I have done this dozens of times, and only once has a student started things by eagerly raising his hand and saying, “FDR.” This was memorably from a confident Mexican-American student in Riverside County. But the other dozens of times I have done this exercise with advance placement students, the first responses have indeed been diverse. They include:
“George Washington.”
“Benjamin Franklin.”
“Alexander Hamilton.”
“Abraham Lincoln.”
If I were reading about this story, it would be hard for me to believe what I have just written. So I will give the reader a test. Let the reader ask the high-school children in the family to identify that man on the American dime and see what the young people come up with.
Over the years, my incredulousness that most of the so-called “cream of the crop” students in junior and senior years cannot identify FDR has spilled over into the faculty lunch room. But I get the impression I am spoiling everyone’s lunch. As one teacher told me:
“If you were to ask me who is the face on the American dime without giving me any prepping, I wouldn’t know either.”
Somehow I got the impression that indeed you would have to give this teacher prepping to get FDR’s identity on that common-place dime.
The message is that with all the little obscure things being presented in today’s academic trivial pursuits, the most important things to learn are being crowded out.
All of my amazement at the little interest in what a person does to earn a face on the American dime has been told by me before, in the Beacon and repeated in my new book. But the other day – on this past May 15 to be exact – the lack of passion and interest of even the best students in the material they are “going over” without really learning was given a new wrinkle by Radio KFI on the “Coast to Coast” show.
KFI quoted a national statistic that 60 percent of the America’s university graduates since 1992 are today working in low-skill jobs.
These “low-skill” jobs range from “phone pro” teams to restaurant floor work.
As the discussion on KFI continued, it was concluded that employers do not trust the passion of even most university graduates today. The students are seen as a coming from a culture of “floaters” who really don’t care about how the society that brought them here works, let alone whose face is on their American dime. In fact, students from foreign lands are being seen as more interested in actual American learning today.
Since this survey dates back to 1992, the last year of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, we surely cannot blame the son George W. Bush for this malaise, as is sometimes done.
But on the other hand, “No Child Left Behind” which introduced this millennium seems to have made actual important learning even more impossible. The structure of “No Child Left Behind” after all is designed to create dilettantes among American students or … in the words of one teacher who has spoken about it – “good Jeopardy players.”
To become a dilettante indeed seems to be the present ideal of American public education. The problem is that we have forgotten a part of the definition of a dilettante is a person who is indifferent to the priorities and hierarchies of learning. To a dilettante, anything may be interesting but nothing is important
Under the conditioning of our present testing system, all issues to a dilettante are equal and worth just a point each. So the heroic life of Franklin D. Roosevelt or George Washington or Abraham Lincoln is no more important in our school system than is the fact that the Know Nothing Party botched its assignment to correctly paint the Washington Monument.
On the other hand, we surely need a few geniuses to lead us for another century, and geniuses are known to be passionate about what is really important. In fact, the great geniuses like Edison and Einstein and Churchill were either terrible students or no students at all in the assortment of academic minutia. But at least their societies were supportive enough to help cultivate them even if it meant their not learning how to how to play “Jeopardy” very well.
In today’s pressures to develop good dilettantes in our schools, the potential geniuses who are pursuing their own learning passions are not just deterred. They are treated as crazy and diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin to subdue them. The singular and passionate Edison and Einstein and Churchill probably wouldn’t have had a chance in all the facility being used to dominate our schools. Heaven help us the next time we need to hand over our problems to a genius.
Chris Sharp – Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California.” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.