“No Test Left Behind.” Gotta love that.
These kids have the system figured out. I just heard one student in my Senior English class telling her friend, who is going to take the same college class that this student just took, “You don’t have to listen class. You don’t have to do the work. Just hand in all of her study guides and you’ll be fine. That’s how I got an A.”
If one can believe that she actually did get an A, I’m horrified. Not only is her lack of genuine effort appalling (or smart, I guess, some would argue. Why put in more time if you don’t need to? Use the system to get your A and get out) but it is also at the heart of what is really affecting this new generation - they don’t know how to really work or genuinely learn.
How did they get this way? What did we do to these kids?
This is exactly the issue that Denise Clark Pope tackled in the text Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students.
Talk about miseducated! The above example illustrates all that is wrong with handing out grades that are supposed to represent the acquisition of knowledge. How foolish. I earned a B in Jerry Schnabel’s “World Religion” class at BSU, yet I learned more in those 10 or 12 weeks than I did than I did in all of the education classes I aced.
In Schnabel’s class, there was no way to skirt the issue: you had to study, read, and grapple with ideas. There was no way you could fake your way through it and even pass, let alone get an A. Yet, in my education classes, I knew - just like my student mentioned earlier - that if I jumped through enough hoops and said the right things, I could get my A.
So I was really no better. But there did come a time - whether it was through a demanding teacher or through my interest in a class or my realization that I might actually need to remember and use the information from my classes - and I started to enjoy learning - even in those damned education classes.
I read an article in the latest Newsweek about the growing number parents who think (I mean, believe) that their children are gifted - when right around five percent of the total population can actually be classified as that (and less than that can be classified as “genius”). The author referenced and upcoming book that I can’t wait to read (and I think it’s a book that will offer be an interesting companion to Pope’s book) called Thank God for B Minuses.
I guess when learners stop valuing knowledge in favor of a symbol and parents pushing every child to stockpile those worthless symbols, we end up with a world like the one in Pixar’s The Incredibles where the protagonist’s son, Dash, is blessed with incredible speed, yet he isn’t allowed to use it because everyone must be equal; no one can be exceptional. The mother, Helen, tells her son, “Everyone’s special, Dash.” The son responds with in a line that surely went over most of the children who saw the film (and I wonder how many of their parents didn’t catch its significance either) -- “That’s just another way of saying no one is.”
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