A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”
Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”
Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.
Much blame should be placed upon the National Education Association (NEA).
I am very serious in my assessment. The NEA is a bargaining organization that should limit its activities to teachers’ wages, rights and benefits. It has gone far beyond that ‘charter.’
Over the years, the NEA has taken politically motivated actions that have resulted in a massive overhaul of the informational content of the history, social studies and English classes taught in our public schools.
The end result, massive ignorance. Its so bad, that its cumulative generational effect has been to produce teachers who are as ignorant as their students. And this is compounded by the fact that the teachers are blissfully unaware of their ignorance. These teachers don’t need more pay and smaller classes, they need to receive a decent education.
In the 1950s President Eisenhower warned America about the growing “military industrial complex” which threatened the abillity of the USA government to function in its proper role. He was wise in this warning but I fear an even greater “industrial complex”, the “educational industrial complex”. I have many sources in collegews and universities and they are unanimous in their opinion that the institutions that we value so highly are no longer independant in pursuit of higher thought. They are bound to industry, grants, and government. There is no such thing as accademic freedom. The battle has been lost within these institutions.
Therefore, when the author of the article says,
“Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,”
I am not surprised.
It is unfortunate that the author then continues on to support the current “educational industrial complex” that is the cause of the problem.
Don
Here in Florida, the Governor has recently created a committee to study ways to teach TEACHERS Civics.
The reason? More and more students are graduating that cannot name even the three branches of the U.S. Government.
#3, what is.. the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Independants!
kidding.. kidding..
Look, I know the guy isn’t popular with many people here, but maybe this is why Obama is generating interest. He’s actually willing to take on the teacher’s unions. See for example, Mickey Kaus, here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2184259/
If elected, it could be a “Nixon goes to China” moment.
People in Hungry don’t have enough food, so they are always trying to go through Grease to get to Turkey. If they can’t get there, they go to Chili instead, which is in Bowlivia. They get their drinks from Jugosaliva. And the Virgin Islands were given that name because they lie on the opposite side of the ocean from the Isle of Man…
I was born and raised in upstate New York, and graduated from high school in 1956. The system was vastly different then, and high school was no picnic…….but that’s a different story. What I am getting at here is the fact that once upon a time in most states, there were institutions called “state teachers’ colleges,” where one went in order to actually train for the teaching profession, and you were actually expected to thoroughly KNOW the subject matter. Now, one merely receives “credentials” at the university level.
When I come across teachers whose spelling is often atrocious, I wonder about their other qualifications for their profession.
“state teachers’ colleges,â€
Cennydd:
Did you know that Wisconsin State constitution and government was patterned after that of the New York State system? We, too, had state teachers colleges. There was a new one began in the new State of Wisconsin just after the Civil War and three of the first graduates, who were just poor rural Welsh farm kids, went on to become leaders in industry and the Federal government. An astounding story of persistance in the face of adversity. I lived in the house one of the brothers built in 1906.
Don
I received my Masters in Social Studies Education (secondary level) from Florida State University in 1992. Most of the classes were totally irrelevant. I think the only one that actually had any application in reality was the one where part of the course was a hands-on demonstration of office equipment used in schools! I kid you not! A class on the School Media Center would have been good, too, I think.
There was nothing about teaching content, and the main emphasis throughout the course was “if a student is failing the class, it’s not the student’s fault, it’s the teacher’s — your — fault, because you are not teaching them what they need to know to pass the class”.
Oh, yeah, a lot on feelings, and proper phrasing and — again, no kidding — warnings like “don’t grade in red ink, as that has a negative connotation and can make the student feel like a failure”. Nothing on evaluating text books, what to identify as relevant teaching subjects, etc. I guess they expected our ‘teaching internship (one semester) to take care of that. But guess what? My first supervising teacher thought that because I was in her classroom, that meant she could spend more time in the faculty lounge or take the day off. I had to lobby to get the internship graded as an ‘incomplete’ instead of taking a failing grade, and then take it again. This time I got a good teacher, who taught American History to my daughter, and remembered me from my internship (“Your only problem, Jim, was that you had way too much fun teaching those classes!”)
Jim E.
I had a friend take education course at FSU in the late 90s and got a similar report. All feelings and self esteem, virtualy nothing on teaching. And it was much the same when she hit the real world, no grading in red ink because it might make the students feel bad, if they badly misspell scientific terms you can’t correct them (an example she used was “hitrochen” for “hydrogen”) etc. And another aquantaince lost his job teaching AP US History when the students with a 5th grade reading level they forced into his class (they didn’t want to be there, the school admin did) weren’t up to the work and he failed them. He was supposed to pass them in order to help their self esteem. It is very worrying.
