Are you sure you really remember your curriculum? If you were like me in high school, you remember mostly what you want to remember, or what your brain selectively allows you to remember. I think we'd need to actually see our old text books to know what was really in them, or hear our teachers now, as adults, and possibly hear them with a tape recorder, to know what they were really saying. I know I rarely read the assignments I was supposed to read in high school (which is typical of high school students).
Most adults can't do the math they were taught in high school either, that doesn't mean they weren't taught it (just imagine a pollster going out to find someone in Walmart who can factor a quadratic equation, or use the distance formula). Remember, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
I'm not picking on you- but the impulse to bash the schools is one I think we need to examine. It's not as if you are the only one. I've read here several times (from authors other than you) that the schools don't teach American history (for example)- and that simply isn't the case. Americans do seem intellectually lazy to me, but you can hardly blame the schools for that- who are our heroes? Not Nobel scientists, not literary figures, not doctors, or great philosophers, no, our heroes are TV personalities, sports figures, and - as you say- political caricatures (AKA partisan radio and TV hosts) that spew gross generalizations, and pretend they are talking politics. |
