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Practical Science Education
My wife likes Chick-fil-A chicken. Just bought some for tonight. I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and picked up the potato salad she likes behind the deli counter. Asked for a pint instead of pointing to a container size, which they usually have on display. The high schooler, or perhaps community college student, said she didn’t know what that meant.
The next customer in line, a generation younger than me, looked quizzically. After asking her to show me the small container, and after not understanding why, she acquiesced. She pulled out the small container and said, “This is a one pound container”. The “next in line” woman said that was a pint container. I added that their large container is a quart. While filling my container “next in line” said to me, “I guess they don’t teach things like that anymore.” I got my potato salad and left.
Imagine a high schooler or community college student not being taught the difference between volume and weight. The label on my potato salad said 1.18 lbs. No concept of density and its relationship to volume. No connection. It says a lot about our educational system. It says a bunch about our ability to compete with other countries who do teach fundamentals.
Published in Education
There a plenty of bad teachers, bad parents, and bad students out there. And yet somehow the number of students getting 4.0 grades at my old college has increased 20 or 30 fold.
Maybe it’s because the college went coeducational. I guess men are less academically disciplined or are just not that smart as a group.
There is also the impact on professors of the influence student reviews have come to have, for this and recent pampered generations. Give too many Cs or any Fs, and the reviews will be brutal. That actually affects promotion, retention, tenure, and all the rest.
IOW, the inmates have a significant say in the academic asylum.
FIFY
We live in a country were it is hard to prosperous. Lots of people with college degrees cannot find good employment. What is going to happen with 30 million illegal immigrants that are poorly educated and don’t speak English? I get that people needing servants like Pelosi and people running meat processing plants and people managing government programs benefit from millions of low-skill workers, but the folks working and paying taxes are hurt a lot. It is not sustainable.
What is the business model of the college? That’s your answer.