I think our public educational establishment is rather crummy, but in all fairness, more of educational woes are due, I believe, to cultural factors and poor parenting than anything else. Students just aren’t showing up with either the desire or the discipline to learn, not much a teacher can do in the face of that.
As a history and political science double major back when I was in college (not that long ago mind you), I agree in principle with what this writer says. I think her tone is a bit sardonically pessimistic, which I think unfortunately has a negative impact on her core message.
From my own personal experience, I just do not think that our culture largely places any real value on history or civics. Luckily, I went to a Catholic High School that thought these subjects were very important, which is probably what set me on the college path that I eventually chose.
I was a rather precocious college freshman who knew before the first day he walked on the campus that he wanted to major in history and minor in political science and probably high school teaching. The minor eventually morphed into a double major because I found both subjects so interesting.
But I recall, with much frustration, that all of the financial aid was based upon your ACT or SAT score. I did pretty well but not spectacularly on the ACT and only slightly better on the SAT, but I recall there was not a single question about political science or civics on either test, and only a few random questions about history, and then only because it was part of a reading comprehension part of the test.
I thought this was a complete crock because I always thought that my merit as a student remained completely unassessed. I got all A’s in History and Political Science in high school (and subsequently throughout college) but that was small potatoes because we do not think such subjects are worthy of being assessed in the SAT or ACTs. If that doesn’t send a value message, I don’t know what does.
My wife teaches 2nd grade, and she taught kindergarten for eight years before this fall. She also talks with school social workers, and with other teachers; this week she had a chance to talk with some teachers from other areas.
She has many children who have active, involved, and supportive parents (and a few “helicopter parents” who swoop in to “help” when they should not). However, there are also others — and the percentage seems to be increasing — who are essentially raising themselves. Kids who eat fast food or canned meals they heat themselves, kids who fall asleep watching TV and who have no “bedtime routine” of any sort, let alone stories and prayers. There seem to be a lot of kids who have physical parents, but those parents have either no clue as to how to be parents or (worse) do not even think that it is their responsibility to teach and train their kids how to be civil and contributing members of society.
I keep thinking that a generation from now our society will collapse. We will have many who know how all the technological aspects of life and government work — but no clue about how to be thoughtful, caring, responsible members of society, so that we simply cannot run the things that need to run to maintain self-government. We will wind up with either dictatorship or chaos.
Charlie Sutton
no. 6 that was truly hi-larious! i am married to a community college professor who is quite learned and not just in his field of study. the problem is his students are coming in without the most basic of skills. i personally think it is the parents that should be blamed. the school can only do so much, parent participation is so very important from the very start. my mother taught me to reading and math because it was important to her that i did well in school. i would never have learned to read as well as i do without her influence. also the fact that news services focus so much on american news vs. international news, is it any wonder that we don’t know other countries exist? just another piece of evidence that we are too focused on ourselves. i try to listen to bbc whenever i get the chance.
No. 14…I completely agree about the news. I try to avoid the mind numbing American news channels like the plague. It is amazing how different in substance PMSNBCFauxNews is compared to the BBC World News, or even the PBS evening news with Jim Lehrer.
I think that anyone who can do better than the current teachers in this nation’s public schools should get a teaching position as quickly as they possibly can do so. I believe that they would be shocked at just how hard teachers work. I also believe that not one in ten thousand of the critics would lower himself to do so.
The critics would do well to recall that in 1900 less than ten per cent of the people went to high school and that by 1940 that had only risen to about 25%, but in 1998 83% of the working population had a high school diploma. That might just have something to do with what the critics call “standards.”
It is noteworthy that during the first quarter of the last century public schools were the primary instrument in the assimilation of millions of immigrants AND millions of internal migrants from rural areas to cities. It was in this era that public schools were retooled to focus, not on preparing a farm owning yeomanry for citizenship, but on preparing millions of children for working in the nation’s factories. Of course since then public schools have been expected to do everything from preparing the engineers needed to beat the Russians in space to being the primary place where this nation’s legacy of racism would be transcended.
