01/17/2023
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we have a major problem. Our education system is an incoherent hodgepodge of asinine theories, and the result is squandering millions of lives of potential.
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today…we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” the National Commission on Excellence in Education noted in 1983.
40 years later, little has changed. Untold billions have been spent in an attempt to narrow the achievement gap, but we have little to show for it except a giant bill (to be paid by the very children it failed, ironically).
To illustrate the problem, education journalist Natalie Wexler does a brilliant exercise in The Knowledge Gap. She asks adults to “find the main idea” of the following passage. Go ahead, try it:
"Much depended on…the two overnight batsmen. But this duo perished either side of lunch–the latter a little unfortunate to be adjudged leg-before–and with Andrew Symonds, too, being shown the dreaded finger off an inside edge, the inevitable beckoned, bar the pyrotechnics of Michael Clarke and the ninth wicket. Clarke clinically cut and drove to 10 fours in 134-ball 81, before he stepped out to Kumble to present an easy stumping to Mahendra Singh Dhoni.”
What you just read wasn’t gibberish, but a passage about the beloved British game of cricket. However, if you don’t know anything about cricket, you probably assumed she was inventing phrases to trick you. I certainly did.
This is a perfect exemplification of the problem: schools are obsessed with skills (like reading comprehension) rather than knowledge...
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Rest of the post over at Vocabbett!
https://vocabbett.com/we-have-a-major-problem/
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Image: thebonafidesa/modified/Etsy
