I ran across my old high school history book today. It is nearly 40 years old.

[Brigid]

And I've been comparing it to the one I just got for the college-level history class I am taking that starts next week. The differences are amazing. My new one really seems dumbed down, as far as vocabulary, layout, and content. No wonder people can't read anymore.

[Kablooie]

1. I guess it's more important that student's pass than learn.

[CountAllVotes]

2. +32,000,000

One vote for every illiterate person in America! That means that one in ten persons in the USA cannot read nor write.

We are going nowhere fast.

I have a relative that is now a teacher. By reading a simple note from this person, you'd never know they went to college much less graduated from high school. This person does not use any punctuation, writes in incomplete sentences, doesn't know when to add/end a paragraph, etc.

Said individual went to a pricey college too and still cannot spell the name of the town I live in. Sad yes and true.

You'd think with all of the texting devices, etc. that people would have at least learned the basics of how to read and also write but I guess that is just too much to ask for.

[Jenoch]

7. Do you live in Albaqerqi, N.M.?

If you do, you should give your relative a pass on that spelling

[newfie11]

14. Hey that's one I did get right on geography tests

Of course I lived there

[hfojvt]

32. I just say in phonetically

Albu-quer-que

or

Alboo-kwer-cue

not quite as easy as Czechoslovakia, a place which, unfortunately no longer exists. The coolness was that the capital of Norway used to be in the middle of it - Czech-OSLO-vakia

[CountAllVotes]

24. Ironically ...

I live in a place that is named after a former President of the United States.

You'd think this teacher (or whatever this person really is) would know how to spell it wouldn't you, and no, it is nothing complicated like Roosevelt.

[11 Bravo]

31. It's Albuquerque! I know because we lived there when my Dad was stationed at ...

the Sandia Base in the mid '50s. To the day he died, he could never talk about what he did there, but he was a Naval Aviator and Sandia was dedicated to the design of nuke delivery systems, so I can probably make a pretty fair guess.

[Jenoch]

43. My brother's best friend's father died last year

at age 81. He did not know that his father worked for the NSA until the funeral. For all of those years he thought his dad worked for Control Data. Some of his dad's retired colleagues came to the funeral and spilled the beans.

[ReRe]

15. I guess I live in a special place....

...because the college my kids went to would not graduate anyone who could not read and write. They had Eng Comp for first two yrs, and at the end of their second year, they had to take a writing test and if they didn't pass, they had to keep taking English. And if they got to be a Senior and still couldn't pass a writing test, they would NOT graduate. My kids skated right through the test at the end of their sophomore yr.

[Freddie]

16. My daughter went to community college

And the English Comp requirements were tough! I think more kids dropped out because of Comp II than any other course. With lots of hard work she did fine and was well prepared for the many writing-intense courses she had after she transferred for her bachelors degree.

[WinkyDink]

18. Your post is ironic.

[awoke_in_2003]

22. ...

[Nye Bevan]

30. +'1 (n't)

[HiPointDem]

46. ironic post.

[Karia]

3. Students are capable of more

but it is hard to find good textbooks these days. Publishers seem to think students want books that look like web pages and are easy to scan quickly (rather than read carefully).

Low expectations start long before college though. For a good article on the textbooks for elementary, middle, and high school, see http://tinyurl.com/csfydy8 , "How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us," by Gail Collins, New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012

"All around the country, teachers and students are left to make their way through murky generalities as they struggle through the swamps of boxes and lists."
<snip>
"And that’s the legacy. Texas certainly didn’t single-handedly mess up American textbooks, but its size, its purchasing heft, and the pickiness of the school board’s endless demands—not to mention the board’s overall craziness—certainly made it the trend leader. Texas has never managed to get evolution out of American science textbooks. It’s been far more successful in helping to make evolution—and history, and everything else—seem boring."

[awoke_in_2003]

23. Yep, you can blame Texas...

We have some fine colleges down here, but primary education sucks.

[liberal_at_heart]

4. I was really surprised how dumbed down my college English composition class was

I had taken a college credit level English composition class in high school. It was great. I took one again in community college ten years later and it was incredibly dumbed down. I was definitely disappointed.

[Comrade_McKenzie]

5. I've learned more through the Internet than I did in my standardized testing factory. nt

[Brigid]

6. A lot of students at my community college need remedial work.

Many of them have to beef up their reading, writing, and math skills before they're ready for college work.

