I heard in Ireland, you couldn’t graduate high school (or their equivalent) until you were fluent in both English and Gaelic (Celtic?). I heard this from an ex-co-worker who grew up in Ireland. However, he said they stopped making the second language a requirement sometime in the 70s.
Are Irish kids who graduate high school knowing only English dumber than those who graduated knowing two languages? Are there other repercussions from this change, do you think?
I have a copy, level of education of parents in one of several important markers, yes. But it does not indicate who is “dumb”, it indicates who is likely to do better.
I can read both in English, how does the ability to read them in Greek or Latin make my education shallower? Again, knowing a foriegn language does not make you smarter- it means you know a foriegn language. Oddly, I learned Old and Middle English- at one time I could read Chaucer and even Beowulf in the original (well, Beowulf was more or less educated guessing and memorization, I admit, but I could read Chaucer quite well). Does that make me smarter? It’s a useless skill, now, except maybe if I attend an SCA event.:dubious:
I can read Bureaucrat, and that is much more useful.
I can say that if we taught the average kid Bureaucrat, he’d find it a 1000% more useful than Greek.
The Irish equivalent of “graduating from high school” is getting the Leaving Cert, and Irish (that’s what it’s called, not Gaelic or Celtic) is still a required subject for the Leaving Cert. Many students also do another European language as universities tend to require it for admissions. Fluency, however, is not required in either Irish or any other language studied and you do hear complaints that Irish students are at a disadvantage to other Europeans for being effectively monolingual.
DrDeth writes:
> Einstein failed a school entrance exam, maybe he should have stuck to digging
> ditches.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstei…_and_schooling
Notice that although he didn’t pass the exam to skip the last year or so of high school, he did very well on the math and physics section of the test. In any case, this test was only about whether he could skip the last year or so of high school, not whether he was qualified for university study in general. He went ahead and finished the last year of high school and got into university.
md2000 writes:
> This maybe is another good myth for Cecil to tackle. A more in depth look at this
> that I once read determined that no, Einstein actually did quite well as a child.
> Apparently, one year during his schooling the area’s marking system was
> changed to match the country norm (inverted, as I recall) so reading Albert’s list
> of marks over the years made him appear to go from top to bottom of the heap.
> Actually he stayed at the top. One person read the marks, made the comment,
> and it has followed him like a bad internet reference for most of a century -
> perhaps because it makes such a pleasing moral.
I don’t know of any reference that talks about this misreading of the marks. Do you have a cite for this? In any case, the notion that Einstein did badly at school is simply wrong. Einstein’s teachers always thought he was smart. Some of them also thought that he was an arrogant jerk. He actually did quite well in general, if not utterly brilliantly well, in school, in college, and in grad school. It wasn’t until he wrote his four important papers of 1905 that other physicists began to realize how great he was. He was 26 that year, and he had just finished his Ph.D.
People sometimes talk about his working as a patent clerk as if that proved that people thought he was a failure. It was actually a good job. It was the equivalent today of someone in the several years just before and just after finishing a doctorate doing a post-doc instead of being offered a tenure track job. It wasn’t the best thing to be hoped for, but it was O.K.
Einstein then went through a series of academic jobs. In 1914, when he was 35, he became a professor at a German university and the head of a physics research institute. At that point he was at the top of the academic hierarchy for physics professors. Einstein’s talent was always reasonably well appreciated throughout his life. There was never a time when people thought he was stupid.
**Wendell Wagner **answers this better than I did, but you clearly did not read my cite.
“Rather than completing high school, Einstein decided to apply directly to the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (later Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH)) in Zürich, Switzerland. Lacking a school certificate, he was required to take an entrance examination, which he did not pass, although he got exceptional marks in mathematics and physics.”
From what I can tell it one could compare this to taking the SAT, failing the Reading and Writing sections but acing the Math portion.
More like taking AP tests, but not doing well enough to get credit on the English and Language ones.
You obviously don’t know anything about European walnuts.
As I said - statistics never tell the whole story. IIRC, they said it was the single biggest statistical indicator of future success.
What difference does it make if you’re smart, but nobody can tell? For example, I doubt the recent administration was as dumb as some people say - but even the “axis of evil” speechwriter said in his book “there was an absence of deep thinking.” As evidence of this, apparently W mentioned to him, just after he was hired, that “Dave, we missed you at the morning prayer meeting”; not clueing in to the fact that he was Jewish. Others have remarked on the previous administration’s singular lack of curiosity. Is this good or bad? The results - economy, war, Katrina, perversion of the justice system, torture (relying uncritically on seriously flawed legal opinions) speak for themselves.
My point wasn’t that we can’t read latin, quod erat demonstratum. My point was, what deep demands on the intellect have we replaced it with in modern education? “Our friend the beaver”? “Sally has two mommies”? Ebonics?
Another recent study of excellence suggested that the key to success is practice, pratice, practice. Some people may have an innate talent, but generally the Tiger Wood’s or Pavorotti’s or other major talents of this world get where they are by practice. This is nowhere more evident than the Olympic athletes, but the study suggested the same was true of brain power.
The college students of today are probably much smarter than a generation or two ago, in raw brain-power. Nutrition and external stimuli are generally far better than 50 years ago. The media bring new experiences and widen your view of the world. 50 years ago, would you even know what’s happening in the Middle East or Asia unless your parents kept copies of the New York Times around. Today you can get an in depth analysis at your fingertips and documentaries by the dozen in HD. You learn to think deep by being shown the many different angles of deep thinking.
