Literacy Today: Why It's Worse Than Yesteryear

 

            Here's one that will make you shake your head, especially in light of the $8,000 per pupil per year that we're devoting in tax dollars to K-12 education these days:

 

            Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough (author of 1776, JOHN ADAMS and several more gems) says the curriculum that American schoolchildren had hundreds of years ago was better than what they are getting today.

 

            "It is a sad, sad, but true fact that the literacy rate in the state of Massachusetts in 1798 was higher than it is in 1998," McCullough has said.

 

            McCullough described the education of the founding generation 70 years before Massachusetts became the first state to fund elementary schools and to begin standardizing their curricula.

 

            The founders, he said, "were steeped in, soaked in, marinated in, the classics: Greek and Roman history, Greek and Roman ideas, Greek and Roman ideals. It was their model, their example."

 

            McCullough's conclusions are borne out by a 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research (AIR). It assessed the literacy of 1,800 graduating seniors from 80 randomly selected two- and four-year colleges and universities, and found that more than 50 percent have only the most basic literacy skills. That means they can't summarize the arguments in a typical newspaper editorial, for example.

 

            The same study reported that 20 percent of U.S. college students completing four-year degrees have only basic quantitative literacy skills. That means they are unable to estimate if their car has enough gas to get to the next gas station or to calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies.

            See www.air.org/news/documents/Release200601pew.htm

 

            The solution is obvious: we must return to the basics in education, especially the great classics of literature and traditional math instruction.

 

                The hope is that, as more people realize how damaging it is that today's schools snub the classics almost entirely,             opportunities for classical learning will increase. Even if that doesn't happen in public school classrooms, which are mired in anti-western civilization Political Correctness, then look for it to happen in private schools, homeschools and new niche-related "afterschools."