Professor: Kids have become a generation of know nothings (employment, exam, science)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Seriously, one has to wonder if the professor is actually culturally literate by today's standards. While it is true that students should know something about America and its history, nowadays, they need to know about other people in our world as America is no longer a *white* country and the culture no longer is only male.
The culture wars were on. Into them ambled Hirsch, with his high credentials, tweedy profile, reasoned arguments, and addictively debatable list. The thing about the list, though, was that it was—by design—heavy on the deeds and words of the “dead white males” who had formed the foundations of American culture but who had by then begun to fall out of academic fashion. (From a page drawn at random: Cotton Mather, Andrew Mellon, Herman Melville).
Quote:
The more serious challenge, for Americans new and old, is to make a common culture that’s greater than the sum of our increasingly diverse parts. It’s not enough for the United States to be a neutral zone where a million little niches of identity might flourish; in order to make our diversity a true asset, Americans need those niches to be able to share a vocabulary. Americans need to be able to have a broad base of common knowledge so that diversity can be most fully activated.
Quote:
To be clear: A 21st-century omni-American approach to cultural literacy is not about crowding out “real” history with the perishable stuff of contemporary life. It’s about drawing lines of descent from the old forms of cultural expression, however formal, to their progeny, however colloquial. As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant hip-hop musical Hamilton reminds us, every voice contains an echo; every echo can be given new voice.
Nor is Omni-American cultural literacy about raising the “self-esteem” of the poor, nonwhite, and marginalized. It’s about raising the collective knowledge of all—and recognizing that the wealthy, white, and powerful also have blind spots and swaths of ignorance so broad as to keep them dangerously isolated from their countrymen.
Exactly. I know what I need to know, and whatever I dont know I know where to find it. We have the entire worlds knowledge in our pockets, seriously..... our smart phone. I don't need to memorize the dates that The Middle Kingdom of Egypt flourished, but if the need to know it arises I can pull it up in seconds.
Yet you apparently are unable to punctuate correctly.
Really? What about the people who were in college in the 30's and 40s and supposedly read all those great thinkers that traditional western civ lionized? They were the adults in the 1950s and early 1960s and they mindlessly conformed to every single thing the government, business, and society demanded of them. The 1950s was the most conformist decade of the 20th century.
The only people who refused to conform were black civil rights activists, many of whom never learned all the "universal truths" from traditional western civ classes because of segregation and racism, and semi-literate white "hoodlums" playing rock 'n' roll, many of whom didn't even graduate from high school.
Just curious - were you around in the 1950s and early '60s?
I was - admittedly, as a child and teenager then - and I don't remember it that way at all.
Many of the adults of the 1950s were members of the "greatest generation". Look them up, if you need to. Yes, it was a more peaceful time - mostly: there was Korea, and later Cuba, then the Missile Crisis, the Suez Canal Crisis, troubles in various hot spots around the world - but domestically, things rolled along rather quietly during the '50s, though most people were not quite the "mindless conformists" you claim.
Thanks to the huge numbers of the Baby Boomers, it was one of the Golden Ages of Childhood in American - the 1890s were the previous one. Television's influence was huge. Pop culture became more widely spread, thanks to television's influence, and things changed rapidly beneath a placid exterior. American literature thrived, as did Broadway, with wonderful musicals that were extremely popular, and rightfully so.
Business boomed as well, and more and more people entered the middle class and saw their aspirations for their children to go to college and do well economically come to pass. Of course, those same children frequently became the protesters of the '60s, once they got to college!
You might say the seeds of '60s revolt were sown in the '50s, not just in the case of the Civil Rights Movement, but with much, much more: the Women's Movement, the Beat Generation, the Folk Revival, and the counter-cultural literature and music they engendered (the often very literate beatniks and folkies preceded the hippies by at least a decade), the Vietnam War, rock and roll, the growing importance of teenage culture (bit of a dichotomy there, some would say), nuclear power and the controversy associated with it, computers, of course computers - the Space Race - all got underway in the "placid" 1950s, or at least the conditions were created for them to develop within the first half of the following decade.
Last edited by CraigCreek; 03-09-2016 at 03:53 PM..
I have no idea what you are talking about in point A. No, not everything is on computers. Most everything in the written word can however be found on the internet.
To point B, yes, inaccurate information is always a problem. The same goes for books, too, especially regarding history. But reading Dante's inferno online vs in an actual book shouldn't be any different.
And to point C, if some specific topic is barely touched upon in regards to the internet, as a whole, it must not be very important. And you nailed it on the head, only if someone thinks it is worth having. But I'm not sure how this is relevant to the discussion of general education and relevance to a college education.
A: I am talking about alternate motives that people may have for doing things but so often with the Net, the focus, almost to exclusion of everything else, is on what is the most popular. If a person had read literature, they might at least be aware that alternate motives can exist.
B: Books may be inaccurate but they have less of a chance than the Net. One of the reasons why I keep hard cover reference books around, such as on metallurgy, is that if I need a quick source, I'm pretty well assured that what is in the book is accurate and that it can be properly referenced in my paper. With the Net, however, not only do I have to find the information but then I have to spend hours verifying if it is accurate and not someone's opinion and if it is a source that can be properly referenced.
Found this out the hard way one night on a take home final. What the Net told me about oil refineries went right and left. What a book could tell me is concise and I was able to derive enough information out of my organic chemistry book (the subject was geography) to answer the question.
Further, once printed, it is very hard to alter books as oppose to what is on the Net. Can one find an older version of Huckleberry Finn to read on the Net, for example?
C: Well, there we go. We have this wonderful Net that contains all the information.....of the type that only certain people believe is necessary to have out there.
