Why are US schools so bad at facts?

[agamemnus]

Fun facts that most of you dumb-dumbs forgot about, but were in fact wrong in the first place:

In school, we "learned" that the Romans had widespread lead poisoning due to lead pipes. In fact, this theory has been disproved ages ago.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html

In school, we also "learned" that glass, over a period of centuries, actually flows. Apparently this is also wrong
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#B..._antique_glass

And this is Massachusetts... capital of intellectualism.




PS, In case you were wondering:

For the first one, I was randomly reading about lead production in Wikipedia in the Roman Empire and got to thinking about why there was no mention of mass lead poisoning.. then I googled "lead poisoning Roman Empire".

For the second one, I was looking for a verb for making glass in an ancient factory in the form of "glass is being ____". I stumbled upon the glass sub-article by looking over the main glass article...

[littlelolligagged]

Maybe you just went to really lousy schools?

[']['ear]

I've always considered stuff like that BS filler anyway.

[agamemnus]

Maybe you just went to really lousy schools?

They were using basically standard textbooks.... so, no.

I've always considered stuff like that BS filler anyway.

...
You believe knowledge is BS. Thank you. Now we know.

[']['ear]

You believe knowledge is BS. Thank you. Now we know.

Channeling the Prince of Lies now?

But to elaborate, I find fact-based learning for kids of a certain age to be BS. In addition to the the three Rs, kids should be engaged in creativity-building, not stuffing useless facts into their heads. Really, are you better developed intellectually learning that the ancient Romans were or were not poisoned by lead? I'd rather that you learned about an empire, learned what made the empire fail, learned what people lived like then, maybe wrote a story about what it might have been to be a Roman centurion, or a chariot driver, or some such. If you didn't learn a single name, factoid or date, that would be fine with me.

Oh, one exception. Learning about or system of governance and some general history is not bad. But I loath names and dates history. Rote learning is for Japanese robots, not a society that intends to prize innovation and creativity.

[Ominous Gamer]

They were using basically standard textbooks.... so, no.

You failed to identify who "they" is, and which textbooks you were referring to. Do you have titles and their geographical area of influence?

[littlelolligagged]

Channeling the Prince of Lies now?

You've already apparently managed to drive Icky away with the constant trolling of you and your comrades. Do you think you could manage not to troll someone who isn't even posting in a thread?

[EmperorNorton]

I have never once heard of such "facts".

[littlelolligagged]

I have never once heard of such "facts".

him lurned em at skool

[Aimless]

Tbh those facts never came up in school, when I was a kid. And I'm not sure why this thread's in D&D

Are your schools sucky when it comes to many facts that really matter??

[littlelolligagged]

Every school system (hell, every individual class, even) is different.

[Nessus]

And I'm not sure why this thread's in D&D

Because no one has thought of banning aga yet

[LittleFuzzy]

I've always considered stuff like that BS filler anyway.

On par with urban legends :agrees:

[agamemnus]

In addition to the the three Rs, kids should be engaged in creativity-building, not stuffing useless facts into their heads.

Yeah, I agree... however, some people actually remember "useless" facts that weren't stuffed but rather they were found to be interesting "useless" facts. I think you should be free to remember whichever useless facts you want!

I also remember a great deal more than useless facts anyway.. you could actually even call me a genius, I guess..

I remember writing an essay on the Roman Empire's fall that included the idea of lead poisoning... Wikipedia didn't exist back then, and neither did this article... so that is one reason why I remembered this bit better than most.

You failed to identify who "they" is, and which textbooks you were referring to. Do you have titles and their geographical area of influence?

I plead the fifth! That I don't remember. The Latin book was fairly small and had orange-yellow-golden text, and I am sure it was standard. I don't remember at all about the glass.

[']['ear]

You've already apparently managed to drive Icky away with the constant trolling of you and your comrades. Do you think you could manage not to troll someone who isn't even posting in a thread?

Please. I "drove away Loki?" Horse shit cubed times pi. Go fuck yourself.

[Nessus]

Please. I "drove away Loki?" Horse shit cubed times pi. Go fuck yourself.

Post of the decade

[littlelolligagged]

Please. I "drove away Loki?" Horse shit cubed times pi. Go fuck yourself.

