Recent studies have shown that 45% of college students showed no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing by the end of their sophomore year.
Wow, no shit?
What fucking moron did this study?
The researchers go on to say that these students haven’t had to write a paper requiring at least 20 pages, and a third of them did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.
Are people surprised by this?
Just when I feel like I shouldn’t rant any more about education, because it’s getting old, here comes a study citing the obvious: WE HAVE NO EXPECTATIONS!!
Students don’t improve because school systems constantly bastardize the curriculum to make passing easier. The single most important factor in learning is … (wait for it) … trying. To learn, people need to read (a lot) and write (a lot). Of course, this is an unpopular statement, because it requires that 1) school systems hold students accountable, and 2) that students give a shit enough to actually read the books they are assigned.
I understand the magnetic pull of SparkNotes; why read the book when someone else already did, AND that person posted all the relevant summaries on the Internet?
Why read the actual book? Because it’s the only way to get smarter.
Sometimes, books are incredibly hard to get through, and you only understand their importance once you’ve trudged through the mind-melting verbiage and reached the end. Prime examples (for me, at least) are: any book by Jane Austen, Plato’s Republic, Goethe’s Faust, most of Shakespeare’s tragedies, anything that comes from David Foster Wallace’s brain … you get it. Some books are really difficult to finish. You want to give up; it’s hard to understand; you could be watching reruns of 30 Rock; but you see the importance, and when it’s all said and done, you’ve learned something new.
Black, white, Asian, Muslim, Christian, atheist, blah, blah, blah. None of it makes any difference. What matter is the individual. Do you have the desire to learn? Do you have the desire to make yourself more informed about the world around you? Do you want to engage with the world at the most primal level? Or do you want to be in the ranks of the elite by knowing all that you can know and then applying that knowledge in some capacity?
Unfortunately, most high school students (and thus college students) look at learning as a means to an end: graduation. They want to shed the shackles of confinement and branch out into the real world – an understandable desire – but ideally, people can be satisfied within the confines on their own heads. One of the major dictates of intelligence is imagination: can you entertain yourself? Can you think outside the box? Can you read a book and make it come alive in your head? Can you write words on a page which stimulate, entertain, and inspire other people?
Well, if you’re currently in school, those questions begin to matter less and less as high schools, colleges, and universities rely more and more on arbitrary scores, ranking, and publication quotas.
As cynical and sarcastic and pessimistic as I am, I look with great anticipation to the day that society re-embraces learning as an art – an end of its own. Learning should never end. If I didn’t learn from my students every day, I would quit my job.
I should open my own school – a university-style high school where everyone lives in dorms and the expectations are sky high: Reading the classics, understanding and implementing the fundamentals of government, calculating numbers that are logistically practical, applying business theory and law locally, researching and understanding social customs and mores, contributing socially to the community, critically thinking about and applying reason to the conflicts of society in 2011.
But I’m too tired. And I have no money. So the tragedy marches on.
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