jmra wrote:When I was a teenager I could memorize nearly anything. My Dad was a Pastor and my brother and I competed nationally and actually were national champions in a competition called Teen Bible Quiz. Not only could we quote entire books of the Bible, but we could recite chapter and verse upon request and pull data from multiple sources of scripture with less than a minute to provide detailed answers. Although certain passages are still engrained in my head, I couldn't begin to quote an entire chapter much less an entire book.
I have sons in 7th and 9th grade taking advanced classes through an online public school. I finished 5th in my class (would have been second but opted for early release work program my senior year) and still am little use in helping them with their work. My wife who has multiple degrees doesn't fair much better.
Working in education as a testing coordinator we often stress to students how important it is to take the SAT and the ACT their junior year as much of the material on the tests are covered in their first 3 years of HS. Often advanced students who take the tests both years will score better their junior year than they do their senior year.
Many will disagree with with me, but in the Information Age that we live in, I would much rather dedicate time teaching my kids deductive reasoning and how to find information/solutions than making them memorize information that most people's brains simply files away so deeply that it is barely remembered or discards completely shortly after a test and no longer feels the need to retain the information.
I agree that probably the best thing that a college education can give is the ability to think critically (which is a skill sadly lacking from a lot of the nation's universities these days), but thinking without data is a waste of time called "daydreaming", and the skilled thinker has TWO things at his/her disposal: 1) a reserve store of knowledge upon which to base some preliminary hunches/theorems/assumptions; and 2) the knowledge of where to find additional information to complete your process.
For instance....
Every leap forward that Albert Einstein made was predicated on previously existing knowledge that he had internalized; and at its point of origin, it started with the physics that he learned in stodgy old textbooks as a young student.....with established theorems he had to learn, and equations that he had to memorize, before he could prove them in a lab, and then build on those things, one brick at a time, until he arrived at relativity, and his (less well-known to the layperson) work in number arrays and tensors (which are well above
my pay grade...).
As far as the literary classics go, to quote Ecclesiastes 1:9, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." There are
no great literary themes being written about today that haven't been written about for millennia. There are people today who advocate banning Mark Twain's "
Huckleberry Finn" and Joseph Conrad's "
The N----- of the Narcissus" because both books contain the "N-word".........and in so doing, they lose two things: 1) they lose a connection to a rich part of humanity's past heritage; and 2) they miss out of some of the most important pro-civil rights writing of the 19th century. In getting rid of these two seminal works, we get rid of two of the most important works that taught white readers about the commonalities of race. We have shrunken our vocabulary - at the expense of our culture - because people are ignorant about meanings and too easily offended:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controvers ... ggardly%22.
I could go on. jmra, I get what your saying. I do. But the "Information Age" didn't start with personal computers and the Internet. When I was a kid, we had to learn how to use the Dewey Decimal System to locate library books as part of our search for information. The idea of a personal computer was still science fiction. Man hadn't even been to the Moon yet, and computers with limited capabilities filled entire buildings. All that personal computers and the web did was make the searches faster. But that doesn't change the fact that you have to know
how to search. Back in the old days circa maybe 1993, and being a total n00b to the internet and completely unaware of the consequences at the time, I once did an Alta Vista search of the term "furry animals", because I wanted to print out some pictures for my toddler son. I was rewarded with a bunch of links which.....let's just say were not fit for mixed company. I knew "how" to search....as in, how to type words into a search box and click "submit"; but I
didn't know how to search
contextually, because PART of that context is the totality of possible Internet searches. If
you mean something very innocent by "furry animals", but 999,999
other users mean something entirely different, you're not going to get results that are germain to your search. But even the Dewey Decimal System was like that.......just less likely to show you something you
shouldn't see..... because town libraries didn't stock that kind of trash. "
Lady Chatterly's Lover" and Chaucer's "
The Miller's Tale" from "
Canterbury Tales" was about as risqué as any library would get.
So when I look at the exam linked at the top of this thread, these are less about specific facts, then they are about the generalized kind of facts which are the basis for a good search and which would be good to have already internalized. For instance, when I look at the geography questions:
Geography (Time, one hour)
- What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
- How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
- Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
- Describe the mountains of N.A.
- Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
- Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
- Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
- Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
- Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
- Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.
It occurs to me that Salina is
still a small town.....and back in 1895, it was probably smaller yet. It is reasonable to assume that it was
primarily a farming/ranching economy. If you were a 19th century farmer in or near Salina, you would want to
know what "climate" means, and to be able to plan strategically for its effects on your crops. If you knew the major rivers, you had more information about how to get your crop to larger markets. If you knew the names, locations, approximate elevations, and distance from you for north America's mountain ranges, you might better understand
why the winds blow in one direction one part of the year, and in another direction in another part of the year, and you'd know why winds blowing out of the southwest tend to be warmer than winds blowing out of the northwest...... and what that means for your wheat crop. Not every question on that list has a direct impact on a Salina, Kansas wheat farmer, but
some of it does..... and the
rest of that list makes for a more well-rounded person, and a better-informed voter, who might maybe understand his nation's foreign policies better because he knows something about European republics and capitals... etc.
All I know is that when I see how badly our educational system has failed people in modern times, it makes me want to cringe. I am reminded of those "man in the street" bits that Jay Leno used to do, where he would ask passers by very simple questions about current events and such, and the degree of ignorance was shocking. THIS is the education system that produced Obama voters..........and it is no wonder at all.
