| ▲ | tgv 11 hours ago | |||||||
> Times have changed. Yeah sure, but that's a platitude that doesn't warrant anything. > Students [...] aren't shallower or less educated than those [...]. Proof needed. You can't just say that. > I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. The tests and grading norms have changed. It's been shown that (in some countries), secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. Being born into a world of technology only makes you apt to using that technology. It doesn't make you smarter or provide you with more knowledge. As a counter anecdote: quite a few secondary school pupils know that there's an infinite number of primes, and that E=mc^2. However, they've got no clue at all to what that means or what it's good for. It's just factoids, not maths or physics. And in relation to the linked article, those excellent grades are irrelevant. And you even admit it. Young people don't read. Won't read. Can't read. Literature is pretty much doomed. Your cultural relativism doesn't assuage that. | ||||||||
| ▲ | seabass-labrax 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
> ...secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago. On its own, that isn't a particularly useful observation, because more than just the test has changed since that time. For instance, teachers who seek to help their pupils pass a test teach, to a greater or lesser extent, 'to the test'. Are the present-day students being taught to a test from four decades ago? This is just one of many factors which one would need to control for in order to accurately compare performance over time. Although there are certainly people who specialise in that research, I think it is more useful to ask what skills our present-day society needs, and work back from there. There are vanishingly few professions in which a knowledge of the number of primes, say, has any relevance. What do people need to know now, and what books should be read by students in order to learn it? | ||||||||
| ▲ | rixed 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
> secondary school pupils aren't able to pass maths and physics exams from 30 or 40 years ago But can pupils from 30 or 40 years ago pass today's exams? | ||||||||
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