Or, compare The Econiomist to Time or Newsweek. Then guess which one is European, which are American… There just seems to be no need to apologize for being smart in Europe. Yes, sometimes that can be arrogant. Simon Cowell comes to mind, but you know what - he’s usually right. Perhaps it’s the problem that America is too rich and egalitarian, therefore the money that feeds the media is from a lower strata of viewers?
The other problem is that in Europe, a poor guy who wants to do well want to be like the wine-tasting, opera-watching snobs with money. In America, they want to be like the beer-guzzling rich texan with the gold-plated longhorns on the hood of his Cadillac, or the comb-over billionaire (if he’s not broke this week) who is arrogant and stupid and equates gold leaf and tacky with taste.
You are still equating knowing a second language- which is a skill, much like typing or car repair- with intellect.
In general we have replaced that skill with Computer use, Word Porcseeing, etc.
Oh great. So here we are in Kornbluth-land, with “Bachelor of Typing”. That’s really helpful.
I might consider advanced database design with table joins, or carburetion and motor repair (especially including diagnosis of mechanical problems), to be mind-challenging topics.
Using the internet might qualify as the equivalent of knowing latin or french if you knowledge is broad and in depth, and you have a grasp of the protocols behind the applications. True, one of the major applications of the internet is porc-seeing, but most adolescent boys master that application one-handed.
So really there are 2 topics - “what’s ‘smart’ mean?” and “how do you get there?”.
I think for example that my intensive exposure to English grammar not only gave me a good grounding to learn French and Spanish (somewhat) in high school, but also provided the basis for a good understanding of syntax in programming languages.
You don’t think knowing how to use a computer is important? There are degrees given in Various computer skill, including Programming, which requires a new “language” be learned.
The problem is still - how intensive a mind exercise would you consider learning BASIC programming? I had 6 months of latin before the stream was cancelled in grade 9. The complexity of latin grammar is legendary, and having some exposure to it gives you the grounding to appreciate the humor of the latin lesson in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”. For someone the Pythons’ age, this was a simple spoof of what they encountered everyday in class. “People called Romans, they go house”?
Even back in 1985, one of my college profs was moaning about how the PC was destroying programming skills. Students brought their BASIC skills to mainframes, wasting cycles in what he called “exponential debugging”. With a error listing from a compile, the student would fix only the first error and re-run it; instead of fixing all visible errors first.
Anyone who’s learned a foreign laguage to the point of making decent conversation will probably tell you it places demands far above basic BASIC. The interesting thing about foreign languages - (a) humans (most of us) are wired for language (b) it can’t be faked (c) it requires several thought processes, i.e. both memorization, analytical and compositional (d) it’s a skill that improves with practice.
Even learning auto mechanics can exercise problem-solving skills, if taught correctly. From my experience, analytical problem-solving is what our minds should be best at, and yet it seems to be sadly lacking in most people.
I have very little experience with what the education level was in, say the 1950’s. I wonder what proportion of students could muddle through Virgil or the Aenid, vs. what proportion of students today can normalize a complex database and write a program to extract and analyze the data? Perhaps we’re being too nostalgic for a golden age that never was?
Even when I was in school, before failing was illegal, there were the students who were consistently at the bottom of the class and advanced only because after 2 flunks, they were to old to stay in that grade.Those guys typically dropped out around grade 9 and were the ones doing janitorial or night watchman work -or digging ditches.
What you said was “Computer use, Word Porcseeing [sic], etc.”
Ah, so you are attempting to score a debate point based upon a typo in my post. :rolleyes:
I don’t think there’s any doubt that a student who learns Latin and Greek and studies in school is going to be smarter than another student who fucks off all day and eats Ding Dongs. There would seem to be concrete benefits to learning a language.
But it’s not a question of Latin vs. nothing. The question is, what is the other student learning instead of Latin? What is the Latin student missing from his education because he’s spending 1 hour a day on a language he’ll never use? Are both students spending an equivalent number of hours in rigorous study?
That’s why the Asian students tend to test higher, I think. They simply study harder, and study more — possibly at the cost of socialization skills, given that their schools are rigorously gender-separate.
Actually, I think he’s contrasting Word Processing (what you intended to say) vs Programming, Network Administration, etc. that you might have meant. John W. Kennedy is just very precise, so when he quoted you, he quoted you, errors and all. Others made fun of your typo, but John was just quoting the actual spelling you used.
Typing, data entry, and running spell-check are not the same level of thought processing as learning a language - even a fairly simple language.
That’s what I got from it, too. It’s the difference between being able to use a typewriter and being able to build one. “Computer skills” is a broad term.
RR
Yeah, as I said, Porc-seeing is a skill that most adolescents master on the internet. There’s some really good porking visible out there. (And they say a good comedian never explains his jokes).
I don’t think we need to learn latin. It’s probably not essential to learn any second language. However, it doesn’t hurt. I’m sure it exercises something in the brain, and may someday come in handy.
The real problem is - what are we learning instead? My impression of the “Johnny-can’t-fail” north american educational system - students are learning what is expected of us, which for many students is nothing. Add to this that we celebrate it. (“Are you smarter than a fifth grader”?) This is why foreigners have the impression that Amurkans are dummer.
The typo has bugger-all to do with anything. You claimed that learning to use a word processor is a significant intellectual achievement. Five-year-old children can learn to use a word processor.