CDZ What should adults know about the world?

[320 Years of History]

​

The framework for the discussion in the video above is this:

the headlines of this poll that we’re about to discuss are disturbing. College-aged Americans have surprising gaps in their knowledge of geography, the environment, demographics, U.S. foreign policy, recent international events, and economics. So how can they be active citizens and informed voters? And how can we help them fill in these gaps?

So here to answer some of those questions are Susan Goldberg, editorial director of the National Geographic Partners and editor in chief of National Geographic Magazine; Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Gary Knell, president and chief executive officer of the National Geographic Society.

Now, the survey they’ve jointly sponsored was conducted by Applied Research and Consulting among 1,203 people aged 18 to 26 who currently attend or have recently attended a college or university in the U.S., whether a two-year or a four-year institution.

On the knowledge questions asked, the average score was only 55 percent correct. Just 29 percent of the respondents earned a minimal pass of 66 percent correct or better. And just over 1 percent—that’s only 17 out of the 1,203 students—earned an A, which was 91 percent or higher.​

You can either watch the video or read the transcript.

Some excerpts from the discussion:

• GOLDBERG: You know, and I think one of the other issues—I’m certain not an education expert, but I think one of the issues is that people don’t know what to believe anymore. So right now, when you’re—when you go online, you never have to encounter anything that is different from your own worldview because it’s coming into your newsfeed. So you’re not—like in the old says with looking through a newspaper, you would encounter headlines that would make you go, huh, I didn’t know that; or, isn’t that interesting; or, I don’t agree with that. But now you don’t have to ever encounter anything that you don’t agree with to start with.
  
  And the other—and one of the other issues is you don’t know it’s true. We have done a really rotten job as a media industry of helping people understand that’s real information and how to identify whether sources are credible. I worry that young people see stuff on a screen and they think it’s all the same, you know, and it’s coming from—it’s equally credible or equally not credible. We must educate people on how to figure out whether a source is credible or not, because otherwise—there was—there was just an interesting story in the Post yesterday by Margaret Sullivan talking about how some students can’t—don’t know that Osama bin Laden is dead. Now, that would be—have been a hard story to miss. (Laughter.) But—
  
  
• DOZIER: There was one particular answer where they asked all the students, you know, how knowledgeable do you consider yourself in foreign affairs, or in overall—world affairs. And they seemed—the majority thought they were pretty good at it.
  
  
• DOZIER: Now, the other question is, how do you inspire curiosity and also let these students know that they’re not as good as they think they are? (Laughter.)
  
  GOLDBERG: Well, I think this is—this is one of the issues. And I do think we, the media, are somewhat to blame. We just can’t scold people into getting smarter, right? That—
  
  KNELL: It’s much more fun. (Laughter.)
  
  GOLDBERG: But that’s just not going to work. You can’t—and ever since I was a kid, I can remember people always thinking, you know, the—you know, what’s happened to kids these days; they don’t know as much as we did, blah, blah, blah. But we’ve got to—we just have got to figure out ways to almost entice them into wanting to learn. Yes, I know, we can set more rigorous standards and do those, but it shouldn’t be so burdensome. And so today, if you go to NationalGeographic.com—better be by now—we should have not only a story about, you know, this study, but there is a quiz that you can take. There is an easy quiz and there is a hard quiz. And the easy quiz uses the answers that everybody got right, and so you can test yourself. And the hard—the hard quiz takes the questions that very few people got, and so you can—you can see how you do. So that’s a way to interest people and I think entice people, and we should start doing that at a very young age.
  
  
• DOZIER: And we had a presidential candidate last week who didn’t know what Aleppo was. Is it—is that all—does that all stem back from this self-selecting, I’m just going to follow stuff about Hollywood so that’s what’s going to pop up in my stream, and I’m not going to learn anything about the world?
  
