Funny about Money

Whither America?

Does anybody really expect that the United States can maintain (make that “regain”) its economic and political primacy when its young people come out of college ignorant as posts?

I’m halfway through grading one class’s effort at the dumbest-downed exercise I could contrive, and as dumb as it is, they still can’t get it right! This is a review and upgrade of skills they should have mastered before they hit freshman comp, but that they did not master because they left high school, most of them, unprepared for university work. They do not have a vocabulary that allows you to speak with them on a level that can by any stretch of the imagination be called “educated.” This evidently is because they don’t read, which evidently is because they can’t read.

About half the students did not bother to read the announcement cutting the number of items on this assignment from 22 to 20. A good 40 percent of them accomplished the assignment by copying and pasting from various online web sites, some of which are conspicuously out of date and some of which contain incorrect information. Three of twenty papers had to be returned because what the students turned in was so far off base as to be unintelligible; in these cases, they didn’t bother to read the assignment hand-out, either.

Incredibly, a large proportion of the students did not know the meaning of the word anthology. Nor did they think to look it up in a dictionary! One guessed it meant “encyclopedia”―close, but no cigar.

Understand, these are university juniors and seniors! They all have to take freshman comp, a course that routinely makes them buy an “anthology,” texts that often sport the word “anthology” in the freaking title! These people have been plodding through American educational institutions for fifteen or sixteen years!!!!

Well, say you, maybe the assignment is bad. Maybe my Mickey-Mouse little project was just too difficult for normal human beings.

We might conclude that if they all flunked. But so far, not so: halfway through the first class, we have four A papers (out of twenty read so far) and three strong B papers. That’s if you can call an error rate of about 15% on a give-away activity “strong.” So no, the assignment is not unreasonable.

In the last year I taught full-time, I learned many fascinating things from my students. I learned that Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state. World War I was fought in the nineteenth century. All African American children are children at risk. The word “episcopal” is pronounced “ep-i-SCOP-al.” And when three papers handed in by three different writers are word-for-word identical, it comes under the heading of “amazing coincidence.”

I put it to you, dear readers, that this is not good for America. Do you wonder why college graduates, even from some of the finest schools in the country, have no clue how to manage their own personal finances, do not understand the dangers of the credit card, sign their names to predatory mortgage agreements, and end up over their heads in debt? It’s no mystery. If you don’t even know where Wisconsin is (or where the Rocky Mountains are), how can you be expected to understand the slippery vagaries of finance or defend yourself against the pervasive greed and exploitation facing you when you reach adulthood?

And if you are breathtakingly ignorant about your country’s history, how can you be expected to vote intelligently on its leadership? (Explains something about the last eight years or so, doesn’t it?) If you know nothing of science and math, how can you be expected to function in a workplace dominated by science and math? If you can’t read and understand a simple set of instructions, larded with examples and give-aways, how can you be expected to function in the world at all? If you don’t speak more than one language (your own), how can you hope to comprehend what is going on around you in a global economy? If you do not know literature, how can you understand enough about humanity to navigate the high seas of commerce?

In a world economy where the children of our competitors are educated well, we have no chance to keep up as long as we continue to churn out ignoramuses from our learning factories.

We are dooming ourselves to a future in which America will be even more sharply divided by class than it is today: the rich and powerful will get more and more rich and powerful, and they will keep their children in power by seeing to it that their children are educated (truly educated, not pretend-educated) and affluent. The rest of us will sink into poverty. Those who are in power will be citizens of the world, and the rest of us will be residents of a very limited place.

Very limited, indeed, in every way you can think of.