The test fails the test
A couple of months ago a study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (article here) reported:
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent
That was even lower that the score of 49 percent for Americans overall who took the test.
So, being a curious fellow, I took the test myself, and got a score of 93.94 percent, and I was told that the monthly average when I took it was 78.1 percent. Apparently, Americans got 59.3 percent smarter since the test came out. Hmmm.
This got me thinking: Is my civic literacy really twice that of the average elected official in the US? That seems like a pretty odd thing to conclude, since I’m almost certain sure that I would be pretty lousy as a dog catcher, much less a high elected official. If a test that shows that I am more qualified to be an elected official than many elected officials, then surely there is something wrong with the test, right?
Signing on the dotted line
It is enough to make your head spin. Yet another article on on why we have to save penmanship. According to the article:
In Florida, handwriting was reinstated into Florida’s school standards in 2006, after educators became concerned that it was slipping away from classrooms. According to state guidelines, third graders must begin learning cursive, fourth graders must have legible writing and fifth graders must be fluent in the script.
And what is the most important reason for saving cursive writing?
Can you imagine being an adult and not being able to sign your name to a document?
Great. So now we’re spending instructional time over three years to teach kids to sign their name. Well, that’s certainly better than having them waste their time playing computer games….
The curse of penmanship
Yes, just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, a recent magazine article argues “In Defense of Penmanship” for continuing to teach children good penmanship in school.
The author, Kitty Burns Florey, starts by suggesting that even in the digital age, kids need to learn to write neatly:
Can’t we say goodbye and good riddance [to good handwriting]?
I was surprised to find that the answer is: Not so fast! By the end of my journey into the world of penmanship–from the Phoenicians to the Bic, from monks in their scriptoria to Bill Gates at the keyboard–I’d found plenty of evidence that handwriting is a skill that should be kept alive.
And what is the best of that “plenty of evidence”?
Kids certainly need to learn to type on a keyboard, but they also need legible handwriting–for taking tests, writing reports, working at the chalkboard. Many schools have adopted some version of technology for these tasks, but far more haven’t the resources for it. Children are judged by their handwriting; if they produce indecipherable chicken-scratching, a teacher will not be sympathetic.
That’s right, folks, it boils down to this: Kids need to learn good handwriting because schools are too poor to provide students with the right tools for writing.
More bad news for the correlation trolls
I’ve written before (here, here, and here) about the absurdity of blaming the rise of video games for cultural calamities like a decrease in attendance at National Parks that happen to take place over the same period of time. The problem is that correlation is not causation–or to put it in more simple terms, the fact that two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean one causes the other.
Now there is even more evidence that the explosion in the market for video games has not "dumbed down" our culture. Quite the contrary, in fact:
In 1999/2000, there were 24m visits to Britain’s biggest museums. In 2007/08, the figure was 40m. Between 1999 and 2001, Britain scrapped entry charges, so the increase is partly attributable to that. Still, it was a lot of people. And another factor is the popularity of blockbuster exhibitions, such as the Terracotta Army show at the British Museum–which are seldom free, so scrapping charges cannot be the sole explanation. In most of the great cities of the West, museums now dominate the lists of most popular tourist attractions. More people go to the Louvre each year than to the Eiffel Tower; in London, three museums–the Tate, the British Museum and the National Gallery–each attract more visitors than the London Eye.
Score another point for Steven Johnson.
