By Professor Doom
I want to talk about
specific questions on the Harvard
entrance examination, which reveals what an 18-year-old could do,
in the 19th century. Yes, the successful applicant probably came
from the best prep schools, but no, this is not sufficient to explain the
failure of our modern education system…we’ve had over a century to match the
teaching skills that were “the best” we could offer back then. Keep in mind,
back then a teacher was anybody that
wanted to call himself a teacher…you didn’t need years of training and an
Education degree to teach kids (truth is, you still don't, but that laws make it so).
All those years of
“teacher training” and the highfalutin’ Education degree should produce
results; our 21st century students are the products of Educationist
research, they should be way better than 19th century students.
We’ve had these
Education departments spewing Educationist muck for decades now. We’ve poured
money on crazy hare-brained “new methods of learning,” damning generations of
our kids to illiteracy, innumeracy, and ignorance on many levels. The failure
of Education as a research field is fully exposed on that exam.
Yes, the Harvard exam
was intended for the best educated high school graduates of the 19th
century…but the simple fact that all our Educationist “research” now cannot
produce even a handful of students able to perform at this level is very
revealing at just how completely
Education has failed as a field.
To put this failure in
comparison, imagine if the field of Aeronautics, flying machines, was started
in the 19th century, when the best we had were hot air balloons. In
order for this field to have failed as badly as Education, our best 21st
century flying machines would be hot air balloons that can’t even stay aloft,
and must be released at the top a cliff, to glide down, crashing in flames
about half the time...
And that’s what we have
now, right? Oh, no we don’t. We even have space rockets that land by themselves
nowadays. So, Aeronautics is apparently a legitimate field with much success to
be proud of. Education? Obviously not. Obviously, obviously, obviously.
So, the test. It begins
with an extensive and detailed list of questions involving translation into
Latin and Greek, with hints for obscure vocabulary words. I concede Greek and
Latin aren’t as important to the 21st century as the 19th,
but now our high school graduates can’t answer many of the test questions in
proper English, much less any
non-English language, even more much less do so with precision like “form a
noun denoting the masculine agent from” and “Give the rules for the
Subjunctive…”
And the Harvard
applicant, 90% of the time, can answer these questions in two different
languages, in addition to English. Educationists have removed foreign language
from our childhood education, as well as English, and replaced this knowledge
with…nothing.
There’s more to the
test than language skills, however.
Bound the
basin of the Po, the Mississippi, of the St. Lawrence.
--yes,
that’s a question from the exam. Try phrasing that as a “fill in the bubble”
question, which is how our students demonstrate knowledge today.
Next comes some history
and geography. Again, there’s a focus on ancient history, and I’ll concede
perhaps this isn’t as important now as then. But, “man on the street” interviews
reveal most college students are deeply, deeply, ignorant of basic current
events, rudimentary geography, or even recent history. Our Educationists
have removed the old material of history and geography and replaced it
with…nothing.
Ok, so Education with
its highfalutin’ “new ways of learning” gobbledigoop has removed iffy stuff
like language skills, history, and current events. Maybe it covers the other
topics on the test?
Half the Harvard test
is mathematically related, knowledge that I firmly believe is worth knowing
because it stands the test of time. Again, Educationists have eliminated this
sort of knowledge in our public schools (I often dealt with students who, in
their first year of college, hadn’t taken a math class in 3 or more years), and
on our campuses (where degree programs often require 5% or less of the
coursework to be mathematically related).
One more time, it’s very
clear: Educationists have removed this material, mathematics, and replaced it
with…nothing.
I’m pleased to say that
most of my third year mathematics
students—i.e., specialized students who are dedicated--would do well on these
mathematical “entrance exam” questions…but I probably should point out about
half of those students were born in a different country than here (mathematical
knowledge is universal, after all).
Let’s look at some
specific questions:
“One meter
is 39.37 inches. Compute from this datum the value of 4 miles in kilometers.”
Some questions, like
the above, do require some local knowledge (not everyone on the planet knows
how many feet are in a mile), but most of the questions really are what used to
be high school level material, at least with a calculator. Granted, the Harvard
students didn’t have calculators…but 90% of them could answer the questions all
the same. Today’s students can’t answer those questions even with a calculator.
That sort of mathematical knowledge has been removed from the curriculum, and
replaced with—you guessed it!—nothing.
The next question
really caught my eye:
“Prove the
formula for the cosine of the sum of two angles.”
Some questions, like
the above, require a level of sophistication that simply no longer exists in
our kids. I had a “Prove this” question on a recent final exam, a far simpler
proof than the above, one I went over the day before the test. While I grant
not all my foreign students can prove things, not one “native born” American
could this year, and that’s a typical year. I catch heat for asking students,
advanced students, to prove things,
but there really was a time when an 18 year old could think clearly enough to
do that sort of thing, right out of high school. You can’t do that anymore, not
even when tossing in two years of college.
It is clear that
following Educationist ideas has led to the intellectual castration of our
children. They are no longer capable of reproducing rational thought.
“Find (a –
b)6 by the Binomial Theorem.”
The above question
really is high school level algebra (because I remember doing it in 10th
grade, and I wasn’t in an AP class)…but I wouldn’t dare ask that in a so-called
“College Algebra” course today. I do ask something comparable in a 3000 level course,
however, and most students can do it. Thanks to all that Educationist teaching, it takes two years of
specialized coursework in higher education to match what a general high school
graduate could do in the 19th century.
Does this really sound
like we’ve improved our teaching methods? Let me state clearly the takeaway
from the Harvard entrance exam of over 150 years go:
Education as a field has devoted over a century to the study of
teaching human beings. We’ve applied the methods of Education to our kids, and
now we’re much, much, worse off than if we had done nothing.
Two questions keep
coming up as I look at this 19th century test, and consider tests of
today. How much evidence do we need to understand that Educationists have done
absolutely nothing to improve the education of our children despite decades of
their “research”? How much evidence do we need to understand that Education as
a field of study has made education worse?
For me, the evidence
is very clear that Education departments of all forms should be shut down,
Education as a field should be reduced to the status of Phrenology, and
Educationists should be viewed with all the scorn of TV Preachers.
As a final shot: with
the Educationist track record of complete failure, why does anyone suspect
Common Core will really be an improvement? The Harvard test makes it very clear
that if we simply abandoned everything Education as a field has taught us and
reverted to 19th century teaching methods—including using teachers
completely untrained in Education--we’d be far better off.
I’ve been remiss in
asking a question of my gentle readers. Allow me to do so now:
Outside of Education,
what other field of knowledge has gone so far wrong that it’s obvious, if we
reverted to our 19th century level of understanding, we’d be much
better off? I’m hard pressed to come up with an answer, although Economics (at
least, Keynesian Economics) is a possibility.
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