Boyish-Tigerlilly wrote:What level of literacy do you believe the US as a whole has? It's not abysmally. It's very high 90% according to the DoE. If you look at the NJCCC, you will see literacy skills mandated for all NJ schools for each grade level.
If there really were no literacy component to education in primary or high school, it would likely be a lot less than it is. It must be near you that literacy isn't taught; every school I have observed and taught at taught literacy skills to students. Whether they actually learn it or practice on their own time is something different. We could improve our literacy so most people can get beyond an 8th grade level, yea, but that's not because literacy education is missing.
Parental drop-off and lack of participation is one problem in the literacy development of those who do not gain literacy skills by high school, and then parental drop-off increases. The school can't control what goes on at home, how much the student is immersed in a literate environment. I can't make students do homework or interact with the parents.
Per some governmental studies done in 2002, and repeated in 2006, by the Department for Educational Statistics, some 20%+ of adults in america are functionally illiterate in terms of both language and numeracy. An additional 25-30% are functionally marginally literate. The study defines these terms rather effectively.
2002,
2006. Both PDF.
That teachers make the attempt to teach literacy skills is not in doubt, merely the efficacy of their attempts and the rigor with which standards are applied. You said it best yourself: whether or not students learn literacy is up to them. They'll be promoted to the next grade no matter what they do or do not learn, in the vast majority of cases.
Darth Wong wrote:
I can think of a much better justification for not making homework count toward course grades: there is absolutely no reason to believe that the child actually did the work himself. In fact, one can almost bet money on the parents helping the child, unless the parents are lazy or uneducated themselves.
Parents helping their children with homework at the K-12 level is not only anticipated, it's desired. You help your kids with homework, I'm sure. Parental involvement with education has several major benefits, and families in which the parents do not help children with homework show a marked decrease in eventual educational outcome.
All that aside, the simple answer is that there isn't enough time in the class day for children to practice basic arithmetic and language skills to achieve proficiency. Homework is essential.
Darth Wong wrote: If you're only of average intelligence but you devote yourself entirely to language, you'll have perfectly adequate skills. You may not be able to write astoundingly expressive poetry that brings people to tears, but you'll be a solid communicator. The same is simply not true of math; not only would the person of average intelligence fail to become a math visionary, but he would fail to even graduate or survive to the senior level. The math and engineering guys I knew who did poorly in English were either born in another country or just didn't really give a shit about becoming highly fluent in English. When the most common answer to a grammatical correction is an irritable "whatever", it's hard to come to any other conclusion.
Is the implication here that a college graduate with a degree in English has only "adequate skills" in the language? Because otherwise it's apples to oranges.
If on the other hand, that is your implication, I'd have to say that given my own experiences in the English department at two universities, it's a sadly accurate reading of the situation; however, that reflects the depths to which English university level education has sunk, rather than languages being inherently easier than mathematics.
(As an aside, I'd say it's partially more common for an average person to achieve competency in language than in math simply because on the surface level of daily interactions, math is less frequent than the native language; arithmetic is taught by the instructor using the local language, but the native language is not taught using math.)
An example of these depths is that at the University I am attending for my post-grad, the English department's undergrad English BA has 5 specialties, which each student must choose, in addition to a set of core English classes all must take. In the core classes, there is 1 grammar class, which is a surface level survey of English grammatical rules. Anyone with an adequate level of fluency in English could pass it easily.
The specialties are British and American Lit (reading stuff and writing essays), Creative Writing (writing short stories and poetry), "Interdisciplinary Studies," (make your own major, no rigor required in any field) Language and Discourse (linguistics and transformational-genitive grammar, the only non-subjective specialty, also the one I took), and "New Voices in Literature" (Black Lit and Women's Lit, essays).
When I was going through the language/discourse specialty, there were approximately 4 students at the university sharing that specialty, out of approximately 4500 English majors. Being lenient and assuming only half of those graduated with a degree, that means out of 2250 English majors, only 2-3 of us had any sort of formal training in Semiotics, Linguistics, Phonology, and any other rigorous or objective approach to language. Everyone else just wrote 5-page papers in which any viewpoint was right as long as you could cherry-pick enough evidence to back it up or wrote prose or poetry which was graded based on its length and whether or not it was turned in on time.
The idea that these 5 specialties are in any way comparable is a joke, and the idea that the 4 non-objective specialties are in even the slightest way equivalent to an engineering or science degree, I
wish was a joke.
