Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!usenix!peter From: peter@usenix.UUCP (Peter H. Salus) Newsgroups: comp.edu Subject: Re: CAN WE KNOW SO LITTLE? Old: Re: Lawsuits (and countersuits) Summary: Well, well, well... Keywords: ignorance, geography, education, learning, teachers,US,USA,foreign Message-ID: <160@usenix.UUCP> Date: 29 Jul 88 18:47:44 GMT References: <12230@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <12260@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <24100@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> Organization: Usenix Association Office, Berkeley Lines: 80 Bill is, of course right, we are a nation of ignoramuses. And so far as I can tell, the situation is one in which entropy wins and what I think of as civilization loses. I spent over 20 years as a professor and was (at various and sundry institutions in the US and Canada) a department chair, a divisional chair, associate dean, dean of Arts and Sciences, etc., until I became a drop-out. While education-bashing is currently in vogue, it is unarguable that both the elementary/secondary and the post-secondary systems have deteriorated over the past 25 years. My personal feeling is that this is the direct result of losing confidence in ourselves. In WWII and in Korea those of us who were alive were pretty damn certain just who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. In Vietnam (and since) this has been far from clear. Furthermore, we can see those evil agressor nations of 40 years ago as the economic victors. Our sense of right and wrong being confused, our ability to deem and evaluate has decayed: in the 60s we weren't certain just what should/should not be required for a college degree -- so requirements disappeared. The culmination of this is the simultaneous lunacy of Stanford's revisionist great books and Secretary Bennett's attack on the new reading list. In the 70s, most North American school systems knew that it was more important for kids to acquire social skills (like smoking dope?) than to learn facts: so we moved kids ahead with their age-peers, without regard for acquisition of information or skills (like reading). Bill's sack-of-potatoes got his/her diploma through aspiration: you breathed for 12 years and got a piece of paper which no longer certified you could read, write, nor locate Colombia on a map (though you would know where to acquire its powdery export). Over the last decade, we have also become more conscious of the fact that not all discoveries were made by white men, not all literature was written by them, not all works of the performing or visual arts stem from them. And I think this is a good thing, for I read both Sappho and Wilson Harris (as well as Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Leopold Senghor and Simone de Beauvoir) and I enjoy L. Anderson as much as P. Glass and my wife and I own works by both A. and J. Albers. So what? Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot are as much a part of the 19th century English novel as Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Meredith. And students of American literature most likely read Emily Dickinson's verse more than they read Ralph Waldo Emerson's. As a cultural snob, I feel very strongly about this -- and about a lot of other stuff. But most importantly, I think we have an inverted educational structure: we pay our full professors (who hardly teach) quite well and our K-3 teachers (in whose hands are the minds of children acquiring the basic tools of reading and calculating) a pittance we wouldn't offer a receptionist or typist. (Of course, this is because the former are traditionally breadwinners with families and the latter are spinsters with fathers or brothers or married women earning extra funds -- the most recent surveys by NSF, NEA, etc., show that 70 years after winning the vote, women average 72% of men's salaries.) We pay our trash collectors and hairdressers better than those to whom we entrust the future (the children) and then we complain that they don't do a good job. If I went out and hired a $15/hour programmer, no one would think I'd get a wizard or guru. Why should I for $17,500/year? (Or, to take a real example, why should a senior special education teacher in Marin Co, CA, with a doctorate, hit *ceiling* at under $35K?) If our worst students go into education; and their worst students go into education; etc.; why do we wonder that in a few generations the system has deteriorated? Peter H. Salus Executive Director, USENIX Association (which takes no responsibility for my words or attitudes.)