Adleramma Day 6?: "The Defeat of Schools" by James L. Mursell

 Failure and/or Defeat

Apparently The Atlantic doesn't care if you just read their old stuff.

Summary:

Commentary: Despite a slightly different title, this appears to be the article Adler referenced (the quote is in there).

The Iowa test you may have taken evolved from Every-Pupil Testing Program. They hadn't invented good propaganda names like EVERY STUDENT SUCCEEDS NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND yet in 1939.

'Write a formula for the perimeter of the rectangle. Write a formula for the area of the rectangle. A dealer sold a suit of clothes for $42, making a profit of 20 per cent on the cost; how many dollars did he make?' Simple enough, one would say; yet genuine problems, because they require not the mere recalling of knowledge, but its application to the analysis of situations.

 I feel like the rectangle one is pretty basic recall. I did do the suit one correctly (it's 7).

I do think Mursell draws some questionable conclusions. He complains that students who passed high school chemistry, college chemistry, and both were at about the same level. But if both courses teach similar material, that doesn't really reflect anything other than curriculum overlap. He does poke fun at Latin education a bit, which seems to have been a hobby of education writers in this era. He does discount the value of learning a language to a level below "mastery". He doesn't really define mastery, and I think there's probably some value in the process of learning/practicing a language, to say nothing of learning the basics of being able to shop, ask for directions, etc. even if you can't read a novel or carry on a full conversation or whatever.

In this day of encyclopaedias, World Almanacs, and public libraries, a large stock of miscellaneous information for ready reference does not seem particularly vital. Even professional scholars can and do look up specific data when and as needed. It is far more important to know where to look for facts, and what to do with them when found, than to be able to produce them from under one's hat at a moment's notice. 

Look, just replace libraries with smartphones and it's just like today!

He complains that no one reads for pleasure, as people do today. I wasn't able to find firm numbers back to the 40s, but the number of people who read a book in 1940, but the number hasn't changed much (~55%) since the 80s (depending on the survey, the spread was pretty wide even in the same year on different sources). It's nice to know we haven't actually become a nation of illiterate dullards, or at least not any worse.

Overall, besides the style, this article sounds like 100 that are written every year, even today. I've talked a little before about how I find that comforting. People have had the same complaints about education, society, etc. for 100+ years. By most measures, life has improved for most people in those 100 years. Therefore, if we're failing, we're failing succesfully.

On the topic, I think the biggest issue in education is that we don't do a good job of defining what we actually want/need kids to learn or hold them accountable for it. (Mursell eventually gets around to something along these lines, though his solution is the elimination of curriculum altogether. I think that some base universal level have value.) Curriculum and standards are a hodgepodge between federal, state, and local, get rewritten seemingly at random (and not always finished when they do), and don't necessarily reflect the needs of students/society or an effective progression. Then we may or may not actually check to see if they learned whatever they were supposed to learn before shuttling them off to the next grade of stuff that they may or may not use or understand. 

We've spent decades supposedly raising the standard (EVERY KID NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO GO FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO A BACHELOR'S DEGREE!) but all we really do is drag down the middle by forcing the kids at the bottom "up" in the name of whatever the buzzword of the year for passing kids through is, instead of just admitting that some kids aren't (and may not need to) going to get past a middle school level in some areas. I would love everyone in the world to be able to get a well rounded and high level education, but it's not possible today (if ever). We'd be better off if we established a real minimum foundation (of things with universal value), made sure students actually reached it, and then let them hop off to apprenticeships or whatever is appropriate for them. And if they couldn't (assuming that floor was set to somewhere around 9th grade, as it seems to unofficially be) it should be okay for them to repeat, since they'd still have a couple years since they were "scheduled" to leave anyway.