  HAASS: Well, I can’t speak to, you know, what Gary Johnson—you know, what his daily news diet is and how he got to that point. What I think the relevant question for our purposes is, that we as a society need to then challenge a candidate who doesn’t know what Aleppo is or doesn’t know some other issue, whether it’s a basic issue about immigration or trade or American obligations around the world or the impact of globalization, about why the world matters. So, whatever the issues are, we as voters are going to be asked in two months to make choices, and these choices are going to be, shall we say, consequential and then some.
  
  You know, the other night there was the forum on Commander in Chief, and quite honestly it didn’t quite succeed, to be gentle, in getting to where it needed to. But, again, it gets back to what we were saying before. If American citizens are going to ask the right questions and be able to assess the quality of the answers for people who they—who are going to—they’re going to put into positions of authority and responsibility, who are going to make decisions that will affect all of us, we have got to know enough. We’ve got to know enough to ask the right questions. We’ve got to know enough to judge the quality of the answers. So when a candidate doesn’t know what Aleppo is or doesn’t know some other issue, we have then got to draw whatever conclusions we are going to draw about the adequacy of that person’s background to hold higher office.
  
  And what this suggests, this survey, is that as a society we are not at that point. And among other things, I believe schools—high schools and particularly colleges, which is what we looked at the most—are not doing their part. And that—what we’re hoping comes out of this, in part, is a national conversation about just that: what we do expect.
  
  And Gary’s point, to have conversations about things like STEM, is there a crowding-out feature of STEM? Are we sure that we have got the right answer to what it is we want our average graduate to have? And what’s the right mix of skills and backgrounds and exposure to knowledge.

 

[Fenton Lum]

I can't get all worked up about this given that what the power structure wants americans to "know" is a very sanitized version of reality.

 

[alang1216]

What should adults know about the world? Google

I work with a 23-year-old and whenever I mention something she wasn't aware of she'll Google it as we are speaking. Admittedly she is much smarter and better educated than most but she has the world on her computer and phone.

 

[320 Years of History]

What should adults know about the world? Google

I work with a 23-year-old and whenever I mention something she wasn't aware of she'll Google it as we are speaking. Admittedly she is much smarter and better educated than most but she has the world on her computer and phone.

That's encouraging. (and on topic) Far more so than the conspiracy theory themed remark of the earlier poster.

 

[GaryDog]

There's an interesting point there in the OP about today's media reporting incorrect facts.

We used to say "Newspapers are the today's history being written." The problem is, print journalism is dying. And the problem with that is print journalism is typically more reliable, goes through a more rigorous fact-checking process, and typically forms the basis for those endless analysis articles online, or quick bits on TV news.

The death of print journalism is becoming the death of reliable journalism. Or, journalism period. I was a journalism major and worked at 3 different newspapers, so this is extraordinarily sad and distressing to me. We either need to make editing online and TV news a more serious profession, or start reading more newspapers. I don't see the former happening with the rush of revenue you get from being first.

 

[ABikerSailor]

What should adults know about the world? Google

I work with a 23-year-old and whenever I mention something she wasn't aware of she'll Google it as we are speaking. Admittedly she is much smarter and better educated than most but she has the world on her computer and phone.

My room mate and I are the same way. Google gives you access to damn near everything that you could possibly ever want to learn about.

My solution to getting people a bit smarter about the world? Whenever a person graduates or gets a GED, they should either (a) do 2 years of Peace Corps abroad, or do an enlistment in the U.S. Military.

I know that my world views and understanding of it were greatly enhanced by all the travel I did in my 20 years of the Navy. One of the things that I learned is that people are pretty much the same all over the world. We all have someone we love, we all have someone we don't like, we all have our own unique views of the world, and as long as you respect mine, I will respect yours. If not? I can find someone else to hang out with pretty easy.

 

[Pilate]

Dumb people today seem to be the product of a lack of curiosity. So many times I have seen people not know something and then not care to look it up. It's as if they simply do not care. I suspect that it is related to the abundance of information available. As I have said before, information is a commodity and as the supply increases the demand is met.