I didn't mean to imply it was all your fault, Tear. There's no reason to be hostile. I just think it would be really nice if the continued personal attacks on people could be kept to a minimum - or even out of D&D completely. Maybe I should stop tilting at windmills, but I don't think we really have to put the nails in our coffin already.

Diverse opinions can lead to interesting discussion. You don't have to agree with a word that comes out of anyone's mouth.

[RandBlade]

Rote learning is for Japanese robots, not a society that intends to prize innovation and creativity.

Disagreed entirely. School is a place for learning how to learn as much as anything else. Learning stuff by rote may not be 'useful' - learning how to learn stuff by rote is.

It would be negligent and a bad education to skip entirely any form of learning.

Edit: Thinking about it, I've had no choice but to fire some people in real life because they were unable to learn by rote.

[Hazir]

It is my experience that having mostly useless heaps of information floating inside your head is kind of useful. Very often it saves you the bother of having to go online, look for the information and having to verify what you have just read by coss checking with other sources.

[Unheard Of]

Diverse opinions can lead to interesting discussion. You don't have to agree with a word that comes out of anyone's mouth.

I think some people want a discussion, others want to 'win'. We could do do with less of the latter, in my opinion.

[agamemnus]

It doesn't just come down to those two facts, even, I think. I think what it comes down to is that school books have been very outdated for a while and recently politicized (no, I don't want to learn about the "gay movement" spoken in the same breath as the civil rights movement), instead of being something like a peer-reviewed Scientific American article.

[Ominous Gamer]

you think, based off school books you can't recall, and whom's influence you are unable to provide. WTF does standard mean? Do you understand how textbook purchasing works?
This isn't a US school issue.

I can understand how come conservatives get butthurt because Jefferson is in the history books, but this is not the same issue.

[littlelolligagged]

It doesn't just come down to those two facts, even, I think. I think what it comes down to is that school books have been very outdated for a while and recently politicized (no, I don't want to learn about the "gay movement" spoken in the same breath as the civil rights movement), instead of being something like a peer-reviewed Scientific American article.

And yet the "gay movement" is a civil rights movement. It's about a group of people who are not included in the same civil rights that most Americans (and hell, people in multiple other countries) take for granted. The women's rights movement also grew out of the "civil rights movement." Would you prefer for that one to be ignored, too?

If you just hand a child a peer-reviewed Scientific American article they aren't going to get nearly as much out of it as if they understand the basic principles involved first. Yes, basic textbooks oversimplify. This begins in elementary school and goes through college, even. This is so that you can get a foundation in a subject first. Then you can move on to the meatier books - and yes, supplement them with respectable peer-reviewed journal articles. If you start with the good stuff, it will be incomprehensible to the learner - and that student is likely to give up.

An honest example of politicizing schoolbooks would be that nonsense in Texas.

[Loki]

But to elaborate, I find fact-based learning for kids of a certain age to be BS. In addition to the the three Rs, kids should be engaged in creativity-building, not stuffing useless facts into their heads. Really, are you better developed intellectually learning that the ancient Romans were or were not poisoned by lead? I'd rather that you learned about an empire, learned what made the empire fail, learned what people lived like then, maybe wrote a story about what it might have been to be a Roman centurion, or a chariot driver, or some such. If you didn't learn a single name, factoid or date, that would be fine with me.

Oh, one exception. Learning about or system of governance and some general history is not bad. But I loath names and dates history. Rote learning is for Japanese robots, not a society that intends to prize innovation and creativity.

Generally agreed. There was just an article by Newsweek on this topic: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/t...ty-crisis.html Creativity predicts future success far better than IQ, for instance. Rote memorization doesn't produce innovation, as most Asian and Eastern European countries have long known. Having said that, it's important for children to know major economic/social/political trends, and understand why/how those trends came about. It wouldn't hurt if they remembered the major names/places/rough dates, but they'll probably forget it before college anyway. It's more important to get them to think critically and to become more interested in the topics. Then they might even read about them on their free time.

Teaching about lead poisoning in ancient Rome or what happens to glass over a long period of time seems too gimmicky. The textbook authors and/or teacher were trying too hard to make the material relevant to the students' life I think.

