I really get tired of people saying today’s youth are a bunch of shiftless, uneducated mental midgets. Newsflash: older generations have always said that about the younger generation – going back to the ancient Greeks. Your parents and grandparents said it about you. Yet, 60 years ago, less than 50% of the population completed high school. Most got jobs starting around age 16 or 17.
It is just so tiresome to hear the same disparaging remarks made by every generation of those that follow – it is the height of arrogance, that says “we were the pinnacle of human achievement, and none before or after are our match”.
I taught high school many years. Just between when I wrote my standardized exams in Grade 12, and when I was teaching the same material not a decade later, the bar was raised considerably – we kept banks of old diploma exams for practising on, and just a few years later, the test was more advanced, demanded higher levels of comprehension, analysis, and application of concepts than what I had written – I could compare the contemporary exam and the one I had written side-by-side. And another decade and a half further along, the bar has been raised a couple more times. High school students now learn material that used to belong to first and even second year college and university courses. Educators and students alike have had to attain rising, not falling standards.
If anything, where the system fails is in (seemingly) saying that everyone should have some sort of post-secondary education, when for many it is ill-suited to their skills and abilities – so that in our colleges there are many who have reached their “Peter principle” level in their educational career. But then, there aren’t jobs, good or otherwise for so many of them, so colleges and universities often are serving as a warehouse for youth awaiting real-world opportunity.
I really get tired of people saying today’s youth are a bunch of shiftless, uneducated mental midgets. Newsflash: older generations have always said that about the younger generation – going back to the ancient Greeks. Your parents and grandparents said it about you. Yet, 60 years ago, less than 50% of the population completed high school. Most got jobs starting around age 16 or 17.
It is just so tiresome to hear the same disparaging remarks made by every generation of those that follow – it is the height of arrogance, that says “we were the pinnacle of human achievement, and none before or after are our match”.
I taught high school many years. Just between when I wrote my standardized exams in Grade 12, and when I was teaching the same material not a decade later, the bar was raised considerably – we kept banks of old diploma exams for practising on, and just a few years later, the test was more advanced, demanded higher levels of comprehension, analysis, and application of concepts than what I had written – I could compare the contemporary exam and the one I had written side-by-side. And another decade and a half further along, the bar has been raised a couple more times. High school students now learn material that used to belong to first and even second year college and university courses. Educators and students alike have had to attain rising, not falling standards.
If anything, where the system fails is in (seemingly) saying that everyone should have some sort of post-secondary education, when for many it is ill-suited to their skills and abilities – so that in our colleges there are many who have reached their “Peter principle” level in their educational career. But then, there aren’t jobs, good or otherwise for so many of them, so colleges and universities often are serving as a warehouse for youth awaiting real-world opportunity.