Public education in this country spread from New England to the Midwest and its democratic character was formed there. It arrived in the South with the United States Army in the 1860’s and early 1870’s and many of its critics have never forgiven it. I would remind critics of the NEA’s political actions that it was the fundamentalist Protestants of this country, particularly in the South, who politicized the schools since the days of the Scopes trial to the present, and that it is conservative politicians who have launched an assault on public education whose sources are a craven appeal to the racist reaction to school desegregation, a cowardly fear of the political power of teachers’ unions and an ideology that idolizes private enterprise.
American public education is the last truly democratic institution in this country. This democratic character has been part of the public schools’ legacy since the days of the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. American public education, alone in the industrial world, grew from the grass roots. All the systems lauded for outperforming American school in all the tests ever mentioned began as elitist institutions whose benefits were passed from the top down. Since the draft was ended the public schools are the only institutional experience which a majority of Americans share. Public education has never been offered in complete equality, but I do not believe that there is another institution in this nation that has made as many strides toward offering its benefits in some equal measure to all people.
Father Dean A. Einerson
Rhinelander, Wisconsin
I think there is a lot at play in why American education is failing (though if anti-intellectualism is the meter, the UK isn’t much better if you look at the average young person). It’s easy to pick on teachers, with some truth. Two generations ago, with professional opportunities for women restricted, many of the best and brightest females went into teaching (not saying playing this in reverse is smart). Today they are being attracted by prestige, money, and challenge into many of the same fields as men: business, technology, medicine, law. By happenstance, I know many retired teachers in Fairfax County, VA, (a great school system), and I suspect many of them would be doing something different if they launched their careers today. You also have stratification within schools – the top teachers typically gravitate to advanced/gifted/AP classes. You can also lay some blame at the feet of American colleges: most have an incoherent general curriculum, outside of the sciences/mathematics, and I’m not aware of any that systematically follow the Oxford model of trying to make a student deep in at least one area.
Weakness in American mainstream news re: international coverage is self-reinforcing trend. Most people want relevance first and fast, so you end up with scary soundbites. But cable is another story: I get BBC America, BBC International, Bloomberg (great overnight financial news globally), plus a host of country-specific news shows. Plus, most people I know (younger, professional) get their news online, where they can seek out meaty sources (Christian Science Monitory, Economist, Washington Times for Africa) and eschew most of the chaff. Having traveled extensively, however, I think we should be careful about overstating the relative provinciality of American news. BBC coverage in the UK is quite UK-focused, and much more repetitious in terms of content. Smaller countries (Ireland, Belgium) get even more provincial.
16. Dean A Einerson:
My wife volunteered at the local schools to assist in a specialized field. Her work was excellent. She has been dis-invited as she caused too much disention among teachers. I can only add that my wife is a very quiet and non-political person. Her sole error was in doing a good job.
I was within a semster of reaching the teacher training requirements of the college that I was attending. I chose not to continue because I could see that I would never be able to exist in the politics of public school. And that was in the 1970s.
You see, I have a rather simple philosophy; I would do my best to provide the best education possible for the students – best books (any era), best teaching techniques, and develop their charactors as much as possible (the one thing that they would carry and use throughout their lives).
No, quality can not exist in a public system.
By the way, you argue a lot like ex-Wisconsin DPI Benson.
Don
Fr. Dean,
Very idealistic. Tell me:
Have you spent any time in the public schools?
I have and let me tell you, they are a battle ground. Yes many teachers are doing above and beyond, but many more are just following the system to get by on below-average salaries. The students test the system as often as they can, and in many instances in my three year stint as a substitute teacher, I had to face down students who were both taller and heavier and more street-wise then I, broke up fights in the hall while other teachers stood and watched (afraid of lawsuits if they intervened); and had my license revoked temporarily because of a false report by a student who was mad at me for telling him to go to the office.
I soon came to the decision that I would rather become a librarian than risk my life in the public schools.
Sure the blame can be placed on many sources: parents who don’t parent; students who don’t want to learn; teachers who go along with the system because they will not get ‘performance raises’ if they don’t; administrators who focus on getting passing scores on standardized tests with the money it brings to the schools; and, perhaps especially, the teacher’s union who fight the idea of merit raises and excellence among teachers ‘because it will harm the self-esteem of the rest of the profession’.
I hold teaching to be one of those professions like police and fire-fighers that is essential to our nation. They should be celebrated. But from an inside point of view, there are many teachers in the system who have given up on trying to excel, and now just ‘teach the test’. It’s sad. But it’s true.
