Why don't American kids learn basic stuff?

[Animavore]

I'm not sure how the problem can be tackled. As long as we live in a society where people can get along perfectly well and be successful while remaining as ignorant as pig shit (greatly highlighted by the Frank Grimes episode of The Simpsons) I don't see it changing any time soon.

Alright, but as someone mentioned above, somebody needs to sling burgers. What are we gonna do when everyone has a Ph.D in something or other? Who's going to plant the rice, slaughter the cows, build the houses and cars? How many Ph.Ds are going to be willing to swing a hammer for a living? Don't get me wrong; I'm not advocating ignorance, but doesn't it seem that there will always be some people whose intellectual limitations somehow contribute to the propogation of the species? I'm not talking prescriptively, just descriptively.

Yes. I'm not out to change it or think that it can be. Which is my point. I don't think people will change by taking them to the library or trying to encourage reading. They've been doing that all my life and I presume before. And even if they do decide to read a trip to any bookstore shows you the quality of the drivel they decide to read with psuedo-science out selling real science by 3 to 1 and trash like The Da Vinci Code topping the list.

[Geoff]

The ones in the middle are the only ones we should beat focus on. That is, the ones who could go either way, depending on their environmental influences. In pedagogy, it's called "teaching to the middle". OK, not exactly, but that's my modification of the principle, anyway.

Disagree. They should all be focused on equally, but in different ways. There should be more structures in place for those at both ends of the scale, but especially the top end. Teaching to the middle, in effect, has produced the situation now where exams are no longer useful as a selection guide for Higher Education, because too many students get top grades. We're turning out too much mediocrity, and not enough excellence. IMO, of course.

[FBM]

Yes. I'm not out to change it or think that it can be. Which is my point. I don't think people will change by taking them to the library or trying to encourage reading. They've been doing that all my life and I presume before. And even if they do decide to read a trip to any bookstore shows you the quality of the drivel they decide to read with psuedo-science out selling real science by 3 to 1 and trash like The Da Vinci Code topping the list.

You hit the nail on the head. The Da Vinci Code is an adolescent story. The fact that it sold so many copies is indicative of the way adolescence has been prolonged by those who have learned to engineer consent for the profit motive. What was the guy's name? Bar..ah...Bernays. Right. Keep people perpetually naive and eager to jump at the easiest and quickest stimulus so that they will buy, buy, buy without that pesky thought process getting in the way.

Disagree. They should all be focused on equally, but in different ways. There should be more structures in place for those at both ends of the scale, but especially the top end. Teaching to the middle, in effect, has produced the situation now where exams are no longer useful as a selection guide for Higher Education, because too many students get top grades. We're turning out too much mediocrity, and not enough excellence. IMO, of course.

I'd agree in theory, but in reality, there's not enough $$$ in the system to create that sort of environment, and a decided lack of incentives for it, wrt both educators and students. The powers that be are mainly interested in economics, ie, producing producers and consumers. Producing people who know a lot about reality? No profit motive there, is there? People who know, understand and can see through all the bullshit advertisers and public relations people throw out/up don't consume heaps of useless shit.

[Millefleur]

I already mentioned my parents were the same, encouraging reading all the time, but it never stuck with my siblings. I always liked reading, from the start. It wasn't the other way around. I even loved being asked to read in class and making up stories and writing. It's similar to the fact that I liked drawing and was drawing shapes when most of the other kids were drawing stickmen. I can still rememeber scoffing inwardly at that.
I don't see how kids can be motivated to be interested in learning when their fathers, uncles and brothers are earning nice money doing hands-on things like brick-laying, carpentry or plastering. Those guys make more than most office workers and electricians, even more than the engineers in some cases. It nearly seems like a mug's game to go to college.

My parents were exactly the same as yours, I sound like you and my sister (and brother, though you can't really count him) sound like your siblings. I read book after book as a kid, wrote books, drew, played with sewing machines and drills and hammers and despite having no career to speak of and losing interest in college after the first year I still want to pick up books, get lead from one online article/site to the next etc out of curiosity.. while my sister sits on her arse and watches Jeremy Kyle.
I kind of agree that you can't neccessarily instill a love of learning but young children are naturally curious creatures, you see a spark and you've got to fuel it and run with it, the earlier the better. I sometimes think primary school is more important than secondary - fine you'll learn the most in secondary school and that's where you'll earn the grades you'll carry with you but if primary school doesn't excite and encourage you you're pretty much fucked when you get to secondary.. Most of my friends and their parents seemed to view school as free childcare where you can just fuck around. Ideally kids need to want to know how something works etc rather than think 'Shit, I'm going to fail and get in trouble..' imo.. My GCSE grades weren't fantastic, a wide range from A's to a U, but I went there wanting to learn and even if a subject didn't interest me or seemed perplexing and I switched off at the very least I tried and had some respect for those trying to teach.

