Dave Barry - Bad Habits

The panel’s report is also good news for the kids, because it confirms their suspicion that they wouldn’t have learned anything even if they had been paying attention in class instead of trying to see who could most accurately guess how large, in square inches, the sweat stain under the teacher’s left armpit would be by the time the bell rang.

But most of all, the panel’s report is good news for the teachers, school administrators and other members of the American educational establishment, because as the people most responsible for screwing up the educational system in the first place, they will naturally expect to be given a great deal more money to fix it.

So everybody is pleased as punch to have blue-ribbon federal proof that the school system stinks on ice, and everybody is busy coming up with helpful suggestions for making the schools good again, the way they were when they were turning out real geniuses like the people who are making the suggestions. For example, President Reagan checked in from the planet Saturn with the suggestion that we need to go back to voluntary prayer in the schools. Now I think we can all agree that making our children pray voluntarily will certainly help, but we need to do more. We need to get Back to the Basics, back to the kinds of learning activities you and I engaged in.

For example, every student in the country should be required to read Ethan Frome unless he or she has a written doctor’s excuse. As you no doubt vaguely recall, Ethan Frome is a book you had to read when you studied early American novels because it turns out there were hardly any good early American novels. As I remember the plot, Ethan Frome falls in love with this woman, so they decide to crash into a tree on a sled. The sled crash is the only good part, and it lasts only about a page. But the way I look at it, if I had to read Ethan Frome, I don’t see why these little snots today should get out of it.

They should also be forced to disassemble frogs, the way we did in biology. Remember? You’d slice your frog up with a razor and root around inside, looking for the heart and the kidney and the other frog organs that were clearly drawn in several colors in the biology textbook, until eventually you realized that you must have been issued a defective frog, because all you could ever find inside was frog glop. So you just poked at the glop for a while and then drew the heart, etc., from the biology textbook. This taught you about life. When I was in school, I also had to do a worm, although I’m not suggesting that all of today’s students should have to do worms. Maybe just the really disruptive ones.

So that’s my back-to-basics program: Ethan Frome, frogs, and maybe some class discussion of the cosine. And any kid who doesn’t know the exact date of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent (December 24, 1814) will be held back for another year, or, if the Russians appear to be getting ahead of us in space again, shot.

One of the more popular ways to feel superior these days is to complain about the schools. We adults just love to drone on about how much better educated we are than our kids. We say stuff like: “These kids today. They get out of high school and they don’t even know how to read and write. Why, in my day we read Moby-Dick eighty-four times in the fourth grade alone.” And so on. Adults just eat this kind of talk right up.

Well, I hate to disillusion everybody, but it’s all a crock. We aren’t better educated than our kids: they’re just less drivel-oriented.

The main evidence adults offer to prove kids are less educated is the fact that Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are declining. You remember SAT’S. You got your number-two pencils and sat in the cafeteria for two hours answering questions like this:

Fred wants to redo his bathroom in pink wallpaper, so he invites Sam over to help. If Fred’s bathroom is eight feet by five feet and has a seven-foot ceiling, and each roll of wallpaper is 32 inches wide, how long will Sam take to realize there is something just

a little bit strange about Fred?

SAT tests are designed by huge panels of experts in education and psychology who work for years to design tests in which not one single question measures any bit of knowledge that anyone might actually need in the real world. We should applaud kids for getting lower scores.

When you and I were in high school, we thought we had to learn all that crap so we could get into college and get good jobs and houses with driveways. The problem is that so many of us went to college that college degrees became as common, and as valuable, as bowling trophies. Kids today are smart enough not to waste brain cells trying to figure out how long Train A Will take to overtake Train B just so they can go to college. That’s why so many colleges are desperate for students. Any day now you’ll be watching a late movie on UHF television and you’ll see this ad:

“Hi! I’m Huntingdon Buffington Wellington the Fourth, dean of admissions at Harvard University. I’ll bet more than once you’ve said:

‘I sure would like to go to a big-time Ivy League university, but I lack the brains, the background, and the requisite number of dinner jackets.’ Well, this is your lucky day, because Harvard University is having its semiannual Standards Reduction Days. That’s right: we’re admitting people we once wouldn’t have allowed to work in our boiler room. And for the first one hundred applicants who call our toll-free number, we’re offering absolutely free this honorary degree written in genuine Latin words.”

Another reason you shouldn’t feel better educated than your kids is that almost everything your teachers told you is a lie. Take the continents. I bet they told you Europe was one continent, and Asia was another. Well, any moron with a map can plainly see Europe and Asia are on the same continent. I don’t know who started the lunatic rumor that they were two continents. I suspect it was the French, because they wouldn’t want to be on the same continent with, say, the Mongolians.

And what about those maps they showed you? Greenland looked enormous, bigger than Russia. If Greenland were really that big, it would be a Major Power. All the other nations would stay up late nights worrying about it. But the truth is Greenland is smallish and insignificant. The other nations rarely even invite it to parties.

So don’t think you’re so smart.

Every so often I see a news article in which some educator gets all wrought up about the fact that people don’t read books anymore:

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)—Noted educator Dr. Belinda

A. Burgeon-Wainscot, speaking before the American Association of People Who Use the Title

‘Doctor’ Even Though They’re Not Physicians, but Merely Graduate School Graduates, Which Are As Common These Days As Milkweed Pollen

(AAPIVUTDETTANPBMGSGWAACTDAMP), said today that people don’t read books anymore. At least that’s what we here at the Associated Press think she said. She spoke for about two hours, and used an awful lot of big words, and frankly we dozed off from time to time.

Well, I am not a noted educator, but I know why most of us don’t read books. We don’t read books because, from the very beginning of our school careers, noted educators have made us read books that are either boring or stupid and often both. Here’s what I had to read in first grade:

“Look, Jane,” said Dick. “Look Look Look. Look.”

“Oh,” said Jane. “Oh. Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh. Look.”

“Oh,” said Spot. “Oh my God.”

Now I’m not claiming that we first graders were a bunch of geniuses, but we didn’t spend the bulk of the day saying “Look,” either. We thought Dick and Jane were a drag, so many of us turned to comic books, which were much more interesting and informative. When I was in first grade, the Korean War was going on, So I read comiC books with names like