The Ignorance of America

We are talking about the media and entertainment. It is known that entertainment is far more lucrative than education, ignorant people is easier to control.

It is not fair to blame teachers, kids usually focus more in TV shows than geography books or politics, and many teachers are not paid well enought to explore multimedia teaching possibilities.

The only fix I see to that is to make education=entertainment, your enemies are the many religions and many politicians/media giants.
The internet is something that could change things. If in the right hands, I don´t know the evil behing google, but I think google earth is a good example of entertainment and education.

What we are looking at is not a failure of the educational system.

It's a failure of values at home.


You can have the most incredible education system possible, and it won't instill the motivation necessary to succeed.

You can have an atrocious or (in some cases) absent educational system, and it won't stop those want to learn.


Our children are held hostage to our deeply personal hopes and fears - which they see far more clearly than what values are said by our mouths.

I'm just lucky to have finished High School before the WASL became a requirement for graduation. The Jr. High I went to, we had to take "practice" versions of it, this was before it was fully put into place. Everyone I talked to did horribly on it, and almost all of us were pretty smart.

I don't know how bad it is now, I don't talk with people of that age, but i'm dreading what things will be like once I have kids...

And if your goal is to get home in time to catch the simpsons?



Hardly irrelevant. It IS the point. Just because knowledge can be had doesn't mean everyone gains from having it. And just because knowledge can be had and a majority don't have a particular peice of trivia which I think this is a PRIME example of doesn't mean they are poorly educated.



There is a vast difference between respecting someone believing in angels or reincarnation and allowing someone to harm innocent people. Personally I think picking and choosing what parts of your religion you find convenient to believe to make less sense than take it or leave it. If you can't believe it on X Y and Z points isn't it foolish to have faith in it for other points? I think they are dead wrong but I have more respect for people who believe their WHOLE religion than people who pick and choose the "nice" aspects. And how is believing in angels superstition but not believing in a god? I'd call them both superstition. There is no more basis of evidence behind one than the other.



Ok so you seek knowledge for it's own sake I think that it's unfair to the rest of the population to condemn them for not doing the same. And the part I kept in quotes is more important that most of the questions this survey asked. I don't care if I can stop 1000 people on the street and they can't tell me 1 freedom from the 1st amendment. However if those same 1000 people don't know how to aquire the knowledge that's a problem. There is more knowledge out there than any single person even you can retain. To call people ignorant because they don't know a collection of trivia questions is rediculous. The test of education is can they succeed in life based on their goals? And given a need for a piece of information do they know how to get it?

As disapointed (sp?) as I have been with the educational system in my country and state, I don't disagree with this at all. With or without a good system in place the key to having educated adults is in pushing our children towards it, motivating them to care about their own learning and to take pleasure in learning.

Sure it is. Any learning, any gaining of knowledge, anything that enriches your mind and your life is a good thing. Maybe the subjects the OP mentioned simply don't interest you personally, but I would hope you have some things that do and that you are always striving to learn more about those things.

I thought he called it the "no child allowed ahead" program.

Sorry, I do blame teachers.

In the United States, we are graduating idiots with college education degrees and placing them in front of public school classrooms, where they can pass on their bad habits and attitudes, their lack of cognitive skills, and their incredibly ignorant views of the world on to a fresh generation of victims. Stories about the misadventures of education students (and faculty) are rampant in higher education.

In nearly every academic discipline outside their own, education majors as a group perform dead last. They refuse to read or do assigned work, they have terrible study and work habits, they suffer from extremely short attention spans, and they have little tolerance for alternative points of view. In part, the fault lies with education programs that trade basic, field-related content and cognitive training for meaningless courses in methods and psychology. In part, the fault lies with a profession that makes little effort to attract the "best and the brightest" - and in fact discourages intelligent, innovative, and different people. But much fault also lies with teacher-wannabes themselves - who are, for the most part, lazy.

Of course, if you're a member of the education faculty at an American college or university, you spend much of your time manufacturing databases, manipulative statistics, and new methodologies to demonstrate that your students are wonderful, and the quality of education is rising rapidly. Attentive parents and professors in allied, content-related disciplines know better.

your lucky its 2 am and I am tired or I'd blast you a new one

So doesn't that translate to an education system that doesn't offer enough incentive to ensure it's employes are the best at what they do and an education system that doesn't properly educate it's students? Again the fault of the system.