[maiforpeace]

There were plenty of times when I would come whining to my mother that I was bored, and she would always tell me to pick up a book and read.

Our evening ritual after dinner was that one of the kids would pick an Encyclopedia Brittanica and open it randomly to a topic...then we would all read it together and discuss it. We did the same thing with the dictionary, picking out a new word for the day.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Talking about "instilling a love of learning", I was very excited to be going to school. I still remember the exact moment the teacher wrote a word on the blackboard and how thrilled I was to think, "She's going to teach us to READ!" This wasn't from anything I got at home, not by a long shot.

[Pappa]

I suspect it's harder today with wall-to-wall kids' TV.

[Gallstones]

My oldest daughter came home from 5th (or maybe 6th) grade and said "I'm glad we won the civil war". We live in Florida, FFS, the 3rd State to secede. Didn't know who Robert E Lee or Jefferson Davis was, but knew Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman. I had to explain the facts behind the War of Northern Aggression.

CES, most people cannot write a coherent sentence. Subject-predicate agreement is beyond a lot of people, at least around here. "We is" or "we was" is common. The ability to do simple arithmetic like long division or (horrors!) counting change is uncommon. I handed a woman at a farmers market $10.25 for a bill of something like $8.16 and she had literally no idea how to figure out how much to give me back.

Ebonics?

[Svartalf]

My oldest daughter came home from 5th (or maybe 6th) grade and said "I'm glad we won the civil war". We live in Florida, FFS, the 3rd State to secede. Didn't know who Robert E Lee or Jefferson Davis was, but knew Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman. I had to explain the facts behind the War of Northern Aggression.

CES, most people cannot write a coherent sentence. Subject-predicate agreement is beyond a lot of people, at least around here. "We is" or "we was" is common. The ability to do simple arithmetic like long division or (horrors!) counting change is uncommon. I handed a woman at a farmers market $10.25 for a bill of something like $8.16 and she had literally no idea how to figure out how much to give me back.

Ouch, and I'm the one deploring my inability at math because I never managed to stick any of that stuff inside beyond the 4 operations, basic geometry, some stats and probability stuff (mostly from playing games with dice between 4 and 20 sides), and first degree equations (and even those are damn rusty, as the time it took me to solve the last I tried is witness to)

Then again, I live in a country where a kid in five should not be allowed to go to middle school because he hasn't mastered the basics one should have to even get out of primary.

[Svartalf]

LOL this is funny....

I once asked a New Yorker, "If Japan is in the Far East, and Palestine is in the Middle East, where would the Near East be?"

His reply, "Long Island?"

You cheated, Palestine actually IS the near East.

and I like the guy's answer a lot better than if he had said France or Germany.

[Svartalf]

I think you have this arse backwards. You can't "instill" a love of learning in children. They either have it or they don't. My brother and sister never had the love of learning and books I do despite been brought to the library every Saturday.
Of my three nieces one is too young to say anything about. The oldest doesn't care much for learning and likes dancing and sports while the middle one is always nose deep in books and excels at maths to the point the teacher is asking her mother to give her harder maths problems at home. She certainly didn't get that from her parents, at least not from example, though maybe from genetics as she would share some of the genes I have and my family in general whom many of have similar leanings.
And I'm pretty sure the idea of the more intelligent in society being ridiculed is not unique to American culture or even new.

It's not being made to go to the library, it's living in a house full of books, where you can just see what you like, and having interesting parents.

I still love my dad for reading from Iliad and Odyssey to me when I was at the age when most kids get the disney version of Grimms' tales.

[Svartalf]

Talking about "instilling a love of learning", I was very excited to be going to school. I still remember the exact moment the teacher wrote a word on the blackboard and how thrilled I was to think, "She's going to teach us to READ!" This wasn't from anything I got at home, not by a long shot.

Funny, love of learning made me disgusted with school, where I was good, I felt held back, and where I was not, I wondered why we had to learn that crap, or if we had why they did not make it at least digestible.

[charlou]

Somebody has to work at McDonald's.

And that's perhaps a more profound truth than you may have intended.

I give Robert_S credit for intending exactly that.

Re, the US education system, how's the 'No Child Left Behind' policy going, btw?

[Tero]

Daddys too tired to read to kids, so he pops open another beer.

(I read 5 hitch hikers guide books to my son when he was 9 or 10)

[Robert_S]

Somebody has to work at McDonald's.

And that's perhaps a more profound truth than you may have intended.

I give Robert_S credit for intending exactly that.

Re, the US education system, how's the 'No Child Left Behind' policy going, btw?

I don't really know how the No Child bill is going, But I did mean it that some schools are geared towards preparing children for menial labor.

What I said is actually a quote from a conversation between a friend who was facing felony charges and his father, a retired detective. This took place over a pitcher of beer around 2 in the afternoon.