Jim E.
Oh, and the lack of authority by the teacher to discipline in any way shape or form the disruptive students in the class. The students know that nothing will happen if they create chaos, so they do. And the entire class suffers for it.
When I was tutoring English at one of our community colleges in the South Bay Area of California, I couldn’t help noticing the atrocious grammar and spelling of those whom I was trying to help, and I often thought to myself “How in God’s name did these kids ever graduate from high school? What in the world were they being taught?” Then I discovered that some of their teachers were just as badly off as THEY were! The dysfunctional system feeds on itself!
At the NEA convention in 2004, the NEA actively lobbied:
for increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts,
for a national health care system,
for reparations to African Americans,
for statehood for the District of Columbia,
for taxpayer funding of federal elections,
for a national holiday for Cesar Chavez,
for ratification of the United Nations treaties on the Rights of the Child and on Discrimination against Women,
for reproductive freedom without governmental intervention,
for assigning women to military combat,
for a federal statute prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,
for income tax benefits for domestic partners,
for passage of hate crimes legislation.
They also:
opposed school choice, tuition tax credits, vouchers, parental option or “choice” in education programs,
opposed designating English as our official language,
Insisted that all homeschool instruction be given by teachers licensed by the state education licensure agency,
Insisted that any homeschool curriculum be approved by the state department of education,
Insisted that homeschooled students should not be allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities in public schools.
Oh, they also passed a resolution calling on all educators to make a concerted effort to defeat Pres. Bush’s re-election bid.
(sarcasm)Yep, definately focused on education related principles. (/sarcasm)
I agree that the public schools are in sorry shape, and that the media has contributed mightily to the general decline in Americans’ understanding of the world. But before you jump on Jacoby’s bandwagon, realize that she thinks most of the people on this board are also to blame:
Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.
If you read her contributions to the “On Faith” column in the Washington Post, you know that her antipathy toward religious believers of almost any stripe is boundless. Though the IHT article doesn’t dwell on it, she blames religion (which is itself, in her estimation, a form of stupidity) for a good portion of the ignorance that pervades society.
Not to throw out another bone for everyone to gnaw on, but I also think tenure for teachers leads to mediocrity. I have worked in both a public school system as a student teacher and went to a high school (parochial) which had annual reviews and one year contracts.
Maybe tenure is necessary for legal protections in a world where students and helicopter parents who are all to ready to sue at the drop of the hat. But, even in that short a time I worked in public schools, I cannot tell you have many teachers I saw who got tenure and their teaching style and content went down drastically and immediately.
My dear Don,
I am so very sorry to hear that you wife had such a distressing experience. It must be very painful particularly since it must have been so unexpected. The episode, as you describe it, sounds most peculiar, and unlike anything I have ever heard of happening in any public school system.
I am not sure why you mention John Benson in connection with my argument. My view is simply a very unremarkable understanding of the history of public education. I have always believed that unless we understand history we will have no idea of where we are going and almost none of where we are. Of course my passion for history is such that my undergraduate degree is in US History with a minor in Political Science. This was considered about the least marketable degree for teaching in the early 1970’s (I was the only person in my student my History and Social Studies student teaching seminar that was able to find a teaching position in the field in the summer of 1971.)
I suppose the mention of John Benson and the Wisconsin DPI suggests an agenda, but then your comment about quality and a public system makes your agenda clear. It sounds as if you made a wise career choice, although I believe that you would have found that most of your colleagues would have shared your philosophy.
Father Dean A. Einerson+
Rhinelander, Wisconsin
As a retired college teacher of American government and history who still teaches a class or two in these subjects at a local community college, I feel that I can comment with some authority on these issues. Neither unions or overworked teachers are at play here. The absymal state of American public education is linked to the erosion of our culture, lack of student discipline, and teachers who do not know their subjects. I might toss in educational adminstrators who, for the most part, operate from a perspective of fear and apprehension.
In Idaho, the M Ed required a minor in each of the subjects to be taught.
My equally dear Jim,
I taught US History to seventh and eighth graders in a public school district northwest of Milwaukee from 1971 to 1996 when I resigned to go to seminary.
I also have some second hand experience. My parents were both public school teachers for over forty years in Janesville, Wisconsin. One grandfather taught for a few years in a country school and the other taught history in Milwaukee until the day he died. Most of my aunts and uncles were teachers and so are most of my cousins. Two of my aunts taught in one room schools in southwest Wisconsin and another aunt and an uncle taught in the so called “inner core†of Milwaukee. My family has teachers at every grade level and in a wide variety of content areas, and my mother spent the last thirty years of her careen teaching the blind.
