ACTA's Must-Reads
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"Really?"
Over at the Pioneer Institute's blog, Liam Day is shocked by ACTA's study The Vanishing Shakespeare:
Again, I have to ask, Shakespeare? Really? Not Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair (Yes, I have a thing against early 20th-century American realism), but Shakespeare, the apogee of Western Culture and the English language. Now, the literary canon needed to be broken open and made more inclusive, but please tell me there is a place, an exalted place, for William Shakespeare in even a multi-cultural world.
Separately, Day commented on a recent Gallup survey showing that only seven percent of Americans can name our first four presidents in order. For one of the causes of this problem, one might consult ACTA's The Hollow Core, which looked at 50 top colleges and found that only seven require a survey course in American history or government.
Lesson? Students don't learn what they aren't taught, and it has consequences.
Posted by cmitchell at August 17, 2007 02:42 PM
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Comments
Americans in general, and Deweyist educators in particular hold unreasonable prejudices about memorisation (most of us have heard the tiresome rags about "mere rote memorisation"). On the contrary, training and developing one's memory may be more efficacious than many think. And of course memorising immortal poems and passages of beautiful or moving prose and thus possessing them as one would practise musical compositions eventually to play them by heart is far different than memorising state capitals and the US presidents in order, though even these bare facts help make connexions with other facts that aid in the basic understanding of events taken or taking place.
Posted by: Jacques Albert at August 23, 2007 08:23 AM
Luther, you have a good point. I got the presidents -- the fourth is Madison, Hamilton was never president, but I have to admit I was a little shaky on Madison. What difference does it really make? I could give a science quiz that would make most of these conservative education critics look like fools in the eyes of myself and my science colleagues. So what? I would score near the top of the heap on most of these so-called tests of general cultural knowledge -- I know, because I've taken a few of them. But give me a test on pop culture, and I'd be lost, because I don't give a rip.
The lack of general cultural knowledge is probably appalling. It is certainly astonishing. But you are right -- if people don't "use" the knowledge later, if they don't care about it, no amount of hammering it into their heads in school is going to make much difference in the long run.
Posted by: Mike at August 23, 2007 08:47 PM