Are Americans really this uneducated?

[SirTristram]

I don't even need to read the thread... the answer is YES! only canadians are smart j/k

[Vaskez]

Originally posted by Azred: Vaskez, many Americans still refer to the Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia. [img]graemlins/dontknowaboutyou.gif[/img] jak se mas? dam si cerny pivo, prosim!

I don't know any Czech...although isn't "pivo" beer? Damn I don't actually know which year the Czech Republic and Slovakia became independant countries *shame on me*

[Djinn Raffo]

Actually SirTristam (I know you were joking!!!! but) i read another sites article on the same poll and Canadians did quite poorly as well.

Here it is.

From the article:
"Young adults in Sweden, Germany and Italy ranked highest, answering about 70 percent of questions correctly, followed in descending order by France, Japan and Britain. Young Canadians, Americans and Mexicans gave the right answer on fewer than half the questions, the survey found."

[ 11-20-2002, 07:36 PM: Message edited by: Djinn Raffo ]

[Azred]

Originally posted by Vaskez: I don't know any Czech...although isn't "pivo" beer? Damn I don't actually know which year the Czech Republic and Slovakia became independant countries *shame on me*

Yes, "pivo" is beer.
The Velvet Revolution happened in 1989 (I saw it on TV) and was a direct result of both the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the events in Tiananmen Square.
No shame on you, by the way--we can't all know everything. [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]

[Lord of Alcohol]

I read this today in Us & World news report magazine, which I subscribe to. I looked it up an viola' here it is-

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/0...5textbooks.htm

Remaking history
The latest skirmish in the Texas textbooks wars could decide what kids will read across the nation
BY MARY LORD

What would you call a history textbook that highlights the bravery of African-American sailor Dorie Miller at Pearl Harbor but leaves out Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen? How about an economics text whose cover shows the male statues atop the New York Stock Exchange looking remarkably, er, clothed? Texas has a word for them: approved. And books like these could be coming soon to a classroom near you.


Last week, after months of line-by-line scrutiny and impassioned public debate, the state board of education selected the history and social studies texts it would buy for its 4.2 million public-school pu-pils. Because Texas accounts for a hefty 8 percent of America's $4.5 billion textbook market, whatever flies in the Lone Star State usually lands on desks nationwide. Winning Texas "is the first step to becoming a bestseller," says Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, a New York-based nonprofit research group. Only California, largest of the 22 "adoption states" (where textbooks are approved on a statewide rather than local basis), spends more, but it doesn't vote on books for the crucial high school market.

Critics say the heated politics behind the Texas textbook wars end up shortchanging American schoolchildren. Top sellers don't necessarily make riveting reading. That's because the selection process too often forces publishers to sanitize content and avoid words or concepts that might offend "a score of heavy-duty, aggressive special-interest groups," contends Sewall.

"Pernicious." Each side of the controversy has its pet peeves. Traditionalists want democracy and free enterprise presented more favorably, while progressives lobby for more representation of minorities and women. Meanwhile, creationists object to passages referring to glaciers sculpting the Earth millions of years ago. Add the dates, facts, and eye-catching charts mandated by state curriculum standards, and what emerges from this "pernicious" process, says former Oxford University Press President Byron Hollinshead, is "a lot of self-censorship among publishers" and glitzy textbooks that "are totally unreadable."

During the Texas review process, no point seemed too tiny to fight over. Texas education board President Grace Shore deemed the assertion that 50,000 women worked as prostitutes in the Old West inappropriate for a high school history text. One reviewer quibbled with a phrase saying the Senate "cleared" President Bill Clinton after the House impeached him (he is found "not guilty" in the corrected text). Hispanic citizens lobbied for new passages about Mexican defenders of the Alamo. Result: protesters on both sides decrying political correctness and textbook censorship.

Texas officials defend the adoption process, particularly the public's right to weigh in. "We welcome it," says Robert Leos, senior director of textbook administration at the Texas Education Agency. He maintains that the college professors, teachers, and ordinary citizens who gave their input helped improve texts, whether by elaborating on multicultural themes or spotting factual errors. What's more, the agency sent a letter to publishers warning against altering content to please outside groups.

But education historian Diane Ravitch thinks it's time to abandon the adoption system entirely. Attempts to mollify all sides only create textbooks that "in almost every subject are awful," she says. Her forthcoming book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, details her charges and includes a 55-page glossary of prohibited words. Among them: "slave" (replace with "enslaved person") and "sophisticated" (banned in reference to religion). "The adoption process gives immense power to small pressure groups," concludes Ravitch. "The only way to stop that is to get rid of the process itself" and let teachers choose their own textbooks.

That may not help much, however, for subjects like social studies; 4 in 5 of the nation's middle and high school social studies teachers neither majored nor minored in history. No wonder American students score lower on history tests than in any other subject–including math. Fewer than half of high school seniors demonstrated even basic knowledge of U.S. history on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress. Now there's a fact for the textbook warriors to chew on.


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Heck hath no fury: John Leo on the censorship of school books and tests for fear of offending some students. (6/17/02)
Know much about science books?: Many are rife with errors, says new study (1/22/01)

Its not only ignorance in geography thats going on, it ignorance altogether. ~LoA

[Lord Starshadow]

I think it's a case of PC (political correctness) gone wild. People are getting offended over every little thing. I'm all for including multicultural issues into the history books, but why take out other things? It shouldn't be considered a bad thing that the children will have to read a little bit more, in my opinion.

[johnny]

Originally posted by Vaskez: On a funny note, I was watching The Weakest Link game show the other day and a question put to a woman was: "What is the capital of the Czech Republic?" Now in my opinion all adult Europeans should know this but not only did she not get the correct answer she said: "Croatia" !! I was ROFLMAO for 5 mins Yes the capital of a country is another country. Indeed.

OMG, what was the reply of the redheaded mistress ? I bet she really came down on her, didn't she ?

[Animal]

I think the same could be said in many countries, not just the US and it's a shame. I don't feel that children spend nearly as much time in school as they need, to get a good education and the time they do spend in school very little is learned with regard to world affairs, but I don't think any one group can be pinpointed as the culprit. Lack of funding, kids who don't want to learn, teachers who don't want to teach and parents who are not interested enough in their childs education all add up to bad news.
I find it necessary myself to supplement my daughters learning with extra activities and work at home in the hopes that she will learn to educate herself in time and not rely on a failing school system.

[Rokenn]

For all of you bashing this study, saying it's skewed, has hidden agendas, blah, blah, blah. You may want to note that this study was done after the US had started bombing Afganistan. With the staturation coverage of the 'War on Terror' how is it possible that so many draft age men and woman (remember they were asking adults here). Could not find Afgansitan on a map?

Also an interesting tidbit I heard on the radio on the way home about this. Over 50% of the wrong answers from American young adults place New York west of the Mississippi.

On the bright side we did do the best on identifing what El Nino is...

[Azred]

re: textbooks in Texas. We go through this every year. All sorts of groups fighting to get what they think of as "subersive", "derogatory", or "not politically correct" out of the books while wanting to add their own versions of events back in. Like I said earlier, this is why I will personally be presenting to TJ that for which Sergeant Friday always asked--just the facts.
I have never seen any statistics, but I am certain that the percentage of parents who read their children's textbooks is quite small. I know many parents don't have the time, but I will find the time to do so.

[img]graemlins/laugh3.gif[/img] I especially like the one about clothing the statues. What will they do in the art classes I wonder? Put a robe over Michelangelo's David or some such nonsense.... [img]graemlins/dontknowaboutyou.gif[/img] It all fairly reeks of censorship to me. [img]graemlins/idontagreeatall.gif[/img]