Friday, January 20, 2006

Another survey says

This report is slightly less disheartening than it initially seems. Take this poorly worded bit:
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
Uhmm... three of those four "tasks" depend first upon numerical aptitude, not literary aptitude. But it does go on to say this:
Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education. Also, compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching and using information from texts and documents.
The educational system in this country leaves much to be desired, yes... but there's also good old-fashioned American laziness to consider, as well. People in this country, by and large, are simply not intellectually curious; they do not seek out new ideas for their own edification, for fear of posing an insurmountable challenge to their tenuous belief systems. One thing that the Democratic Party did not take into account during the last election was the strong streak of puritanical conservatism that runs very, very deep within the population. Education has to get better, sure, but people have to first understand that ideas, too, can become stale and irrelevant. Even the ones that are held to be most precious.

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