In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Eric Bohlman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Art Kendall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in >news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
>> There is no doubt that the average college student is not up to the >> average student 50 years ago. There are at least two things >> contributing to this. One is selective memory and retention. Things are >> not like they used to be and they never were. Remember how our >> generation had to walk miles to school in hip deep snow, uphill both >> ways? There are cunieform writing from the time of the Sumerians >> decrying that failures of the the then current younger generation. >The other, of course, being that the students of 50 years ago were a much >more selected group than the students of today. And that's for purely >economic reasons. 50 years ago, it was possible to make quite a decent >living without much education. The GI Bill brought about a large number of college students, many of whom would not have been able to afford it before. Quite a few of these even had to make up deficiencies; there was no "dumbing down" in any respect. On the contrary, these ordinary means, but intelligent, students even caused the standards to be raised in many cases. These were not economically selected; the veterans of WWII were a fairly representative sample. The high school courses had not yet succumbed to the dumbing-down process, and so they were reasonably prepared. A good high school program back then is far better than the memorize-and-compute program now, which supposedly covers more. Learning calculus computations without understanding is not even useful. -- This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University. Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
