BORED OF EDUCATION?
Posted By Ruth King on March 11th, 2014
MOUNTAIN MAN NEWS….NO URL THE AUTHOR IS CONNECTED TO ME BY HAVING THE SAME PARENTS
The NY Times, wrote a journalistic essay (how dare they) explaining that the College Boreds will no longer require essays in their SAT exams. Nor will they penalize guessing. I’m guessing (that’s allowed now) that they will soon eliminate English and Math altogether. After all, I-phones have calculators anyway, and texting requires neither a large vocabulary nor spelling. President Obama will not only see to it that every young person attends a college, but each of them will have a macbook, I-pad and I-phone as well. The SAT exams will also attempt to increase the number of minority students entering college, so hire education should be gearing for an influx of Asians and Jews. Oh wait, they’re not minorities. I mean how many Hispanics do you see in Chinatown?
Now some of my colleagues at USC anticipated the future. After all, academics and intellectuals are fantastic fortune tellers. Witness how those economists have constantly steered us against any fiscal troubles. Faced with large classes, many of my colleagues have been giving multiple choice exams which a trained orangutang could grade. Now it’s not that academics want to shirk their obligations. Multiple choice exams not only do not penalize guessing but encourage it. Essays, unfortunately, stimulate critical thinking and if students were allowed to develop this, they might start to ask pointed questions.
They might, for example, wonder about the need to have so many courses in one department. We have reached the point that if you are going to be an English major, you really need to take a separate course in the English novels produced over each fifteen year period. Fifteen year periods are inadequate in studying American history. The course delineations should cover five year periods. Now I hope that my gentle readers won’t be too critical. College departments have long ago discovered that the cause of truth requires that they grow in size and get more money and more staff. Why should they be any different than the Department of Education or Transportation? Intellectual discipline? Come on now..
I can only hope that the SAT decisions are only the first step in democratizing education in America. Personally, I would eliminate the need for any exams prior to and even in college. As a matter of fact, why not grant a B.A. to every child at birth? Now of course that shouldn’t apply to our millions of illegal immigrants. They should only get a High School Equivalency degree and the B.A. should be withheld until they have worked in the U.S. for a minimum of two weeks.
Now I fear, gentle readers, that you might accuse me of being sarcastic. Au contraire, my dear friends. If Americans are to continue electing greedy and incompetent politicians and accept the idea that insurance companies and corporations are striving for our benefit, then I think it really would be best if literacy and critical thinking would disappear. We would all be happier. As for math, why would any American worker want to know the ratio of his CEO’s income to that of his own salary? Let’s hear it for the College Boreds. They know what’s good for us.
Comments are closed.
