Kids have been flunking these gocha tests for at least 30 years and the world has not fallen apart.

If it is the USA Today it must be true.

Internet? Think of the children.
Violent video games? Think of the children.
Porn? Think of the children!
History lessons? What're ya gonna do?

That said, I agree with @1, we were failing these tests when I was a kid and I have a hunch they've been failing since the mid-50s.

I only graduated from high school a year ago and that was standard required reading for everybody Freshman year! Even if you only read the back of the book you would get 5 right! Sheesh!

Kids have been flunking these gocha tests for at least 30 years and the world has not fallen apart.

What do you think the chances that W would have failed to know this stuff when he left boarding school? Maybe you should be a bit more concerned.

The problem is that NCLB is all about test-taking, and not about learning or education.

I never take the results of these seriously. Niether should you.

/P.S. Does SLOG not understand HTML underlining? I can get bold and italics to work...

Are those your answers?

So that's what you get. One can be a constructive contributor society while not knowing any of the things above.

So ask all the old farts questions relevant to today's teens, like who was the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, or the names of the two perpetrators in the Columbine school shootings, or what the Y2K problem was, and check their awareness.

i thinks so

When he left boarding school? I seriously doubt he could correctly answer most of these questions TODAY.

I mean, it's not like "No Child Left Behind" means "left behind smart people"...

BTW Y2K was more of a hype than a problem.

Yes We Can!

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-02-26-student-quiz_N.htm

Comment 29 never happened!

Whether Augusta is the capital of Maine or George III's mother; whether Walt Whitman smoked or wrote "Leaves of Grass"; whether Louis XVI suffered from phimosis or guillotining.

It's all in your thumbs. Dumb is the new smart. Celebrate your know-nothingness. Drink Lethe...it's the new Coke.

http://strix.org.uk/downloads/files/width400/lolz-you-fail.jpg

-George Santayana

a. What color was Washington's white charger?
b. After what famous baseball player was Lou Gehrig's disease named?
c. Railroad crossing, look out for the cars. Can you spell it without any R's?

1984 is the one that came true, ala Big Bush, Osama Goldstein, and so forth.

I got confused by the link to the test itself, which has different questions.

next time i'll write them down first.

And Columbus didn't try to discover America - he discovered the Carribean and was looking for China, so the question is triply lame.

@37 - Washington's horse was snowy, with hints of ecru; Babe Ruth gave Lou Gehrig his disease - fluids in the locker room or something similar - if you spell "it" with an R you get Rit dye - no longer very popular as people just hate dyeing.

And ST2.1 will be held in February.

A: In the ground. But they'll still complain about it for a couple of days.

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
*Ignorance is Strength*

The thread reveals utter arrogance about ignorance. who needs a basic understanding of world history and culture, anyway? who needs experience? Who needs rationalism?

In reality this is all a sign of declining hope, declining fortunes and an underlyign complete cynicism that is all the more dangerous as it is vehemently denied.

And if it weren't for my Adult Attention Deficit Disor

OH, LOOK! SHINY THING!

WTF?

Now I know who buys all those "Dummies" books.

After you've been out of high school a few years, you'll have seen this same old Civil War chestnut dusted off a few times, and then you'll realize this is just a canard used by somebody with an agenda.

Yeah, didn't think so.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they allow disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children now are tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

What's the matter with kids today?

How accurate is this? It seems that this report has more to do with a political agenda than anything else. That agenda, teach more liberal arts.

That's ok, but what is really lacking is a fundamental understanding of our government and legal system. Knowing who wrote a story for elite Victorian English people is nice, but not as important as knowing how to wade through our court system and government.

Americans know very little about civics, government and law. Folks have no clue how to find a law or even how to contact their government officials.

At a minimum, schools should show students where the legal statutes are located and how to read them, or how to contact their state senator. It isn't as difficult as people think, it's just not taught.

So who's this Ralph Emerson guy?

Who else but Americans could be this self-centered that nearly every question relates to their own history? From the sample questions listed, only two (the one relating to Hitler and the one relating to George Orwell) were from beyond North America.

I have heard that when Bush was elected, he had never traveled outside the states. If this is true, and if American history is the only history American kids are learning in schools, is it any wonder that the rest of the world is fed up?

No doubt, but I wanted to draw an apples to apples comparison. This was a test of high school kids, not middle aged heads of state, after all.

I HATE YOU WALT FREAKIN' WHITMAN... LEAVES OF GRASS MY ASS!!!!

Factoids:Critical Thinking::Giving a man a fish:Teaching a man to fish.

I of course knew all of the answers today, and would have at 17, too. I don't know how telling it is that so many kids missed the ones about 1984 and the Walt Whitman -- I wasn't assigned Whitman until junior year and 1984 was assigned only in AP English senior year -- but its sad that so many missed the history questions.

I'm also not sure if I think it's particularly worrisome that most teenagers didn't know what "Invisible Man" was about. I didn't read that until I was about 22 and my friend's father was so surprised that I'd never read it that he grabbed his own copy and made me take it.

All that being said, I'm working on a project about NCLB right now, and I could rant about it for hours on end.