Ben Feller
BreitbartFri, 20 Jan 2006 12:00 UTC
WASHINGTON - Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
That means they could not 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.
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.
"It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they're not going to be able to do those things," said Stephane Baldi, the study's director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research organization.
Most students at community colleges and four-year schools showed intermediate skills, meaning they could perform moderately challenging tasks. Examples include identifying a location on a map, calculating the cost of ordering office supplies or consulting a reference guide to figure out which foods contain a particular vitamin.
There was brighter news.
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.
Also, compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching and using information from texts and documents.
"But do they do well enough for a highly educated population? For a knowledge-based economy? The answer is no," said Joni Finney, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent and nonpartisan group.
"This sends a message that we should be monitoring this as a nation, and we don't do it," Finney said. "States have no idea about the knowledge and skills of their college graduates."
The survey examined college and university students nearing the end of their degree programs. The students did the worst on matters involving math, according to the study.
Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills.
Baldi and Finney said the survey should be used as a tool. They hope state leaders, educators and university trustees will examine the rigor of courses required of all students.
The survey showed a strong relationship between analytic coursework and literacy. Students in two-year and four-year schools scored higher when they took classes that challenged them to apply theories to practical problems or weigh competing arguments.
The college survey used the same test as the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, the government's examination of English literacy among adults. The results of that study were released in December, showing about one in 20 adults is not literate in English.
On campus, the tests were given in 2003 to a representative sample of 1,827 students at public and private schools. The Pew Charitable Trusts funded the survey.
It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Comment: Comment: Ah yes! The "Dumbing Down of America." This has been going on for the past 30 to 50 years and every now and then a voice crying in the wilderness brings it up, but they are shut down by benevolent government that sought to "democratize" education. What that really meant was taking everything to the lowest common denominator. Studies were reduced to the level of the least competent students and the bright ones were left to rot. That's typical for an emerging pathocracy. As we noted just the other day, Pathocrats come along with "high sounding ideals" such as Dubya's "No Child Left Behind" plan which, only later, turn out to have hidden meaning in the fine print. Instead of actually helping education, the bill was designed to create a database of cannon fodder - America's children - to send off to die in foreign wars of aggression. This is an example of a "paramoralism" writ large. "No Child Left Behind" sounds so benign and even benevolent when you are thinking about education. But, in the end, "No Child Left Behind" means something quite different, though the wording is quite precise. It means just that: no child will be left in America when the wars are finished.
As for the "dumbing down" process, that is precisly why the Neocons can get away with passing such a horrendous act off on the American people. It is not just the society that has been dumbed down, the leaders also suffer in this crisis. Andrew Lobaczewski writes:
Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies
and turned them into caricatures of themselves
. This occurred as a result of the
participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.[
]
The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a new class within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the others, i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man. ...
Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down.
Any leadership position - down to village headman and community cooperative mangers, not to mention the directors of police units, and special-services police personnel, and activists in the pathocratic party - must be filled by individuals whose feeling of linkage to such a regime is conditioned by corresponding psychological deviations, which are inherited as a rule. However, such people become more valuable because they constitute a very small percentage of the population. Their intellectual level or professional skills cannot be taken into account, since people representing superior abilities with the requisite psychological deviations - are even harder to find. [...]
If the many managerial positions of a government are assumed by individuals deprived of sufficient abilities to feel and understand most other people and who also have deficiencies as regards technical imagination and practical skills - faculties indispensable for governing economic and political matters - this must result in an exceptionally serious crisis in all areas, both within the country in question and with regard to international relations.
Within, the situation shall become unbearable even for those citizens who were able to feather their nest into a relatively comfortable modus vivendi.
Outside, other societies start to feel the pathological quality of the phenomenon quite distinctly. Such a state of affairs cannot last long. One must then be prepared for ever more rapid changes, and also behave with great circumspection.
After such a system has lasted several years, one hundred percent of all the cases of essential psychopathy are involved in pathocratic activity; they are considered the most loyal...
Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally, whether in economics, culture, science, technology, administration, etc.
Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything....The phenomenon of pathocracy matures during this period: an extensive and active indoctrination system is built, with a suitably refurbished ideology constituting the vehicle of Trojan horse for the process of pathologizing the thought of individuals and society. The goal is never admitted: forcing human minds to incorporate pathological experiential methods and thought patterns, and consequently accepting such rule. ...
[At a certain point, when normal people begin to realize that they have been duped], a new phenomenon occurs: separation between the pathocrats and the society of normal people. The latter have an advantage as regards talent, professional skills, and healthy common sense. They therefore hold certain cards. The pathocracy finally realizes that it must find some modus vivendi or relations with the majority of society: After all, somebody's got to do the work for us. ...
Goaded by their character, such people thirst for [power] even though it would conflict with their own life interest
They do not understand that a catastrophe would ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.
[Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Ph.D. (psychology); Political
Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes]
I fully agree with this article. Most of our students lack skills to do all assignments they have as homework and study well. But I think that there is a teacher's problem. When the teacher cannot involve students into studying his lesson, the conclusion comes on it own: he cannot educate children good. They usually refer to [Link] or any other services to get assistance with their college papers and home tasks as they cannot do it by themselves. May be they miss some information in the class during the lesson or the teacher explains it badly or they have no desire to do it at all. But all this issues come from the teacher first and then from the students' side.