[BainsBane]

8. What college level history class are you taking?

Is it a course offered by a history department with research faculty? An education course for history teachers. something else? And which textbook have you been assigned for the college course? The chief difference between the two books should be a significant change in content.

[Brigid]

9. This is a freshman-level American history class.

It's at a community college. Students take it as a general ed. requirement, because it is transferable to a four-year college. It is probably taught by adjunct faculty.

[Jenoch]

21. I remember my American history class

from my freshman year. The teacher was a decent guy, but it was a difficult course in to excel. A student could take down everything the teacher said in lectures, read every assigned chapter in the textbook, and none of that material would be on the test. Anyone with a working knowledge of American history could get a 'C' or even a 'B' on the test, bit there was always a bunch of obscure stuff that made it almost impossible to get an 'A'. There seemed to be a few perfectionists in class that were upset over the testing situation, but as soon as I figured out the situation, it made that one of the fun and stress-free classes. It helped that the teacher was an old guy who was likeable.

[maindawg]

10. the education industry is a rachet

You should go try and read just one text book from a century ago. I have three of those small brown text books from that era. History , German, and the other is like animals and biology.
I work in the schools with all ages of children. I can tell you that the text book are garbage. The way they teach now is by method. They will have about 40 or 50 lessons to complete. So they have to be easy enough to accomplish that goal. They teach the test.
College is very expensive, and while I agree that education can be a for profit venture, it should be free also. Free education is the bulwork of a strong society. If you wish to educated, you must do it yourself.

[MineralMan]

20. A rachet, eh?

No such thing. So much for edumacation, I guess.

[BlueJazz]

27. Here you go > LOL

[MineralMan]

42. Nah. That is a ratchet.

[KansDem]

52. Then there's the "racket"...

The racket (or ranket) was a small double-reed wind instrument of the 16th and 17th centuries. It had a narrow cylindrical bore folded into a number of parallel tubes, and therefore produced a very low pitch relative to its size, similar in character to the bassoon.

http://www.la.unm.edu/~davies/MAA/instruments.html

Maybe its name comes from irate neighbors shouting, "Hey, stop that racket!"

[MineralMan]

55. Often spelled with two "ts", though. Rackett.

I used to play the rackett, in an early music group. It sounds like musical farts.

[KansDem]

56. Hey! I played a little recorder and viola da gamba!

Last edited Mon Jan 14, 2013, 06:08 PM - Edit history (1)

In an early music group, too!

Maybe at the next DU get-together, we could get together for a little "L'homme armé?"

[Jackpine Radical]

28. I think it rhymes with "sachet."

Or, for you Gophers, "Cloquet."

[progressoid]

44. “It says sprocket not socket!”

“This lawn supervisor was out on a sprinkler maintenance job and he started working on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom 7″ gangly wrench. Just then, this little apprentice leaned over and said, “You can’t work on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom 7″ wrench.” Well this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got Volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, and he reads to him and says, “The Langstrom 7″ wrench can be used with the Findlay sprocket.” Just then, the little apprentice leaned over and said, “It says sprocket not socket!”

-Steve Martin

[HiPointDem]

47. another ironic post.

[ZRT2209]

11. textbooks can be made more quickly and easily for tablets

soon paper textbooks will be a thing of the past and those old crones on the school board will find themselves impotent

[sad-cafe]

35. until schools have the funding to make sure students ALL students have a computer both at home and

at school, there will still be a need for paper textbooks.

[Warpy]

12. One of the things I managed to snagged when my last grandparent died

was a high school math book from the early 1930s, back when a high school diploma was regarded as highly as a baccalaureate degree is now. Now I was a total math shark, but I had trouble getting through that thing. Knowledge of obsolete weights and measures was combined with all sorts of other things to make the problems hairy as hell. I doubt many people of any educational level could get through it now.

We've confused passing with being educated, money with wealth, wealth and fame (or infamy) with success, charisma for worthiness, and the list goes on and on. The culture has been so cheapened--and shortchanged--that I don't know if this country will ever dig itself out of this second Dark Age.

I know my eyes were opened when I tutored math and English at the college level and found out how illiterate so many high school graduates are. My own ex, not a stupid man by any stretch of the imagination, despaired of being able to write properly, mostly because no one had ever required him to read difficult books.

I would despair were I not on so many other sites and talking to younger folks who are not fools, who read and are literate, and who can do more than simple arithmetic.

