Crisis in public education? What crisis in public education?
WASHINGTON - More than half of students at four-year colleges — and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges — lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.
Comments
>They cannot 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.
This was the paragraph in the report that caught my attention.
If students nearing the end of a 4-year degree program can't "interpret" or "understand" or "summarize" somthing as simple as an editorial or a credit card offer, the future looks troubled for this generation.
The statistic that suggests students still have better skills than the whole of American adults is clearly flawed. It's not comparing apples to apples. The results would be far more accurate if they compared these college students to American adults who attended 2-4 years of college.
A better question would be WHY have 50-75% of young people lost the capacity for complex thinking? Does the Internet and all that time on PCs changed things?
One thing is certain; these kids who can't interpret a news editorial will STILL show up in an online forum and spout superficial opinions on everything. Instead of real individual research, they go for the easy 5-second Google far too often.