Where do you find the data to back this up? Or are these opinions?

Blast away. I speak from years of experience teaching education majors in a content-and-cognitive-related discipline on the college level. And sitting on numerous committees. And dealing with education faculty. And as a parent on the local level, raising children and attempting damage control.

And judging from your contributions to these forums, you're exactly what I'm talking about.

I have no problem with this conclusion. I'm simply pointing out that there are other, significant factors - the poor quality of education students, and the criminally-poor quality of education-related curriculum, for example. These are not necessarily an indictment of the "system".



You find it in dozens and dozens of places - Department of Education studies, studies conducted by professional organizations such as American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Modern Language Association, the Organization of American Historians, and "in-house" studies conducted by nearly every institution of higher education in the United States - I'm familiar with a dozen or so conducted by the University of Michigan, the University of Texas-Austin, Centre College, Utah State University, Stanford, George Mason University, Virginia Tech, and U-Cal Davis.

Two points - first, you have to dig into the conclusions a bit, because this is a politically-sensitive subject. And second, I'm guilty of exaggeration. Education majors are not always "dead last" in group performance in allied content disciplines such as physics, history, or english composition. But they are almost always dead last or near the bottom.

you might want to read my responses to this thread before you associate me with your students. You want better trained teachers? Make teaching worthwile. You speak from years of teaching college students, I have 5 years experience teaching high school students plus I raised 2. Now this may seem bizzarre but aren't study habits up to what works for the individual by your standards mine may seem horrible but they work for me. I don't spend time manipulating statistics to make myself look good, I have more important things to do like actually teaching. Tell me, have you ever been in a high school classroom, besides as a student? I may seem close minded to you, but I have seen what works for me in my classroom. You assume that we can't use our cognitative reasoning to come up with better methods to teach students. I can't teach my class the way I would like to teach it, due to state and county requirements (grrr). Don't say teacher's are the entire problem when there are those of us that actually care what are students go on to acheive.


Now as for you saying "based on your posts o this forum you are the problem" I am very open to new ideas. What you see here is my personality, not my teaching style or methods. I try to keep those seperate so that any bias I have on a topic does not influence my students thoughts on the topic.

Yes. I am liaison between my department and two local high schools, where I've spent hours each week for years teaching students in my discipline - and giving teachers remedial training for what they missed in their education programs. In this I and others are very fortunate to have the support and understanding of the school board, principals, and the teachers themselves - who are, with some exceptions, an extraordinary bunch.

I also teach college freshmen in various survey courses - a difficult task because basically I have to take high school students and break them of all the bad habits and POV's they've learned - kind of the same thing I did when I was a DI in a Marine boot camp for a few years.

It is certainly not the fault of the teachers though. Yes, there are teachers that do a poor job, and the ones that do are rarely gotten rid of, and that is a problem. I will never forget in elementary school when there were two teachers that had constant complaints from parents, but nothing ever happened to them.

Standardized tests, which to me are the biggest bane of the system, are not the fault of teachers, it's the system. The teachers are not the ones who come up with new methods to judge statistics of how well the students are doing, it's the management--it's the system administrators, it's the system itself.


And again, these things are not the fault of the teachers. Most teachers really struggle to make sure they're offering a decent education to students. In most cases, if teachers didn't really care about making a difference in people's lives, they certainly wouldn't choose education as their major, teachers don't get paid enough for that. 20 years of paying off student loans just so one can get a sh*tty wage is not exactly something for people to look forward to.

The only conclusions I can get are that there are people who just don't know how to teach, and those people rely on the system to show them how. Those are the teachers that don't have any business being teachers. Putting something in place to get rid of them is the difficult task. There needs to be something in place that lets parents and the students judge the teachers and give the teachers their own type of report cards (sometimes they've tried this sort of thing, but the results seldom result in the firing of teachers--teachers' unions are too powerful), and if the teachers fail in those areas too much, they need to be let go and not just moved around like Catholic priests that get caught raping kids.

