Holding kids to higher standards

I love it:
Study: College students lack literacy for complex tasks.
Here's the dirt:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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.

The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills -- no matter their field of study.

The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.

Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. 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.

But here's the good part:

Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education.

Please, please don't give me the test on comparing credit card rates!  (Do credit card companies want their rates understood?)  No, I don't understand George Will's arguments most of the time. And yet somehow, I manage to hold a job. Remarkable.

Bill, a teacher with whom I once worked, was enamoured of E.D. Hirsh's cultural literacy theory that every educated person should have at his or her command a certain amount of common historical trivia. One day he he was storming around the high school hallways bemoaning the fact that none of the kids he polled knew the significance of the date 1066. I caught up with Bill later that day and told him that my unscientific study showed exactly the same results - nobody I asked knew why 1066 was important. Oh, but I had been asking teachers, not kids.

Here's my new rule: require no high school tests that the legislators who vote for them can't pass.

For the life of me, I don't understand why we expect our kids to be smarter than we are.  Maybe because we know we aren't smart enough?

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Greetings from Indianapolis and the ICE Conference. Workshops today and a keynote and spotlight tomorrow. Stop by to say hello if you are attending.

Comments

[Dave]

It was the Norman invasion of England. Of course, I had to google it to find that out. Memorization isn't nearly as important as being able to access, evaluate, and use.

[Brightideaguru]

I found the article interesting also and <a href="http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2006/01/point-to-ponder-college-students-lack.html">blogged about it</a> as well.

Do you know why I know the significance of 1066? My Dad who is a history buff drilled it into my skull!

I think the insufficiencies in life skills that we're seeing is partially due to the insufficiencies with parents teaching their children the values and real world knowledge they need. We must never mistake booksmarts for lifesmarts. We should also not expect teachers and schools to teach students everything about living life.