyed knew when the Civil War was fought
-25% said Columbus sailed to the new world sometime AFTER 1750 (he sailed in 1492)
-25% were unable to identify Hitler as Germany's chancellor during WWII (they instead identified him as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier, and the German kaiser).
-4/10 could pick the name of Ralph Emerson's novel "about a young man's growing up in the South and moving to Harlem" (the novel is "Invisible Man").
-50% knew that Job, from the Bible, is known for his "patience in suffering".
-97% correctly identified Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the speaker of "I have a dream."
-8/10 could identify the subject/basic plot of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Common Core characterized the survey results as an indication that a significant proportion of teenagers live in "stunning ignorance" of history and literature. President Bush's education law, No Child Left Behind, which holds schools accountable for student scores on annual tests in reading and math (but no other subjects), was cited as playing a role in the survey results because it "had led schools to focus to narrowly on reading an math" in addition to cutting school time devoted to other subjects.
Indeed, the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research group, estimated that based on one of its surveys, 62% of school systems had increased math or reading instruction by an average of three hours at the expense of time devoted to other subjects such as social studies and art.
To view the article online, click here.
Are all school subjects equally important, or not?
Were you surprised by the content of the aforementioned "basic" history and literature questions? Do you feel that they were truly "basic"?
Do you think too much time is devoted teaching math and reading AND/OR public schools focus too much on testing?
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4 comments:
Some of these i didnt know mainly because i never read the book so i didnt know what it was about. Some of the things though is bad such as the stat for the civil war. i feel that some subjects arent as important as other ones. In class plenty of times i wonder why i am even learning this since i will probably neer use it in real life such as the sciences.
I didn't know the plot of Invisible Man, or that it was written by Emerson. But, if we were class of '05, I bet we all would.
I believe that some subjects are definitely more important than others. Even so, I wonder why certain things would help measure our level of "ignorance" in literature. Are we as high schoolers expected to know the plot of the Invisible Man and to have read the bible? I think that measuring ignorance should primarily be based on ability to read text and analyze it rather than having read certain books.
I partially agree with Elaina that measuring ignorance should be based on analytical ability rather than content...but on the other hand, isn't that really a measure of competance rather than ignorance? I think people can be analytically inclined and still ignorant of important literary landmarks or whatever. Still, I thought the content of the questions definitely wasn't "basic." It was more like random.
On school subjects: I think different subjects are important to different people, so schools should do their best to balance instruction of all subjects, instead giving certain subjects more weight in order to teach to a test. And I definitely think public schools focus too much on testing.
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