The NEW Illiteracy

Christopher Lasch makes an interesting point about education in his essay "Schooling and the New Illiteracy." The point is that the education of school systems is declining. We have students who are failing the basic concepts of reading, writing, and arithmetic. "People increasingly find themselves unable to use language with ease and precision, to recall the basic facts of their country's history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most rudimentary written texts, or even to grasp their constitutional rights,"writes Lasch. Why is that? Why are some the most important and foundational subjects the weakest?

This is not a new problem our society has to deal. Through a series of changes and adjustments in our educating standards, our levels of intelligence have been diminishing. Through the rest of the essay he chronologically examines the process of development of the mass school system. It started out in America as way of preparing the students for challenges. The goal was to give students the power of being able to see if they are, in a sense, having the wool pulled over their eyes. This has changed drastically. Now there are students who are not prepared for the world. They don't even know who the first five Presidents were, which may not seem important, but it's such a simple fact that it makes you wonder what other important simple facts students don't know.

I think that facts are not bad, neither is extra curricular activities. Both are equally important, but neither superior to the other. There needs to be a balance. The schools should require, and they do, a core curriculum, and that's mostly facts. This is to provide students with necessary information to live with awareness of what's going on in the world that affects them. The extra curricular part is to balance the factual part. It's also an avenue to hone in on the type of study they want to do. This is important to have what the school wants, a well rounded citizen.