[agamemnus]

It was just a footnote, really...

you think, based off school books you can't recall, and whom's influence you are unable to provide. WTF does standard mean? Do you understand how textbook purchasing works?
This isn't a US school issue.

Er, well I live in the US... so...

And yes, I understand how textbook purchasing works. They don't go without new textbooks for a few dozen years and then BAM! the city school administration hands them random new textbooks.

...

1) Gay parades or a "describe your feelings session" aren't more worth spending time on than the history of slavery and black civil rights in the US (and womens' civil rights, I guess). There is very little history or lessons to it.

2) When I was a child, mostly in public school, over a dozen years ago, we repeated subjects in math, history, and science at every level. Learn about photosynthesis in elementary school? Ok, learn again in middle school, and again in high school.. and if you still haven't figured it out, let's do it again in a university. These are the highest level courses we're talking about here, in one of the best (if not the best) higher-education states in the country. (if not the world)

A lot of it I already knew from reading these things by myself. It's so much easier now, with Wikipedia.

As an aside, a lot of other kids couldn't understand the material that we were taught the 3rd time over, anyway.

I daresay, old chum, it's not getting better...

3) Phonics! Well.... it's not exactly the same thing as having factual errors in your book, but this phonics fad (?) that hit my elementary school in early 1992 or so didn't make sense at all to me. It points to outdated methodology just like textbooks (apparently) use secondary material, which is often wrong... (I read that the lead poisoning theory was suggested in the 1970s and shortly disproved... but I guess the textbooks forgot about the "shortly disproved" part!)

Aren't we even told as students (at all grade levels!) to always use primary material if we can? Why then are textbooks using a lower standard?

[littlelolligagged]

It was just a footnote, really...




Er, well I live in the US... so...

And yes, I understand how textbook purchasing works. They don't go without new textbooks for a few dozen years and then BAM! the city school administration hands them random new textbooks.




1) Gay parades or a "describe your feelings session" aren't more worth spending time on than the history of slavery and black civil rights in the US (and womens' civil rights, I guess). There is very little history or lessons to it.

2) When I was a child, mostly in public school, over a dozen years ago, we repeated subjects in math, history, and science at every level. Learn about photosynthesis in elementary school? Ok, learn again in middle school, and again in high school.. and if you still haven't figured it out, let's do it again in a university. These are the highest level courses we're talking about here, in one of the best (if not the best) higher-education states in the country. (if not the world)

A lot of it I already knew from reading these things by myself. It's so much easier now, with Wikipedia.

As an aside, a lot of other kids couldn't understand the material that we were taught the 3rd time over, anyway.

I daresay, old chum, it's not getting better...

3) Phonics! Well.... it's not exactly the same thing as having factual errors in your book, but this phonics fad (?) that hit my elementary school in early 1992 or so didn't make sense at all to me. It points to outdated methodology just like textbooks (apparently) use secondary material, which is often wrong... (I read that the lead poisoning theory was suggested in the 1970s and shortly disproved... but I guess the textbooks forgot about the "shortly disproved" part!)

Aren't we even told as students (at all grade levels!) to always use primary material if we can? Why then are textbooks using a lower standard?

Yes, I can see how you would consider the right to get married, to have your partner be able to share your work benefits the same as any other spouse, the right to adopt a child as a couple, and even the right to survivor benefits (to say nothing of the right to serve openly in the armed forces to defend your country) could be qualified as a "gay parade or 'share your feelings session.'" The discrimination is still there, and is still entrenched in the American legal system. How could it not be something that lessons should come from?

Repeating the lessons is how you build on the material. I'm sure that what you learned in 2nd grade was supplemented with additional information in 3rd. Practicing is the only way math will become second-nature.

Phonics is still being used, because phonics works for most children. Phonics isn't a fad. Yes, it can be a waste of time for a child who already reads and spells fluently, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of elementary school students.

I'm sure your lead poisoning thing is very interesting, but it has nothing to do phonics, and you haven't bothered to show us any proof that it is anything other than your misremembering.

[Loki]

Aren't we even told as students (at all grade levels!) to always use primary material if we can? Why then are textbooks using a lower standard?

