What do you think you know?
Beginning where I left off: A fairly consistent feature of my writing a weekly column over the years has been my failure to finish a topic with a promise which could have been “To be continued next week.” Next week would arrive without the thought ever crossing my mind again.
That is not the case this week. Last Saturday’s column involved some practical issues of education. The last paragraph described the actions of one Jaime O’Neill, who had taught for decades in community colleges. The students in his English class were of ages 18-54 and all had finished one quarter of college work. The professor wasn’t concerned so much with the lack of technical knowledge or complex facts on the part of his students, but that so many of the general “facts” the students felt they knew were more than inaccurate.
O’Neill devised a test of 86 questions for the 26 students in his Class. In my column’s last sentence I said, “I now share a few of the results with you.” This is one of the rare occasions I tend to business. It was the declaration of several readers who told me over the weekend that they wanted to know those results. My friend, Jack Proctor, confronted me with that task Sunday morning when I saw him at church. I now set forth some (not all) of what has been termed “A teacher’s startling discovery.” Professor O’Neill termed the results of this test as “…a sampling of what they knew that just ain’t so:” How ignorant can one be? Here are responses by students to the questions of a general nature. First in the creative area:
Many declared Ralph Nader to be a baseball player.
It was determined Charles Darwin invented gravity. Many “knew” Christ was born in the 16th century or at a later date.
The musician Neil Simon wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Many of the students labeled J. Edgar Hoover as a 19th century president. Further, “The students were equally creative in their understanding of geography. Let us look at a few inaccurate “facts” his students knew.
Cape Town is in the United States and Beirut is in Germany (Answer: South Africa and Lebanon); Camp David is in Israel; Cologne is in the Virgin Islands. Good old Ireland came in for its share of applied ignorance when many of the students listed the North Ireland capital as variously located in Egypt, Germany, Belgium and Italy.
The above is not the worst of the answers: Students transported Leningrad to Jamaica and placed Montreal in Spain. An interesting fact is the history of the famous city of Leningrad. We all should be familiar with the impact of the extended siege of Leningrad by the Germans beginning in 1941. You won’t hear the name Leningrad often in the report of current news. In 1914, the name Saint Petersburg was changed to Petrograd and in 1924 changed to Leningrad. It was the more recent change in 1991 that the name was changed back to Saint Petersburg; it is a modern and attractive city today. An observation in conclusion: Professor O’Neill concluded with this observation: “And so it went. Most students answered incorrectly far more than they answered correctly. Several of them wrote, ‘I don’t know’ 86 times, or 80 times, or 56 times.”
O’Neill declared the students did not like the test although he had made it clear it would not be graded. He said, “They did not like their ignorance exposed.” He was greatly bothered by one students comment of, “Oh, I get it; It’s like Trivial Pursuit.”
On a local observation of ignorance (not knowing): It continually amazes me that intelligent and informed Gordon Countians believe Summerville is North and West of Calhoun. West it might be but north it definitely is not.