Father Dean A. Einerson+
Rhinelander, Wisconsin
25. Dean A Einerson:
Your history is accurate and salient. I did not intend to in any way belittle that factual and salient history or of the fact that it is important in this discussion.
It is your conclusions that bother me greatly. They seem not connected to the facts of education today. You say that “American public education is the last truly democratic institution in this country.” I tender my post #2 as an arguement quite different than yours.
History is my first love but I am more apt with the sciences and Physics. I think that the fact that you and your fellows, history graduates, had a difficult time with employment is sufficient arguement, in itself, for my position.
God bless you as you impart the facts of our past to those who, in this next generation, will be so in desperate need of them.
Don
#22–Don’t you find it interesting that we have to note the word “sarcasm” when we use sarcasm; even on T19? (sarcasm)
If it is any consolation much of what you write applies here in the UK too, except for our added speciality, paperwork. Teachers drown in an ever-increasing rip tide of reports, statistics compilation, forms to be completed, boxes to be ticked ad nauseam and so on. Once, when I was chair of governors, I wrote to the Minister of Education to complain that the paperwork was drowning the teachers. I did not, of course, think she would get the letter but even so it was dispiriting to receive a reply a month later from a very junior flunkey in a PR office 200 miles away from the Ministry of Education.
But but but … I have to add that some of the worst spelling I have seen has been on this site.
Take The Light Of The World out of the classroom, and the classroom goes ………. dark.
#31, I know I’m guilty of much of the poor spelling. My typing skills, never very good, have long leaned too hard on spellchecker software and atophied still further.
Bad spellers of the world untie!
“It’s a man with very little imagination who can only spell word one way.”
— Mark Twain
“It’s a man with very little imagination who can only spell [b]a[/b] word one way.”
— Mark Twain
And of course the ‘father’ of my own profession:
Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey founded the Spelling Reform Association and preferred to spell his name Melvil Dui, and is believed responsible for the American spellings of many words including dropping the ‘u’ from such words as ‘catalog’ (from ‘catalogue’), and a brochure on his Lodge on Lake Placid (“Adirondac Loj”) advised guests that:
“All shud see the butiful after-glo on mountains to the east just befor sunset. Fyn vu from Golfhous porch.”
(All should see the beautiful after-glow on the mountains to the east just before sunset. Fine view from Golf-house porch.)
So, spelling is not an indicator of poor education.
Poor spelling indicates a lack of interest in ensuring spelling correctly. It also shows that one’s teacher didn’t take the time to ensure that his or her student made no mistakes in either spelling or grammar. It goes back to the basics of learning one’s ABCs. Am I old-fashioned when it comes to making sure that my grandchildren are properly educated? Yes, I admit it!
Yeah, I know. I didn’t think I needed to include the 🙂 with my comment.
But correct spelling on a forum like this is not (IMO) as important as correct spelling on a resumé, prospectus, Grant application, etc.
I think some allowances may be made for those who try to type in a message quickly while on break at work, at home when called to dinner, etc.
Different situations/different criteria.
(Not that we shouldn’t TRY for perfection in all things….)
Susan should remember that in a recent poll one-fourth of the British believed Winston Churchill to be a fictitious character.
Andrew (#33): I think your spell-checker dried…
Rather than spin this as a failure o the education system, I wonder what the impact of
* the deep anti-intellectualism of evangelicals
* the dumbing down of culture by Murdoch & GE
er, that should have been “Eisner (Disney) & ABC”
Bob,
Why stop with Murdoch and GE? Add Disney & ABC; Turner and CNN; etc.
40. The comment about the “deep anti-intellectualism of evangelicals” is about the most pretentious and wrong-headed statement I have heard concerning the declining status of American education. You may be right that the big media companies have a lot to do with polluting our culture the extent that the capacity to educate young people is made more difficult. But I hardly see evangelicanism in the same light. If anything, students with values learned in a religious home environment (and note that I did not say Christian home environment) are generally no problem from the standpoint of discipline and motivation in the classroom. And as a well-experienced college teacher of American history and government, I can tell you that the same cannot be said about students who come from an intellectual background representative of the pretention you so well exhibit. By the way did you see the smart liberal kids at Berkeley on the national news this week?
rudydog,
sorry to offend you
i actually say this as a person who would describe himself as an evangelical
but my observation is not new or even unique
One of the evangelicalism’s premier scholars Mark Noll wrote a book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which has become shorthand for the ongoing conversation about evangelical anti-intellectualism. Noll began with a powerful indictment: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” He goes on to point out that evangelicals are the only religious group in America that exceeds the national average of those not completing the eighth grade or high school. At the same time only 24.2 percent of evangelicals achieve some university training, compared with 68 percent of non-Christians.
