Jaime O'Neill's article in SFGate discusses the "dumbing down" of education in America. The title, "Nearing the 'claps of civilization'", refers to the kinds of spelling errors the author/teacher sees regularly in student writing. O'Neill provides us with some interesting anecdotes illustrating the kind of education many high school and college students have been getting in the U.S. these days. In one story, a student makes it through a college anthropology course, but thinks she's been studying "anthology". If you believe the kids he's talking to represent average American students, then their level of ignorance and apathy should cause some concern. It seems, in general, that O'Neill's students regularly fail to identify what we might consider very important basic historical and present day facts and have extrememly limited vocabularies. But more importantly for me, it calls into question the kind of attention that is being paid to children's education.

I shouldn't be too surprised at all of this, however. Just last week, I heard someone say she wasn't good at geology when asking where a country was located. She, of course, was referring to geography. In a senior art history seminar in my undergraduate program, one of the students was presenting a paper on the French illuminated manuscript, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry. A book of hours is a prayer book that is painted with religious images. Anyway, she kept referring to the book as the "Three richest hours". I guess she was thinking this was a Spanish manuscript and that she could somehow get away with guessing a Spanglish translation. In French, it's actually translated as "the very rich hours". What never happened during the course of this uncomfortable lecture was that the professor never corrected her. Perhaps the prof. didn't want to embarass her, but this was a senior seminar! Wasn't she paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to be guided in her education? She probably still thinks the book is about the "3 richest hours" of prayer.

If what O'Neill describes is the general state of literacy and education with a large portion of American kids, I can't help believing that too many public schools are failing our children. I wonder how much this implied epidemic of poorly read and unlearned kids has to do with a laissez faire approach on the part of parents and educators to being involved in their children's lives.