I just feel so sorry for them. Their peer group is so much more ignorant than mine was. It's going to be very lonely for a lot of them as they go through life.

[RC]

38. It looks like you have a handle on the current situation.

We've confused passing with being educated, money with wealth, wealth and fame (or infamy) with success, charisma for worthiness, and the list goes on and on. The culture has been so cheapened--and shortchanged--that I don't know if this country will ever dig itself out of this second Dark Age.

I totally agree here.

[ErikJ]

13. Democracy depends on educated middle class.

[Jackpine Radical]

29. Fox Noose

depends on an illiterate audience.

Therein you have the explanation for the phenomenon.

[Yo_Mama]

17. So true

My mother was a teacher, and collected textbooks. You could see that ours were dumbed down from the versions they used in the 1800s, but when I read modern textbooks, I am appalled about how they have changed in 40 years. I'm 51.

[WinkyDink]

19. Read a TIME or NEWSWEEK from the two eras. The current guises deserve extinction.

[Paladin]

33. Agreed. (nt)

[datasuspect]

57. Read a Vanity Fair or Harpers article from the mid 90s

compared to today.

same thing with television - case in point, GMA segment from the 70s:

notice the lack of choppy editing, excessive graphics.

notice an actual conversation taking place.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

25. When I was in fifth and sixth grade, we read Junior Scholastic every week

It contained simplified (but not real simplified) summaries of the week's news and a feature on a different country every week. One article that I remember was about the formation of the Common Market (the predecessor of the EU). It explained what it was, who the members were, and why it was formed. I suppose I remember because I had heard the words "Common Market" on adult news casts and was glad to find out what it meant.

Fast forward to the late 1990s. I am volunteering in a G.E.D. tutoring program for street kids. I arrive a bit early, so I start poking around in the classroom and find a stack of Junior Scholastic magazines. I start paging through it and discover that it's all about good grooming, how to get along with people, and tiny bits of obvious news with obvious and trivial "study questions." The print is larger than that in Junior Scholastic in the 1960s.

My theory about this dumbing down is that the business interests who control the American economy and the publishing industry and the academic testing industry don't want smart, thinking people. They want people who will be unthinking cogs in the corporate machinery, so helping young people understand the world is not a priority. In fact, employees who understand the world are an obstacle to a single-minded focus on the bottom line.

[HockeyMom]

26. Graduated HS in 1966

and colllege in 1996. Yes, I can understand.

[madokie]

34. I remember when

I was in grade school in the fifties and best I can remember the maps in our school books showed Cuba to be more off the east coast of Florida rather than where it really is

[Riftaxe]

36. Because Students now use picture books

not college text books, they are brightly colored with graphics and pictures, minimal text...since I am sure some study or other showed pictures and bright colors are more important then what is written.

Modern text books are pretty much a joke unless you take a hard science course and even there the texts are less comprehensive then they should be.

[Posteritatis]

37. Kids These Days Suck, episode 713857918!

And god knows I've got some opinions about the state of history texts from back then.

[Karia]

39. It is not the kids & it is not the teachers

I really think the problems are the textbook industry and the anti-intellectualism of the right wing (see my post #3 above).

Many of my daughter's textbooks have been awful but she is getting a great education in our "failing" public school anyway because her teachers are awesome and they bring in lots of material to supplement the textbooks.

[HiPointDem]

49. +1

[nadinbrzezinski]

40. A certain story of a wizard s read by kids in the UK

Two to three grades earlier than in the US. You are not imagining this.

[HiPointDem]

50. the average 6 year old in the uk is reading harry potter, is it? lol.

[Doremus]

41. I bought some books at an estate sale and tucked inside one of them was

someone's 8th grade history test from the turn of the century. It had no multi choice or T/F questions, just 10 questions that required the student to answer on a separate piece of paper. Questions were like "Discuss Tecumseh's involvement in the War of 1812."

Very few students today could pass that test.

[progressoid]

45. Who is Tecumseh?

Kidding.

[HiPointDem]

48. people can't read anymore? why are we here?

[NBachers]

51. I'm probably the only person who uses correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar in text messages

I'm just not comfortable with the shorthand patois, and I'm irritated when I read it from others.

[KansDem]

53. You still have a high-school textbook?

Weren't you suppose to turn it back in at the end of the school year?

Uh-uh-uh...

[madrchsod]

54. i have my mothers school books from the early 1900`s

i also have history books from the 1870-80`s. very different than the books of today.