Every so often a clip makes the rounds of someone interviewing people whose ignorance of history, geography, politics, and everything but current reality TV programs is intended to shock. The latest is James Krug’s interviews on the UCLA campus in California.
In 2014, political science students at Texas Tech did a similar round, with equally depressing results. Some students didn’t know who won, or even who fought, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
Back in the 1990s, comedian Jay Leno from the Tonight Show used to do a bit called “Jaywalking” where he interviewed dunderheads in malls and on the street.
Of course, the Leno interviews and these college ones show only edited examples of the most ignorant or amusing interviewees, so we don’t know the percentage of how many students got each question right or wrong. Still, when the interviews are of college students, surely there is a floor to tolerable ignorance.
“What country is the queen of England from?” is a question that calls for a bare minimum of listening comprehension and reasoning ability, well below what we should expect of a high school graduate.
There should not be a single college student, let alone voter, who doesn’t know the capital of the United States of America. How is it possible that someone could matriculate to the University of California, Los Angeles - or any university or even community college in the United States - and get that wrong? Every American is supposed to have taken U.S. history in both 8th and 11th grade.
Likewise, “what ocean is on the east side of the United States?” should not be a stumper. Basic geography should have been covered in 5th grade or earlier.
All indications are that American public education is in the toilet. The easiest place to see this is the Nation’s Report Card, which has statistics rating students as “at or above NAEP proficient” on subjects from Arts to Writing. Look for yourself. In national public K-12 schools, 24% of high school seniors are “at or above NAEP proficient” in math, 36% in reading, and 11% in U.S. history. That means half the country didn’t get a basic education by age 18, despite taxpayers paying for it. Washington D.C. public schools, the country’s second most expensive, cost $30,000 per student per year, meaning $360,000 spent per child to church out illiterate, innumerate, future voters, 75% of whom aren’t competent in civics.
We’re lucky even to have these measurements, which may disappear. Standardized tests are being weakened or eliminated altogether by education ideologues at all levels who claim that they are racist; their real sin is that they shine light on the politically unpalatable truth that American K-12 education today doesn’t teach to the level it did a century ago.
The reasons for this national debacle are many. Some blame belongs to families and individuals: too many kids raised by parents with no time, knowledge base, or inclination to teach them anything at home. Too much time spent on phones, social media, and “content” with no educational value. There are some excellent state school teachers, but also many mediocre and incompetent ones, and the latter are never weeded out thanks to strong unions and weak school boards. The U.S. recruits most public school teachers from non-competitive colleges where they graduate in the bottom half of their classes.
At private K-12 schools, ‘woke’ is eating into curricula to the detriment of learning. A math teacher at the expensive Grace Church School in New York, Paul Rossi, was fired for daring to raise questions about the racial segregation and discriminatory aspects of the school’s mandatory “antiracism” program. The school’s head, in fluent wokish, said Rossi’s words on a Zoom call had “caused harm.” Nearby Brearley and Dalton schools, and many private schools across the country, have undertaken similar staff and student re-education, often through highly paid consultants with an incentive to find as much racism as possible to keep them in business. Copies of Ibram Kendi’s sophomoric How to Be an Antiracist are flying off the shelves as required reading.
The fish rots from the head. American teacher colleges waste inordinate time on Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, and other nonsense which teach future classroom instructors nothing useful except how to deflect responsibility away from the individual effort and performance of teachers and students and onto vague ideas like “structural racism.” As Daniel Buck wrote in the Wall Street Journal, colleges that teach “education” to prospective teachers are brain-washing them in “critical pedagogy,” a mish-mash of Marxian theory that they can’t wait to bring into class in lieu of math, English, and science. As education analyst Lindsay Burke wrote in agreement, “colleges of education that are captive to the Marxist tenets of critical theory … lectur[e] about postcolonial theory, queer theory, “QuantCrit” and intersectionality, rather than foundational pedagogical concepts, lesson-plan design and classroom management.”
