Well, that was a mostly rhetorical question, as whenever Dr. Myers links something and says how bad it is, it's almost always precisely that bad. And the worst thing is that it's written by a journalism major.
Every paragraph in this article is stunningly stupid, so I just picked one at random to single out, and here it is:
The school system needs a reality check; most students aren't going to be mathematicians, historians, or chemists. So why do we have to take these classes? If students know at an early age what they want to do for their careers, then high schools should offer classes in that area. This would make me feel that the time I spent in the high-school classrooms wasn't a waste.
Here's why you have to take those classes, Ms. Perk: because not taking them, or taking them but not taking them seriously, leaves you an idiot. Pure and simple. And count me among those who believe that we should not be encouraging stupidity. Maybe this is too hard a concept for her to grasp, but one need not go into a field as a profession to find worth in studying it. I know chemists who have read Shakespeare. I work for a grocery store manager whose favorite writer is Hemingway, and another who has a Master's Degree in French.
Other problems arise from the unimaginably stupid notion (and, depressingly, an all-too-common one) that school should be geared only toward preparing students for their careers. Quick answers here, folks: how many people do you know who are still working in the fields they studied in college, if they ever worked in those fields at all? And how many of your collegemates knew, at the outset, what they were going to study and how many of them stuck with it all the way through to their careers? That "If students know what they wanna do" clause is a pretty big If indeed, but of course, Ms. Perk can't begin to comprehend that.
Like I wrote a few months back:
I think the real media bias is not to the liberal or to the conservative, but to the stupid.
This is the future of the media, folks. Ms. Perk, despite her complete lack of knowledge of the world or even curiosity about it, is going to be reporting it. This vacant head will be a source of information. Whether you're liberal or conservative, it can't be comforting to think that the "MSM" may be in the hands of people with heads as closed and empty as the Rubbermaid kitchen containers in my cupboards.
I remember reading Steve Allen's book Dumbth a few years back, and thinking, "Oh come now, it can't be that bad." Sadly, it can indeed. Being smart is no longer celebrated, being curious is no longer encouraged. And here's something depressing: this is an Iowan writing this shit. Iowa. The state that celebrates education on its statehood quarter, and rightfully so; a state where I lived for four years during my own college years and met only a handful of true idiots. Ms. Perk is unworthy of being an Iowan.
I mean, if this person is so loathe to crack a book or learn something new while in college, what is she going to do when she's out?
UPDATE: Here is another good response to this article, with this bit of insight:
That role of consumer, and its attendant attitude, are pretty important here. Stacey thinks she's purchased a degree. She's a consumer buying something. Sorry, that's not it. The consumer model is highly inappropriate for dealing with higher education. You aren't a consumer you're a student.
Exactly right. Just because attending college involves a sizeable transfer of money does not make getting a college degree like getting a pizza. You're not a customer paying for a specific result, you're a student paying for a set of resources. Blaming the school for your failure to learn changes nothing: the failure is yours.
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