As a teacher in the 21st century, I see this first hand every day.  Too many students have no concept of the importance of learning about American and world history.  With our high tec world, they are too busy playing X-Box, texting their friends, or updating their facebook pages to be bothered with studying.

I must also say that this is not meant to be a blanket statement.  There are so many students in our educational system that work hard and acheive both inside and outside of the classroom.  But it seems as though the gap between our honors students and our regular students is increasing.

This brings me to an article that I just read entitled “US officials flunk test of American history, economics, civics.”  According to the article, 2,500 people were randomly selected to take this test, including some self-identified public officials.

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.

Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

“It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI’s civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned,” said Josiah Bunting, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board at ISI.

Unbelievable, is it not?  This is somewhat me going off on a tangent at this point, but something that makes me angry is when public officials, celebrities, or the media judge our students’ scores on standardized tests with those of other countries throughout the world and then tell us that we are failing our students in the classroom.  What they always fail to mention is that the United States is one of the few countries that is legally and morally obligated to educate all of its citizens.  In so many countries, only the students deemed worthy and able to continue on to post-secondary studies are educated.  It would be hard for anyone to compete with that!  All things being equal, I think we do a pretty good job in this country educating our students, but there is always certainly room for improvement.

Tagged as: Education