One thing that has somewhat ruined the system of getting rid of bad teachers are the parents who report teachers for doing things like tapping a pencil on a student's head--in Jr High there was a teacher who almost got fired because when a kid was being really nasty to other kids, and didn't want to do what was required of him, the teacher came up to him and lightly tapped a pencil on the kids head and said, "Hello Kurt, earth to Kurt"--he was almost let go because of being what the mother called "physically abusive". It took almost an entire semester to get that worked out. This sort of thing is probably the biggest reason why complaints about teaching styles doesn't do any good--they're already bombarded with idiotic parents like the one I described. Parents that have as much business being parents as the teachers who rely on the system to tell them how to teach.

The system needs a serious revamp, and blaming teachers for everything, for most things, or even half of the things is not the answer. The system is broken.

EDIT: I want to add that the things that I know about the system are mostly based on what the system was from the 80's to the mid 90's.

I teach US History to 11th graders who think they know it all already, but thats just teenagers.

There is something I have seen recently that might have something to do with this:

Against School - John Taylor Gatto

Not that I wish to imply that I agree or disagree with it, it just seems to be related to this.

As apposed to what..physics, history, and english majors? Well of course if that's the comparison.

A bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts with a general education requirement is what is needed to teach elementary school in the state of California. (Using my own state here, forgive me for not being aware of requirements elsewhere) In order to teach at a Junior high, Highschool, or College level, an educator is required to specialize in one field and major in that field.

For example, a fifth grade school teacher would need only to have a bachelor's degree in general education, a general knowledge of a variety of subjects. He/she would not be expected to know advanced calculas (sp?) in order to teach fractions. But if that teacher decided she wanted to teach highschool math, then she would be required to go back to school and major in mathematics. She would be expected to not only recieve a second degree but also pass a test called the CBEST in order to recieve her teaching credentials. I have seen the CBEST and I know people who have passed it and people who have failed it. The math requirements for a specialized teaching credential are incredibly difficult.

So no, this math teacher is likely not going to score extremely high on any history or english exams, there is no reason for her to. She will teach math. But another teacher who chooses to specialize in History would have to score very high on that exam, but that teacher wouldn't do well on the math test and wouldn't need to.

Now take into account that that fifth grade teacher who had to go back to school for a few more years, pay all that money for a second education, in order to teach highschool, did not in fact go up in pay for all her efforts and you can see why it's so hard to find people willing to go to the trouble.

There is a reason colleges and universities tend to have higher quality instructors. They get paid a lot more. In general (and I am generalizing, this is not true of all teachers) what we have for educators at the elementary school level tends to be those fresh out of college for the most part, little experience, lots of heart. At the highschool level we have the ones who either managed to maintain that heart, that love of teaching and simply took it to another level, or we have the ones who are working their way toward that dream job teaching at a university. We generally do not manage to hold on to the second group for very long... cream tends to rise to the top.

I fully believe that if we paid teachers more money based on their willingness to continue their educations and helped them fund those educations + gave them more control in their own classrooms, we would be able to keep the cream of the crops, they would have the incentive to stay and to continue growing in their profession.

The community college near where I live does this. They pay their instructors for time spent learning and help them fund their own educations. That school has more quality educators and a better reputation than the expensive private school in the same city. It works.

That was a very interesting article. I think there is a lot of truth to the article.

There are alternative schools that are out there that are not boring for the students or the teachers. It doesn't have to come down to home schooling.

The current public school system does not allow people to learn subjects at their own pace--it forces everyone to do things in the same way, at the same pace.

I think a good system would be if, instead of having elementary, jr. high, and high schools as separate places, if there were huge facilities that covered everything, having separate lunchrooms and P.E. facilities based on age. A kid in their 3rd year (the equivalent of 3rd grade), if he or she excelled in certain subjects enough, could be taking classes in those subjects at what's currently considered high school level, and so on. None of this is feasible in our current system, but it could be made into an eventual goal. This is a radical concept, and therefore will never be implemented.

I also think that that jobs in general rely on "official" credentials too often. I think that it would be of benefit for more employers to test people for jobs more often than just looking at whether someone has degrees or certificates. There are people that can get through the system with straight A's for 8 years who can't actually do the job/s they were studying for worth a crap. The problems are not just with the education system, it's the way people get hired that is a big part of the problem as well.

There are too many regulations in the wrong areas and not enough regulations in the right areas, but I guess that's a very general statement.

You all make me glad I taught engineering. I was asked by my alma mater's high school director if I wanted to teach there but I replied that I don't think I can handle the high school age bracket.

Lack of knowledge of History & Geography is really apalling anymore.

