Those appalling surveys you always read about how students don’t know basic historical facts are always bad, but this one is on a whole different order of magnitude. William O’Neill at the History News Network:
In 1992 40 percent of all graduates were found to be proficient in prose and 37 percent demonstrated proficiency in document literacy. In 2003 the percentages were 31 percent and 25 percent respectively. Over a period of eleven years the proficiency of all approximately 37 million college graduates had declined sharply, in prose by nearly a quarter and in document literacy by almost a third. (The performance of high school graduates declined as well, from 5 to 4 percent in prose and 6 to 5 percent in document proficiency.) Apart from the oldest graduates having died the addition of ten, or at most eleven, graduating classes to the pool of college graduates, meant that the members of these classes had to have scored very badly indeed to drag down the averages of the entire population by so much.
When you think about it, one result explains the other. If you can’t read at a college level in college, of course you’ll know more about Bart Simpson than the Civil War because the Civil War isn’t on TV every Sunday. While I have many problems with those fact-based multiple choice tests, this one should be more reliable because it’s testing a skill rather than specific factual knowledge.
Then there’s the part that just makes me mad:
Not surprisingly students seem content with a system that fails to prepare them for life in the work force but offers them four or five years of enjoyable irresponsibility. Murray Sperber, whose Beer and Circus (2000) is must reading on this subject, calls this arrangement the faculty/student nonaggression pact, according to which instructors pretend to teach and students pretend to learn. Everyone gets good grades or evaluations and presumably goes home happy.
Sure, that’s not news, but it just reminds me that when I actually expect my students to read even slightly sophisticated books and understand them very few other professors out there are helping me reinforce the skill I’m trying to teach. In fact, I probably look like an ogre for doing so. Nevertheless, I have a sense of responsibility for America’s future and there are only so many sacrifices I’m willing to make.
Does anybody out there have a sliver of good news with which to counter this? Writing this post has made me seriously depressed.
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