Subject:
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Re: Q. Where is the USA? A. You are standing on it!
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 21 Nov 2002 21:46:17 GMT
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Viewed:
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969 times
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Duq wrote:
>
> Maybe if americans would concentrate more on geography and less on Britney
> Spears they'd get their 'precision bombing' right the next time...
> These surveys are not designed to make american kids look stupid. They're
> just made to test general knowledge. I must admit I couldn't name each US
> state with its capital, but at least I know where the US are, and I wouldn't
> mistake India for Africa on a map...
> As for the beer commercials: The Budweiser frogs win.
One thing which makes me tend not to trust these education surveys is
that in the US, almost every child goes through high school, and a huge
percentage go to college. In other countries, starting somewhere around
the high school age (or even before), children start being classified as
to whether they are college bound, or not. If these education surveys
are only looking at the higher education path schools in the other
countries, then the survey is completely useless to compare against the
US.
Another thing which tends to make me discount these surveys is that many
things while people feel they are important to the whole world simply
aren't. I don't need to know the capitals of the states on a day to day
basis (in fact, many of them are only significant because they are a
state capital - something I haven't totally got used to having grown up
in Massachusetts, and lived 12 years in North Carolina - two states
where the state capitals are significant cities, now I need to
concentrate to remember the capital of Oregon [though it helps that it
shares a name with a modestly significant town/city in both MA and NC]).
Geography and knowing something about other countries is also probably
much more important to most of the rest of the world.
On the other hand, I am concerned when I encounter a cashier who doesn't
grasp mathematics enough to realize that something is wrong when a small
bag of groceries rings up to $1000. Though I haven't actually had that
many problems (and I'm thinking that they may have been all during the
time of extremely low unemployment where the service industry would hire
anyone with a pulse). Actually, these days, it's more often that I
question a total because I added wrong.
What I would rather see though is something which could evaluate the
ability of people to learn and research. The actual learning I got from
college is mostly useless, but what was important was learning how to
learn and research. It also helps to learn a bit of common sense and how
to estimate. The funny thing is that I probably learned more from my
hobbies than from my courses (for example, most of my programming skill
was developed writing programs for gaming, and I did a lot of research
for gaming - I probably spent more research time in my college library
on gaming than on coursework). I even taught myself multiple integration
because I was trying to solve a gaming problem (and I think that turned
out good because my Calc II professor was terrible - when we got to
multiple integration in class, I listened long enough to learn that
multiple integration was the name for what I had taught myself, and
promptly ignored the rest of the lecture).
On the other hand, the store clerk really doesn't need to know that much
about research.
Frank
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