The NCLB Act is utter crap too. WHY, Does a straight A student need to do a "project" to prove they finished HS successfully to graduate?? Isnt this what homework, grades & report cards are for???

I dont blame the teachers either, even though there's some who just dont care. I blame the Government for this one.

Funny, yet sad, story: One of the waitresses at work, who was a recent HS graduate, was about to dump a bucket of grease down the sink. I hollered out "DONT DO THAT!!!" She asks me why. So I explained that the grease would congeal in the drain & clog the sink. "Whats 'congeal' mean?" I said 'solidify'. THEN she says "Whats 'solidify' mean?" After picking up my jaw, when it hit the floor, I gave the explanation for that one too. It's kinda sad when a HS Graduate never heard the word "Solidify". Heh, she DOES however, now know the meaning of "Early Motherhood". No surprise there!!!! And no... it is NOT mine!!!!

This is a real interesting debate.

I am European and I have studying and after working in differents countries in Europe and as well the US.

I think this is not only a question of quality of education but a question of "way of life".


Most of the European countries are very open to the world. No because we are smarter or just better people, just because we are small countries and our bussiness comes from our relation with others. All countries in Europe depends of others (European or not), not only for economy but for culture, for education for research etc....so European are naturaly more open to the world than US is.

USA is a big country and definitivly less open than we are. Your internal life is big enought to not have to look the other for everything you want to do in any kind of sectors. It is one of your stronger point but it can as well a weakness sometimes.

Even with the European community, Europe is not one country but a lot of smalls countries. If we wants to be competitives in this market, we needs to know about the others, we need to speak 3 or 4 languages, we need to understand the other. This is not something most of the American people needs to worry about. Working in NY or LA is not that different than working in Brussel or Madrid.

Concerning the "religious" attitude it is probably something impossible to understand for us. Most of the time we can find it a bit ridiculous. A lot of European countries are childs of the French revolution, this revolution has been a huge change in our relation with the religion. I can watch sometimes in CCN this debate about evolutionism. It seems incredible to most of the people here that this is still a subject to debate in the 21 century. Just something we cannot understand.

In conclusion, I think America has an other type of culture, a culture very oriented to itself but in someway adapted to it is own condition of first country in the world.

Dolores Wayne

I believe americans are not that as aid inthe title of this thread. Being aproduct of the japanese school system and studied in the usa higher education for english. I say Depending onthe person and what their want their goals to be in life will make them good a person they can.

I have worked inth USA, europe, Southeast asia,among other places inthe world. But to say the usa is stupid as this thread says i think your not as open as you should be being explosed to ild range of cultures.......

Forget the trivia -- I've heard man-in-the-street interviews of people who had no clue who our Vice President was, much less where Iraq was on a map, much LESS the history of that area -- yet how many of them are swallowing whatever the media feeds them, pro or con? In a democracy where each citizen has a responsibility to vote, how confident are you that those citizens are voting with at least a working knowledge of the issues? I'm not. Yet they determine the fate of our country every 2 years - if they vote.

Diametrically opposed to this is the extremist culture we have been watching on the news, beheading innocent civilians on TV, strapping bombs to their own children, flying airliners full of innocents into buildings in the belief that they will meet 72 virgins after they die. That violence has its roots in superstitious ignorance, and yet you want to use one trivial example as a point to declare that it doesn't matter? It matters, and it matters in profound ways for the future of our entire civilization.


It's a continuum. Believing in angels in itself isn't an issue. Believing in their counterparts, demons, might lead you to perform exorcisms however. There are degrees here. It's not as black and white as you are attempting to portray it.


Whoever said that? I thought I was very clear in my response to you that there is a difference between using faith as a guiding principle for how we live our lives and scaring the crap out of our children by using demons as a threat to sponsor good behavior. There's a difference between thinking someone's up in the sky watching over us and believing that they want us to kill infidels.


We agree on that, but it has nothing to do with superstitious ignorance in our society.


Unfair to ask our schools to at least instill a thirst for knowledge? That's where I got mine. My high school teachers were the catalysts for my lifelong search of knowledge. And I still graduated from high school knowing where Iraq was on the map long before Saddam invaded Kuwait.

Privatise the public school system now. There's a reason that, given the choice, most people send their kids to private school anyway.

-Kiamat Dusk

that would work, for about 30 seconds