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Although there are certain facts and figures that are handy, and need to be learned by rote memorization, even more important is to teach children to learn how to learn. I am fortunate that when I learned to read I realized that much knowledge was to be had simply by looking for it, this was greatly influenced by the fact that my parents were not particularly well educated but, whether through accident or intention we had a bookcase stocked with Encyclopedia Britannica, a medical text, and works of fiction that included many of the 'classics'. I was also introduced to the Library where far more was available.
Also important, is to teach children how to apply critical thinking skills, to use rational thought in order to determine truth and validity rather than simply accepting fancy displayed as fact. I was also fortunate in that I had a grade-school Science teacher who did just that, using 'astrology' as an example wherein it was demonstrated that 'astrology' had no validity.
Children also need to be taught about certain financial matters (as a practical example of math) such as how compound interest and amortization can be used against them, or in their favor. I doubt that most parents understand these things today (nor have most for many years). For instance, how very bad a 30-year mortgage really is and how much money actually has to be paid to the lender vs. the financed amount, and how much *worse* it is to carry credit card debt where making the 'minimum' payments subjects one to exorbitant costs far in excess of the value of the items purchased.
I passed my GED, first try, age 16, with a 9th grade education & zero preparation. My scores were equivalent to the top 10% of high school graduates in the country & I got a letter from the White House encouraging me to continue my education.
I thought “Whoo-Hoo! ... What’s everyone doing in school now anyway, if we already know the important stuff?”
Until I started college. There I was, scribbling away furiously; trying to keep up word for word with the lecture because that’s what I thought “taking notes” meant. My pink highlighters highlighted either every word on a page or no words for pages. And to prepare for a test, I had a big, jumbled mess of gobbledygook that I hadn’t a clue what to do with.
That’s when I realized: “It’s not what they are learning; they are learning how to learn”.
The students who were knuckling down, plodding away through the stuff that I had already thrown to the wind, screaming “This is irrelevant!”; could start college courses without missing a beat; whereas I got put on academic probation after a failed semester that risked my losing my grant.
There is simply too much history to teach it all in depth. If a teacher covers the whole US history book (from before Columbus to 9/11) things are going to get skimmed over... That's why the movement in history education has been towards skills and processes as opposed to memorization.
That is why the 8th-grade US History curriculum covered the Colonial and Revolutionary periods though the antebellum, and the 11th-grade class began with the Civil War through recent history. Then, the US Government class in 12th grade was supposed to focus on the philosophical underpinnings of our government, the founding documents, and the contemporary "government in action." I wasn't meant to spend time going over the 8th grade curriculum with 12th-graders. Washington, Jefferson, Adams (J. and S.), Madison, and King George III are names that they were already supposed to know.
Columbus, etc. was part of the World History curriculum, covering the Age of Exploration. We weren't expected to teach that again in US History.
The problem was that there was not so much practical application of a lot of these concepts. I remember going through 4 years of higher math with little practical application. I didn’t know why it was useful to me and found it to be incredibly difficult, although I am actually quite good at math when there is a practical application. I later found myself in a job where I had to talk about algorithms and explain them to people on a regular basis. It made a lot more sense to me when I saw it in practice than it did when I was in calculus and did not get what a limit was (as you can imagine, my performance in that class was barely passing). I can now explain to an elementary school child what a limit is. It is quite an easy concept, but not the way that it’s was explained to me in those math classes.
History was horrible. I know in American history we always seemed to get up to WWII and then it was like history ended. I had to take Latin American history in HS and we learned more modern history, but European and American was only up to WWII. Latin American history was in senior year, but we hadn’t learned in junior year what was going on in the US during these periods when they were meddling in Latin America so it didn’t make as much sense as it could have.
We didn't get past WWII, either. Hence, I didn't learn anything about the Cold War until college, although I was living through it.
That is why the 8th-grade US History curriculum covered the Colonial and Revolutionary periods though the antebellum, and the 11th-grade class began with the Civil War through recent history. Then, the US Government class in 12th grade was supposed to focus on the philosophical underpinnings of our government, the founding documents, and the contemporary "government in action." I wasn't meant to spend time going over the 8th grade curriculum with 12th-graders. Washington, Jefferson, Adams (J. and S.), Madison, and King George III are names that they were already supposed to know.
Columbus, etc. was part of the World History curriculum, covering the Age of Exploration. We weren't expected to teach that again in US History.
But you had to because 1/2 or more of the class didn't know there were 13 colonies or who George Washington was. Not to mention that no, Washington, DC is not the capita of the State of Maryland.
But you had to because 1/2 or more of the class didn't know there were 13 colonies or who George Washington was. Not to mention that no, Washington, DC is not the capita of the State of Maryland.
The problem is defining "useless". Counties in a state can be important (Maryland has 23 plus Baltimore City) when discussing state issues.
Knowing that DC is not part of MD, or VA, is something an amazing number of people don't know.
I have never once since I took it in high school needed Chemistry, Bio and Physics is a different set of circumstances.
Education in the US is broad based, a little bit if everything is thrown in to cover all the bases. What's "useless" for you may be an absolute necessity for someone else.
That can be applied to everything and not just school. When I worked in the glass industry I didn't need to know what the melt point of the raw materials was or even the proportions, all I had to know, when I was on the factory floor, was what a good bottle looked like. As a Purchasing Agent (I guess that's called Supply Chain Management now) I had to know how much of what material we had on hand and when to order it (among myriad other things). But I knew the melt point anyway.
Very good response (as always!).
But there is a difference in two areas that I think the poster doesn't understand.
Let's take my old content area -- earth science. One of the multi-day labs that we did was classification of minerals. And kids would often say, "I an't never gonna need to know the difference between orthoclase and plagioclase feldspar. And they were right. But that wasn't really the point of that learning experience. The point was learning the concept of a very basic human trait -- the human desire to classify things. And that's not as easy a task as many people surmise. It's a skill to be learned. And one that carries right over into biology and the classification of plants and animals. And eventually into the life skills needed in many jobs and professions.
We often take skills like this for granted. We may have forgotten that we learned such skills in school. And in some places they don't learn some of those skills that we take for granted. After many years of traveling and living in Thailand, one thing I learned was don't give a map to a Thai person and expect him or her to be able to read that map. Case in point -- the day when we ended up at the border of Cambodia in the days of Pol Pot!
And one other thing that some non-education people don't understand -- that some of the most important things students learn is how to learn.
One thing that I will say in favor of rote memorization is that it is very difficult for students to engage in higher-order thinking about content if they don't know basic facts. I taught high-schoolers who often could not name the three branches of government, or describe their function, when they arrived in my 12-grade U.S. Government class. How does one jump into a discussion of separation of powers, "checks and balances," or federalism with kids who don't know that the President can't make laws, or that each state has its own government that for the most part mirrors the federal structure?
I remember once trying to teach a lesson on westward expansion and the concept of Manifest Destiny with my 11th-grade history class. That single lesson revealed to me the fact that many of my students did not recognize the names of all fifty states or know where they were in relation to one another in even broad terms (as in, they had no idea that the 13 colonies were located along the east coast). They did not know what was meant by "the Midwest," or "The Great Lakes," or what the Louisiana Purchase was. This is drill knowledge that should have been drilled into them long before they reached high school, but I had to teach these things, because they had never learned them.
Throughout my short teaching career, I spent an inordinate amount of time teaching the facts that provided the context for the concepts. Sometimes, the facts were all I had time to teach. That's another reason I left.
Yes, rote memorization has its place. In the old days it had too big a place. But it's still something that needs to be taught.
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