It is easy to laugh at a few Gen Z morons on YouTube, but thanks to Joe Biden’s cynical action in giving away $300 billion in debt owed by students to the federal government, all of us taxpayers just picked up their bar tab. If one could argue that the debt-relieved are now smarter and more informed and have a skill that will allow them to get jobs that will pay some taxes back in, one could make a case that “forgiving” $10,000 or $20,000 per borrower in loans, plus billions in lost interest revenue, makes economic sense in the long run. However, if there is no qualitative control whatsoever on the product, i.e. whether or not recipients of debt forgiveness can read, write, and think adequately to show value for our money spent on their years in college, then the financial, let alone moral, argument in favor of this unprecedented largesse collapses.
Banks won’t lend you money unless you prove you have the income and credibility (credit score) to pay off a loan. They also evaluate the housing market and get a professional opinion about your prospective house’s value. Non-competitive colleges, meanwhile, will take all comers and are more than happy to teach you something useless. Can’t bother or too dumb to learn Greek or Latin? Don’t worry, Princeton will still let you study classics. Not really into books and stuff? Take a course on porn (Westminter College, Utah) or Taylor Swift lyrics (University of Texas, Austin) instead. Exams got you down? Skip them, because or Covid, or stress, or structural racism, whatever – we’ll find a way to graduate you. Too dumb or lazy to pass the bar exam? Join the movement to reform “diploma privilege and reformed licensing” and just skip it. School is hard. It’s 2022 - there’s no bar so low we can’t make it lower.
Months ago, I wrote about what a bad idea it was to “cancel” student debt (that is, absorb it by expanding the money supply). I won’t repeat all the arguments, but they boil down to these:
Students own debt of their own free will. Why forgive this debt and not others, like medical bills, business costs, or car loans? It’s not fair to those who didn’t go to college or who sacrificed to pay their debt off. Eliminating the risk/reward calculation obviates any incentive for smart decisions. It doesn’t help poor people, needy people, or people of color as much as high-earning graduate students. Loans, and loan forgiveness, don’t target skills that the U.S. economy needs. College costs are out of control, rising faster than inflation, due to (a) administrative bloat, and (b) the fact that students can borrow tuition from Uncle Sam and colleges know that. Schools have no incentive to lower costs. Finally, we are going to be forgiving loans not just for some deserving, hard-working, poor students, but also these kids: UNT Link, Yale link.
This is a bleak lookout for America’s future. Far too many young people go into higher education than did a few generations ago, but judging by the results, we’re wasting our money. Colleges today are producing fewer well-rounded graduates and more ignorant snowflakes. Loan forgiveness rewards not just borrowers who worked hard and earned a degree in a needed field like nursing or teaching, it also rewards those who spent four years on “studies” degrees or others proven to be the least remunerative in terms of salaries earned on graduation in relation to total borrowed.
Watching other people’s kids be idiots is sad, but also funny. You can think to yourself, that’s less competition for me or my kids in the job market. Yet, if you were to see your own kids turn out ignorant and ill-equipped to think critically, after you had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (either through local taxes for K-12 or out of your pocket for private school, college, or university), you would be outraged.
Well, America, thanks to the Democrats’ freshly-cracked loan-candy pinata, they’re all our kids now – even the most ignorant and ill-prepared for economic, social, and political life. By absorbing their debt, we now own their failures. Maybe now is the time, like a good parent, or a bank, to ask some more questions about value for our money. Are the schools teaching to measurable standards? Are the students actually studying? Are they studying subjects that have any realistic prospect of leading to gainful employment, or better yet, that are in high demand in the job market? Can they pass standardized tests to show they’ve mastered material? Without good answers to these questions, we’re just handing out money to random mendicants on the street. Maybe they’re the next Elon Musk, but more likely they’re just a drunk headed off to get a couple cans at 7-11.
Thanks for the shout out to the nurses!!!! There were people who had it a lot harder than me, but I am proud to say I put myself through nursing school with public transportation and various jobs. I appreciated it so much more in the end. 32,years later, I still love it!