Os Guinness has described the “sin and the scandal†of anti-intellectual attitudes prevalent in the evangelical church in the last 200 years.
bob carlton’s bigoted remard reminds me of a dear friend who, in 1972 came to our very liberal Methodist college after being denied admission to Oral Roberts University. Her grades and test scores weren’t high enough for ORU.
why is bigoted to point out ant-intellectualism among my own tribe, but not bigoted to attack teachers ?
it is so typical of American culture to blame everyone esle, rather than engage in self-examination
LOL,
Somehow, my post #s 41 & 42 were published in reverse order, so the correction comes BEFORE the statement!
40. I can only guess at why you might believe that using descriptive statistics from a well-known progressive Christian scholar would be offensive to me. That is, unless you place a lot of credibility (if not certainty) in the writings of someone with which you agree who –along with Jimmy Carter, Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo et. al.— attempts to substantiate a political ideology which runs contrary to that of the “tribe they claim to belong.” Let’s let it go at just saying it sells books and that you would likely not accord the same intellectual respect to any orthodox Christian scholar who does not claim allegiance to an oxymoron.
[i]why is bigoted to point out ant-intellectualism among my own tribe[/i]
Well, you didn’t point anti-intellectualism [b]among[/b] evangelicals. What you said was:
[i] the deep anti-intellectualism [b]of[/b] evangelicals[/i]
Words do matter, don’t they! Anti-intellectualism certainly exists among evangelicals, as it exists among Catholics, liberal protestants, Orthodox, secularists and just about all people; Mark Noll was certainly within his rights, as an evangelical, to call for more education among evangelicals. I’m not an evangelical (popular sense) myself, but I know a few of them. My step-father, actually a fundamentalist (literal sense) has no college education, but is one of the most well-read and knowledgeable people I know about matters religious and otherwise. To call him “anti-intellectual” is ludicrous. That’s anecdotal, but points to the problem with equating intellectualism – and certainly the proverbial “open mind” – with a college education.
As to attacking teachers, I’ve not done that, nor do I see it predominately in this thread. Certainly not all teachers are getting criticized. I came up in the public schools from 1957 to 1970. A few teachers were duds, a few brilliant, most were decent. I suspect that’s true today. Welcome to reality.
As a point of fact, my observation is that like economic news, all educational news is bad. Someone above pointed out that a phenomenally high percentage of kids in the U.S. get a high school diploma. They may not be able to read it (as the bad joke goes), but I suspect a higher percentage of kids today are better educated than a century ago.
The problems are two-fold: expanding expectations. [i][b]Nothing[/b][/i] is too good for “our kids”, which means, of course, nothing is good enough. The second problem is that we are asking schools to do everything that families fail to do. While I am sympathetic to the humane impulse at work there, reality is that families raise kids. Which is to say, families are the determining factor, not schools. Families are, of course, complicated things. You can’t say “bad family = bad child”, any more than “good family = good child”. An abusive home may produce a saintly adult, though probably not. A family that values fixing trucks over reading Shakespeare may produce an English professor, but is more likely to produce a mechanic. BTW, as someone who’s automotive skills end at changing a tire, I’m all in favor of mechanics. English professors are fine too, but not when the truck breaks down.
If that makes me “anti-intellectual”, so be it.
40. Since you are in to validation by experts, here is a new one for you to read as a matter of intellectualizing your arguments: [b]The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness [/b]by: Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D. Are Liberals Out of Their Minds? Why do modern liberals think and act as they do? The radical left’s politics and its destructive effects on our basic freedoms have provoked many to speculate on what makes these people tick. [b]The Liberal Mind[/b]” answers these questions. This book is the first systematic analysis of the political madness that now threatens to destroy the West’s greatest achievement: the American dream of civilized liberty. In his penetrating analysis, Dr. Rossiter reveals modern liberalism’s assaults on: The freedom of adults to make good lives for themselves by cooperating with others; The ability of families to raise children to be self-reliant and mutual; The morals, rights and laws that protect our freedoms “Modern liberalism’s irrationality can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche.” “The Liberal Mind” reveals the madness of the modern liberal for what it is: a massive transference neurosis acted out in the world’s political arenas, with devastating effects on the institutions of liberty.
