Luminiferous Æther

There’s an excellent article in Psychology Today from a few years ago entitled “A Nation of Wimps”. The author lays out, in unflinching detail, all the ways that we try to protect children and how it doesn’t make them strong, but makes them fragile.

From the article:

Maybe it’s the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path… at three miles an hour. On his tricycle. Or perhaps it’s today’s playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their kids to school, according to a recent survey. Consider the teacher new to an upscale suburban town. Shuffling through the sheaf of reports certifying the educational “accommodations” he was required to make for many of his history students

Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history.

[Click here to read “A Nation of Wimps”]

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Header photograph by Daquella manera

Ah geography, that long neglected subject of studying arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. The kids these days are horrible at it. Well, at least the American kids. According to CNN 87% of American high-schoolers can’t find Iraq on a map and 11% can’t find America.

Test your own geographic knowledge — or lack thereof — with this online killer quiz. Even for my native land, I scored only 85% (curse you, identical rectangle states!) and a slightly worse 72% for Europe (curse you, Eastern European countries! — except Bulgaria). As for the Africa quiz — I’ll only say that my first reaction was an embarrassing: ‘Holy shit! I didn’t realize there are 54 countries in Africa’.

[Click here to try the US quiz]

[Click here to try Europe quiz]

As if English education hadn’t been dumbed down enough, the government has awarded McDonald’s exam board status, meaning that the company can now start giving A-levels to students. For the non-English readers, A-levels are the school exams that children take at age 18. From the government’s perspective, McDonald’s is now on the same academic level as Cambridge. Starting soon, students will have to decide if they want to take A-levels in physics, chemistry, biology, maths, history, art or burger management.

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, claims this is not further evidence of falling standards but is an academically rigorous addition to the curriculum. Brown said: “You have got to do a pretty intensive course to get that [McDonald’s] qualification. It’s not that standards are going to fall. It’s going to be a tough course. Once you’ve got that qualification you can go anywhere.”

Amusingly Brown had just returned from China and India. Some of the 16-year-old students that I teach also came back from India on a trip to visit and help with poor schools there. The main thing that struck my students was how much tougher the classes were and how much more the Indian children knew — and they were visiting primary schools. That’s right, English secondary students from a good school found the Indian primary schools to be a challenge. My students were supposed to help teach the Indian kids, but in the immortal words of one girl: “They thought we were really stupid.”

[Click here for the BBC on the story]

[Click here for the Guardian covering Brown’s response]

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Header photograph by iboy_daniel