One thing I have learned in my college education is to know lots of case book histories of this or that subject. It saves a lot of time in writing the answer on an exam as oppose to having to explain one's position from scratch. A prof on an ecology exam asked what was needed for unlimited population growth. I referenced the works and his answer to that question of Thomas Robert Malthus, a man that was not part of the lesson of that class, wrote a few sentences, and got full credit on the question.
Want to stress the dangers of over fishing? Reference the Peruvian Anchovy Collapse. What can happen if one doesn't train their subordinates? There's the SS Moro Castle fire to point to.
It won't work, though, if all one knows about these situations is one or two lines that someone wrote down just to note that it happened.
Finally, a key factor one ought to learn in college is being able to predict what the prof is going to ask on the test. A class is as much of an exercise of studying the prof as it is in studying the subject. One might learn this during office hours by seeing what books are on his shelf and then reading those books. Alternately..........
..........in the last hours before the final of a senior Poli Sci summer course on Arab-Israeli affairs, I worked out that the possible major question on the final was either the history of the Arab-Israeli Wars or trace the development of the PLO. The latter question I probably got most of my information from the Net, but this was the late 90's, early 21s century before the Net turned to gibberish. The former question I approached by memorizing sections in those few short hours from http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-M...modern+warfare
The former was the question and I essentially aced the test.
I start the blame with Pearson Education who lowered the SAT averages in 1994 or 95 and have been lowering them ever since. Same time grade inflation seemed to begin....
A: I am talking about alternate motives that people may have for doing things but so often with the Net, the focus, almost to exclusion of everything else, is on what is the most popular. If a person had read literature, they might at least be aware that alternate motives can exist.
B: Books may be inaccurate but they have less of a chance than the Net. One of the reasons why I keep hard cover reference books around, such as on metallurgy, is that if I need a quick source, I'm pretty well assured that what is in the book is accurate and that it can be properly referenced in my paper. With the Net, however, not only do I have to find the information but then I have to spend hours verifying if it is accurate and not someone's opinion and if it is a source that can be properly referenced.
Found this out the hard way one night on a take home final. What the Net told me about oil refineries went right and left. What a book could tell me is concise and I was able to derive enough information out of my organic chemistry book (the subject was geography) to answer the question.
Further, once printed, it is very hard to alter books as oppose to what is on the Net. Can one find an older version of Huckleberry Finn to read on the Net, for example?
C: Well, there we go. We have this wonderful Net that contains all the information.....of the type that only certain people believe is necessary to have out there.
One thing I have learned in my college education is to know lots of case book histories of this or that subject. It saves a lot of time in writing the answer on an exam as oppose to having to explain one's position from scratch. A prof on an ecology exam asked what was needed for unlimited population growth. I referenced the works and his answer to that question of Thomas Robert Malthus, a man that was not part of the lesson of that class, wrote a few sentences, and got full credit on the question.
Want to stress the dangers of over fishing? Reference the Peruvian Anchovy Collapse. What can happen if one doesn't train their subordinates? There's the SS Moro Castle fire to point to.
It won't work, though, if all one knows about these situations is one or two lines that someone wrote down just to note that it happened.
Finally, a key factor one ought to learn in college is being able to predict what the prof is going to ask on the test. A class is as much of an exercise of studying the prof as it is in studying the subject. One might learn this during office hours by seeing what books are on his shelf and then reading those books. Alternately..........
..........in the last hours before the final of a senior Poli Sci summer course on Arab-Israeli affairs, I worked out that the possible major question on the final was either the history of the Arab-Israeli Wars or trace the development of the PLO. The latter question I probably got most of my information from the Net, but this was the late 90's, early 21s century before the Net turned to gibberish. The former question I approached by memorizing sections in those few short hours from http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-M...modern+warfare
The former was the question and I essentially aced the test.
You are talking specifically about taking a test and passing a test. I'm not. Again, the problem with much of Academia is teaching what a professor thinks is important, instead of teaching what is actually useful beyond college in a career.
You are talking specifically about taking a test and passing a test. I'm not. Again, the problem with much of Academia is teaching what a professor thinks is important, instead of teaching what is actually useful beyond college in a career.
The whole point of college has never been job training but education. Teaching information, yes, but, more importantly, how to learn.
You talk of college as a trade school. It's not and never has been. Even schools like the military academies, which were historically (until around 1980) engineering schools, required a heavy dose of traditional Humanities.
Unless it's changed, and it may have, companies all have their own way of doing things. Being stuck with "what I learned in college" keeps you from doing much in that job.
I went along, many years ago, when the plant Comptroller was taking some newly minted accountants around. The thing he said which stuck with me was, "Forget everything you learned in college. It was good but not the way we do things. Your job will be to learn that".
Had a discussion or two this with fellow educators. Simply put we / society have robbed students of their curiosity. The greatest challenge these days is not in getting students to learn as it is in getting them to continue on beyond high school, etc... When I saw the movie Bad Teacher and the little middle school girl asks if she's thinks about it can she get extra credit. That moment was way too close to home for me as an educator. Too many students and teachers as well treat education as a vessel rather than as a catalyst. Education is suppose to spark, not carry.
BS, kids today know a whole lot. The Internet has allowed unrestricted and easy access to information. No longer is it the "wait for the Sunday paper" or "check a book out from the library", now kids can browse endlessly for hours, absorbing all kinds of information.
Are some/many kids know nothings? Of course, no different than kids from every other generation. There is always going to be a group of kids that are just not engaged with any knowledge past how does it specifically impact them.
I have no idea why the constant hype on what schools teach; schools are not the sole source of learning! Schools are for ensuring a minimum learning experience, with offerings of more advanced learning experience to those who qualify/interested. There is no restriction on someone learning outside of school.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