I met a former-Baptist turned Episcopalian at an EFM Mentor Workshop at Camp Beckwith.
He told his life story, including his ordination as a Baptist Minister. When he told his family he was planning to attend college, his grandmother chided him saying “Don’t you know a college education will ruint you for preachin’?”.
Well, he went anyway, and found some of his deep-seated prejudices against other denominations challenged, and he found his grandmother was right, it did ruin him for preaching — as a Baptist.
He left that denomination and became an Episcopalian, and when I met him was going through the discernment process for Seminary. That was about 12 years ago.
Pew polls find, for example, that just one religious group in America now expresses a “favorable” view of “the Christian conservative movement”: white evangelical Protestants.
Most polls show that, rather than fostering greater religiosity, the rise of the Religious Right has produced an astounding consequence: the fastest-growing “religious†group in America for the last decade has been the non-religious—millions of men and women, most of them raised in religious families, who for one reason or other had stopped practicing their faiths.
51. I am also a Baptist turned Episcopalian and can assure you that the SBC does not wollow in or encourage “anti-intellectualism.” Now as a former Episcopalian, I can safely state that too much misplaced pride in all things academic was a factor in my leaving TEC.
rudydog,
that wold be news to albert mohler, who recently said
“The anti-intellectualism of contemporary evangelicalism has led to nothing less than unconditional surrender. We have left generations of young Christians unequipped for the battle of the mind, and the losses are staggering.”
Well, thank goodness, then, for minds such as Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, and others who are heading the movement towards ‘intellectual apologetics’ and not just retorts such as “Oh yeah? Well the Bible says it so it must be so!” or “My church is better than your church” or as the little old lady who visited the bookstore as we were talking about Church history said:
“Oh, I’m afraid you have it all wrong. The Baptist Church was the first church because after all, the Bible does refer to John the Baptist. That’s what my pastor says, so it must be true.”
40. I think Mohler was referring to that part of your tribe that you do likely need to address in the context of its intellectual vacousness. For myself –to paraphase Groucho — I wouldn’t want to be in a tribe that would have me as a member.
I have been away from my computer but have been reading this thread on my Blackberry. What has happened on the topic of “anti-intellectualism” is indicative of what has happened in TEC. We orthodox have let the left define the terms and then we spend all our time trying to explain why the liberals are not correct about us. They have distracted us into explaining while they stole the church. For instance, there is a great “given” in TEC that Evangelicals are anti-gay. The leadreship of TEC put that out 30 years ago and the liberals in TEC really believe it. This tactic is called “The Big Lie”. If you say it with a straight face long enough, it begins to sound like the truth. Now, on this topic, I would submit there is a great difference betweem liberal academia and intellectualism. I am a fervent Evangelical. I am not anti-intellectual. I have a professional doctoral degree myself. I prefer to be around highly intelligent people. I love a debate and an honest argument. I actually read books and wear shoes on a regular basis. I have never had anything to do with the Baptist Church. But I am anti liberal academia. The truth is not that Evangelicals are anti-intellectual, but that the liberal academic establishment is anti-Evangelical and mostly anti-Christian. In the secular world, that is just something we have to deal with; but when Christian professors and theologians become anti-Christian I get upset. I have decided to read the Bible and trust the text. If one cares to catergorize me as anti-intellectual because of it–so be it. But I REFUSE to wear that badge or be defined by someone else’s sterotypes.
David,
I actually agree with you that academic establishment is often anti-Evangelical and mostly anti-Christian.
I have found over & over again that evangelicals (which I count myself as) in our modern churchianity tend to fall into a trap of making faith & intellect a false choice. This mindset equates faith with certainty.
These observations are not mine alone – many, many evangelicals have made this observation and have worked hard to address it.
#57: Well stated. I agree with you that equating evangelicalism and anti-intellectualism has its basis in the big lie. Even more so, I would argue that any effort to do so from a perspective of intellectual elitism is not only pretentious, but ignorant in itself. I grow weary with arguments sustained by the use of mine and others facts and statistics, particularly when I know that understanding faith is much more complex than that.