Schools failing to teach critical skills

In a Feb. 16 Associated Press story on the education summit in Denver, Secretary Arne Duncan was said to have chastised teachers and their bosses in equal measure. Thousands of educators were told that the nation’s schools are in deep trouble, that bickering among teachers, politicians and administrators is sinking efforts to improve education, that one in four American students fails to complete high school, and that the U.S. is falling behind on college graduation rates.

Colleges have substituted a party-like “beer and circus” social environment for a meaningful education, serving to keep students happy, faculty marginalized, and to stimulate the flow of evermore tuition dollars. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa observe in their new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses”: “Growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communications are exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent.”

The Arum-Roksa observation applies to students in general. One would expect to see an even larger proportion of no gains associated with cohorts of athletes from schools that effectively prioritize athletics over academics. Many of these athletes will graduate, credentialed by their schools for participating in diploma-mill-like eligibility programs.

We really need to do more to get Americans to recognize the fact that unless we get our educational priorities right — academics (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) over athletics — as well as get our students to work hard, we will not have the intellectual capital to address the major economic, environmental, health and security issues facing our nation in the century — a century that is witnessing the “rise of the rest.”

Frank G. Splitt

Mount Prospect