The issue is that if you go back and read your exam materials you WILL find things you forgot.
No, two issues here. As easy as it is to do, sweeping generalizations of the "we" and "you" type are annoying as hell, and seldom persuasive.
Second, I was writing college level exams for my students in 1989, for students who could not read, spell, think analytically or even follow directions half the time.
I've read the 8th grade "tests" from the early 1800s, and just shook my head. Much of it would be utterly useless to most of the students, then or now. Those tests were a product of the government schooling, every bit as much as those today. I remember in the 1950s, "history" was a series of dates, places and who "won" the various battles - very little else. I don't remember any of it, and don't give a damn.
People need to be free to learn what they want to satisfy their own needs and talents. And if they don't want to learn anything except how to operate a "smart phone," well, such is life. Too bad to be them.
"School" has been screwed up for a very long time, and the 8th grade test actually proves it.
Much as I'd love to find something to pick on, your points here are 100% accurate. Especially about history. I only enjoyed history because I read it on my own, LONG before I got to schools. As I said, there have been a few classes which benefitted me, and they were 'schedule fillers' in school. Most everything else except math, science and language were crap... all the political science stuff I read even now is crap, was crap, will always be crap until the day it is taught as what it is... a branch of mental medical science known as psychological pathology... or something along those lines.
That's really what politics and politicized anything will always be. Good ideas stand on their own, so do facts. Only falsehoods need political clout. As you state, for illiterate morons, however, political clout becomes necessary to pass off a good idea, since the illiterate morons require a 'strongman' figure (a government offiicial or figurehead) to tell them what to think and what to value, since they, themselves, are incapable of this action.
Again, this probably applies to NOT ONE here, in full, but then again, realize we're very few and very far between.
I am uplifted by the fact that it seems geeks the world over are getting it. Not the full picture, but a big fraction of it.
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Topic: What They Don’t Know (Read 16701 times)