Textbooks are written to earn money. With a few exceptions, the people who write textbooks don't get any reputational boost from writing them (in the social sciences and humanities, anyway). Unlike academic books, textbooks sell...in large numbers. Anyone out for a quick buck is going to write a textbook. Plus, since an author's reputation isn't affected by the quality of the textbook, there really is no incentive to put much work into it. Then you have the ghostwritten textbooks, which is when the original author of a textbook becomes too old to revise it and a new professor is brought on board to do that task (both the names end up on the textbook). In this case, the new author has very little incentive to thoroughly go through the textbook to find old mistakes.

[Khendraja'aro]

Disagreed entirely. School is a place for learning how to learn as much as anything else. Learning stuff by rote may not be 'useful' - learning how to learn stuff by rote is.

It would be negligent and a bad education to skip entirely any form of learning.

Edit: Thinking about it, I've had no choice but to fire some people in real life because they were unable to learn by rote.

Agreed. While "learning to learn", learning principles, instilling creativity and such are definitely worthy goals for any school, some aspects involve learning by rote and cannot be circumvented.

Just one (complicated) example: Organic chemistry. You simply cannot function in OC if you do not learn a lot of basic reaction types (e.g. the difference between a Friedels-Craft-Alkylation and a Friedels-Craft-Acylation, how to prepare the educats, what to do with the products. Or the differences between SN1 and SN2) by rote. I mean, part of that is surely deducible, but it's much faster and more reliable if you simply sat down and crammed it into your head.

[agamemnus]

Yes, I can see how you would consider the right to get married...etc.

Societal norms and definition of marriage. A bit different than being a second class citizen. The other concerns are fairly small in comparison as well.
What I'm saying here is that this whole thing with gay rights deserves a footnote, not a whole course or textbook or whatnot, as some have made it. (as portrayed in the media)

The panel also concluded that the research literature provides solid evidence that phonics instruction produces significant benefits for children from kindergarten through 6th grade and for children having difficulties learning to read.

So it (phonics) would only work for a short amount of people... children through 6th grade? Really? You really would need to have a very unique developmental disability to have to take part in phonics learning (which in and of itself isn't that easy) in 6th grade.

I'm sure your lead poisoning thing is very interesting, but it has nothing to do phonics, and you haven't bothered to show us any proof that it is anything other than your misremembering.

:\ I don't misremember. Also, I don't like how you take my connection between lead poisoning and phonics and just ignore it...

Textbooks are written to earn money. With a few exceptions, the people who write textbooks don't get any reputational boost from writing them (in the social sciences and humanities, anyway). Unlike academic books, textbooks sell...in large numbers. Anyone out for a quick buck is going to write a textbook. Plus, since an author's reputation isn't affected by the quality of the textbook, there really is no incentive to put much work into it. Then you have the ghostwritten textbooks, which is when the original author of a textbook becomes too old to revise it and a new professor is brought on board to do that task (both the names end up on the textbook). In this case, the new author has very little incentive to thoroughly go through the textbook to find old mistakes.

Well yes, interesting points... goes to the failings in the school book buying system in America, which is still not so great even in the digital age.

[littlelolligagged]

Societal norms and definition of marriage. A bit different than being a second class citizen. The other concerns are fairly small in comparison as well.
What I'm saying here is that this whole thing with gay rights deserves a footnote, not a whole course or textbook or whatnot, as some have made it. (as portrayed in the media)


So it (phonics) would only work for a short amount of people... children through 6th grade? Really? You really would need to have a very unique developmental disability to have to take part in phonics learning (which in and of itself isn't that easy) in 6th grade.



:\ I don't misremember. Also, I don't like how you take my connection between lead poisoning and phonics and just ignore it...



Well yes, interesting points... goes to the failings in the school book buying system in America, which is still not so great even in the digital age.

But that's just it. In the United States today homosexuals are still treated like second class citizens, on the basis of their sexual orientation. The ability to do so is even codified. Maybe you don't consider it to be a big deal, but you aren't likely to be denied parental rights because the other parent is the same sex as you, either. In the 1960s a white person wouldn't have thought twice about the discrimination a black person felt on a daily basis.

Phonics helps people learn to read. I can't figure out what your issue is with elementary school children being taught to read.

I ignored your "connection" between lead poisoning and phonics because it was nonsensical at best.