By Professor Doom
After a good four plus years in college,
I’ve had enough time to evaluate the whole professor-student dynamic. And after
all this time, I’d have to say that I’m walking away with the most sympathy for my instructors, and not my classmates.
A lot of people say
that U.S. college students are really, really dumb.
It seems every few
weeks I see another hysterical video demonstrating the awesome ignorance of the
“average” American citizen. Considering over 80% of our citizenry now goes to
college at some point, these videos serve well enough to show the awesome
ignorance of our college students as well.
This leads to a natural question: why? What is lacking in our educational system that so many don’t
know roughly when World War II was, can’t make change in a simple financial
transaction, can’t find Russia on a map, or cannot even identify the historical
figures on our money?
The whole point
of higher education is to make well-rounded, “educated,” graduates, with no
major gaps in knowledge that would cause such embarrassment in a street
interview. Thus it was in the past that our college graduates were forced to
take coursework in a wide variety of fields, all of which have been debased in
our modern higher education system. Which of these fields is the most
important? Is the debasing of this important field of knowledge responsible for
the extreme ignorance that is more
accurately described as everyday ignorance
today?
While my field is
mathematics, I readily concede it’s not the most important thing to teach a
human being. An educated person should be familiar with the basics of math to
be sure, and the modern world requires the educated to understand statistics
(more accurately, to understand how easy it is to manipulate statistics to get
a desired result)…but it’s still not the most important.
The most
important thing to teach a human being is how to read. Reading is the gateway
to all other knowledge, and all forms of ignorance can be helped with reading.
Our public education system, with its emphasis on dull, miserable reading
assignments where the protagonists invariably suffer and die no matter how
goodhearted they are, seems designed to discourage reading.
Beyond the simple
ability to read, however, what subject should be most read? Today’s article
suggests one field is most important above all others, and blames the removal
of this field for the increasing ignorance of our citizenry. The article gives
several reasons for the ignorance, but foremost?
REASON NUMBER ONE:
We have virtually ZERO understanding of history
That’s right,
History is the subject lacking. This field has quite possibly taken the worst
beating in higher education today, relatively speaking. Mathematics has
suffered the death of a thousand cuts, with “college work” being defined down
now to 8th grade material on some campuses. English likewise has
been reduced, from several papers and books a semester to a few small essays
and very short stories assigned, answers to any quizzes relating to the latter
provided via PowerPoint, making the reading optional in any event.
Other fields have
faced execution, or nearly so. Philosophy is mostly consigned to the abyss of
“electives only,” but admittedly philosophy departments were always small
affairs on campus. Foreign languages likewise have been essentially destroyed,
with departments being closed down wholesale; why bother learning about any
culture that the current crop of ideologues insists is evil and of no value?
Computer science has vanished in places as well, administration’s not about to
pay for students to learn actual job skills.
But history,
formerly hefty departments with hefty textbooks in the courses, has taken it
from both directions. Such departments have been whittled down as the course
requirements for students to know something about their own past were
annihilated. What few courses remain are heavily diluted, with reading and
writing requirements a tiny fraction of what they used to be.
Not only does the average college student have a deficient understanding of history,
his or her perceptions of
history are so terrifyingly off-the-mark that you wonder if the next generation
will even be able to tell you the
difference between Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler.
The result of
this, of course, is our college graduates know little of history, and thus have
essentially nothing upon which to base their knowledge of current events,
either.
In a surprisingly
eloquent rant, the essay highlights how History touches upon every other field:
History requires students to understand
causal relationships, and how things are correlated, and how things have influence way beyond their original occurrence. It requires you to understand logic, and
ideologies like religion, philosophy and sociological movements - i.e.,
political beliefs and how technology changes
human existence. It requires you
to understand human beings, and their motives,
The above is only
an excerpt of the rant, but a careful reading of just that one paragraph shows
History’s introduction to statistics, mathematics, theology, psychology,
political studies, and a few other critical fields.
So what happens when you have
students that think “Hiroshima” happened in the 1970s and World War I was
fought to save the Jews from extermination? And don’t laugh too hard, because I’ve heard students in senior level
classes say both of these before.
The gentle reader should not laugh at all,
and be worried, as I’ve seen people that teach
in community colleges with comparable ignorance of what really should be basic
historical knowledge.
The essay
addresses five reasons our college students are so stupid, but the argument
regarding the foremost reason is very strong. Thus I amend my opinion regarding
what the best thing to teach a human being.
First, teach that
human being to read.
Then hand that
human being a history book.
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