"Is Our Children Learning?"

The title of this blog is a direct quote from our illustrious leader, George W. Bush. It highlights a growing problem that I face everyday in my classroom, and I don't know why...ARE children getting dumber?

I know that is a harsh way to put it, but I encounter, everyday, students who graduated from Folsom High School and other high schools who can't pick out the noun in a sentence. They can't understand why I label "While I was outside." as a fragment sentence. One just wrote a paragraph, after we had read an excerpt from "The Diary of Anne Frank", about the black woman named Anne Frank who tried to ride the bus back in the days when all white people owned black people. Where is this coming from, and why is it happening?

While I forsee a future of students failed by the "No Child Left Behind" policies, the students I have now shouldn't yet be products of that terrible program. So what has happened? I would like to be able to, in this blog, pin-point the reason, but I don't know quite what it is. I know some people want to blame families in which both parents work, but that isn't fair. My parents both worked, but they made it a priority to help me with my homework. I do think that the lack of parent support for many kids is a major contributing factor, but there has to be more. The "No Child Left Behind" policy has established a trend of appealing to the lowest common denominator. If we set our standards low, then more kids will reach them. Therefore, lower standards lead to lower students. I think that is a big contributing factor.

But my biggest concern is the way America treats education - it just doesn't make it a priority the way Asian and European countries do. When I was in high school, many students were encouraged to do well in school only in order to maintain their status on a sports team. All through school, the students who were smart and answered questions in class were ostercized. I see that still amongst my college students. Even in politics, if a politician is intelligent, he/she is considered "elitest." Intelligence is considered pretentious and those with it are snobs or think they are better than everyone else. When did intelligence become a flaw to be avoided? As actor John Cleese recently said in an interview about choosing a country's leader, "I don't want someone I want to drink a beer with; I want someone I know is smarter than me." I couldn't agree more.

But what do you think? Do you think that with each passing generation, American children (and eventually American adults) are becoming dumber? Granted, I am making generalizations, but they are based on observations I, and my fellow college instructors, make everyday.