The New York Times: How Low can they Go?
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You'll get no argument from me if you want to contend that American young people could be better educated. All I need to convince me is their strong support for vapid, empty, unqualified presidential contender/cult leader Barack Obama. Indeed, if rumors of their stupidity are true, then their support seems to confirm Obama as ignorance personified. The carcinogenic influence of teacher unions and bureaucracy and political correctness is definitely something we should address.
No argument, that is, unless you are the New York Times. Then I'll call you a far bigger idiot than the worst of those you purport to criticize.
The Times recently ran an article about a study by a weird new group called "Common Core" which had published the results of a survey of 17-year-old Americans on questions of history and literature. Amazingly, the Times article didn't provide links to either the group's website or the survey report. ABC News provided both in their story, and for good measure threw in an interactive feature with a sampling of the questions from the survey.
Neither one of these MSM outlets, however, seemed to have actually thought about the results they were reporting for even a few seconds. The Common Core report provides no baseline to the ability of American students to answer the questions it asked in the past, and it provides no baseline to how well teenagers from other places (Japan, Europe -- much less South America or the Middle East) are able to respond to such questions. Indeed, the author of the report himself states: "There is no current reliable national measure of how much students know about history and literature." ABC gives you this quote, not the NYT. In other words, it's totally meaningless except insofar as your subjective sensibilities might be offended.
And, if you read the Times article, what you will find is that the reason the paper doesn't care about any of this is that it's using the article as an opportunity to launch yet another attack on President Bush, this time savaging his "No Child Left Behind" program -- while at the same time conveniently implying that the the Times is failing so miserably not because it sucks but because Americans are too stupid to appreciate it. This appears to be a running theme of propaganda at the Times these days.
The quality of the anecdotal evidence, if you care about such things, is pathetic, and indicates that the report's authors are at least as ignorant as the kids they purport to survey. They're making a mountain out of a grain of sand.
According to the report (see page 11), you aren't a "literate" 17-year-old America unless you can identify Chaucer, Oedipus and Odysseus. According to it, the Bible is literature, and you aren't literate unless you know who Job was. The report declares that Ralph Ellison is among the very greatest titans of American literature, so if you're not instantly conversant with him, you're a failure.
Now, to be sure, the report did ask a few questions about literature that we might agree should be within a high-school graduate's America literature repertoire: 1984, the Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird and Leaves of Grass. That's it. Six questions out of 11 on literature were of this type, barely half -- I question whether that's even a statistically significant sample. More than half the respondents were able to correctly identify six out of six on these questions, and three out of six were identified correctly by more than 70% of respondents. Amazingly, there's no mention of the work of America's Nobel Laureates for fiction, such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Pearl Buck or Toni Morrison.
As for history (see page seven), twice as many questions were asked as for literature (apparently, the authors think history is twice as important as literature, a proposition that seems dubious on their own terms). One-third of the questions were answered correctly by over 80% of respondents and only six questions resulted in accuracy of less than 70%. Unless we expect the "average" score to be above average, 70% is exactly what we should expect, isn't it?
What were the questions where accuracy was lacking? They asked students to place World War I and the Civil War in the proper date range, to name the purpose of the Federalist Papers and to place freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights as opposed to the Constitution generally, and to identify Joseph McCarthy and the Renaissance.
Now, to be sure, it's important to know that Americans strongly resisted unification after the Revolutionary War ended, and many years were needed to convince them to form a central government -- so strong was their antipathy to dictatorship. But I'd prefer to see students asked this question directly, rather than indirectly by means of reference to a long-haired manuscript it would be totally unreasonable to expect them to read at such a young age. Likewise, our students should know who McCarthy was, and they should know generally when the Civil War occurred. Less than 70% accuracy on these questions certainly indicates that there are areas where education could be improved. But it doesn't concern me much that students are bit weak in giving the date of World War I or that they are not familiar with the Renaissance, and the question about the Bill of Rights sounds almost like a trick. Freedom of speech wasn't actually guaranteed by federal law until the 20th Century and it was imposed by the Supreme Court just like desegregation. The Bill of Rights only protects Americans from federal encroachment upon freedom of speech, not encroachment by the states. Before students could be expected to know a fact like that, it would have to actually be present in the texts they are reading, and most of the time it isn't. I doubt that European students would be any more familiar with the date of the American civil war than our students are with World War I. Our students should certainly be taught to appreciate that Europe caused itself to burst into flames not once but twice in the space of less than 50 years, but I think that, too, is a more a problem of history books than students.
Given the wholesale fraud that's been documented occurring at the New York Times, the nation's so-called "paper of record" over the past few years, from Jayson Blair to the loathsome smear job on John McCain, one could hardly expect Americans reading it, of any age, to be conversant with the truth. Indeed, it could easily be argued that a more important step than educational reform might be for us to find ourselves a new POR. But it's doubtful we'll hear the Times editorializing or reporting about that any time soon.