 

[Disir]

No, I was just going to say, and from a—from a media perspective, I do think that there are growing gaps because of the—you know, the financial upheaval in the media world and the withdrawing, literally, of the eyes and ears from foreign bureaus, from even state-government bureaus, from here in Washington, D.C. So there’s been this pull-back. And, you know, it’s an opportunity for organizations like National Geographic and others, that still have people out there, to really double down on that kind of coverage and to put it out there in ways that people want to read it and to make it interesting and imperative that people feel like they need to get that information.

People have asked for more media coverage of world news going back into 1990s and this has been ignored. I can cite that source if needed. One of the primary issues is we have 5 media conglomerates and they control everything from what is published in books, newspapers, radio, television and internet. Not too long ago, information was whitewashed and diluted or ignored because of the conglomerates subsidiaries. Now, the information is controlled because the individual that sits on the board over here also sits on the board over there. National Geographic is now owned by Murdoch. So, are we really discussing international relations and geography here or purchasing somebodies brand of BS?

 

[320 Years of History]

It's certainly easy enough to consider and remark on the delivery and consumption of current news and information, and there's plenty of valid criticism to make in that regard, for example:

• "Soundbite" news vs. full story coverage,
• Lack of rigorous fact checking,
• Lack of intellectual curiosity, integrity, and rigor, and
• Confirmation bias consumption of news and information.

Gathering real-time (relatively) data is certainly one aspect of the problem for it goes directly to how one as an adult furthers for oneself the learning process that was begun in school. However, that's not what I thought about as I listened to the conversation among Goldberg et al. The question I had and that was not answered is, "What makes it possible for news and information outlets, public speakers/politicians, writers, and so on to so easily make the claims they do, and do so with hearing in return massive outcries of 'BS?'"

What disconcerts me is the nature and extent of the baseline of knowledge and information that young people bring with them as they become adults. That foundation is what enables individuals to reliably discern whether the content that comes their way has any plausible hope of passing the "sanity check" that each of us performs when we receive information. That base of learning is what makes one ask pertinent questions, that is, not just any old question that comes to mind, but the questions that address the "meat" of a matter. It's what allows one to know how and where to look for information that isn't forthcoming from our news organizations and leaders. And it's what allows us to know when we need to (and don't need to) seek or demand additional or better information.

I have my own ideas about what that baseline body of knowledge is, and in another CDZ thread a member posited that my conception of that body of knowledge and cognitive skill is "encyclopedic" to the extent that one would be an expert were one to possess that level of knowledge. I do not remotely agree with the member because I know that the level of understanding I have in mind is nowhere near that of an expert in any one or several disciplines. I know that because all of it is information that one can obtain as a high school student, provided one bothers to do so.

The specific content I'm referring to is that found in high school AP courses. You can look at what that entails for yourself. (The links below go to course descriptions. There are sample exams on the Internet if one wants a more detailed sense of the nature and extent of understanding that qualifies as "mastery" of a given subject. Just keep in mind that what appears on a specific test is what was tested that day; the body of knowledge one must master to be prepared for the test is a bit greater, especially for non-technical courses.)

• History, Government and Politics -- Several options; for the purposes of the discussion here, it really doesn't matter which one an individual takes. If one takes, say, history, one will not be as outright knowledgeable about politics or immigration, but one will know enough to know when or what to explore for oneself when a political matter appears in the news to confirm whether it's so or not so. Each course provides enough for one to perform a decent "sanity check" on a related topic and go from there.
  • U.S. Government and Politics
  • Comparative Government and Politics
  • Human Geography
  • U.S. History
  • European History
  • World History
• Science
  • Environmental Science -- This course is pretty cool insofar as it draws from biology, physics, earth science, and more and applies the content from those disciplines to a specific topic, the environment. Accordingly, it is a great way for one to gain first hand experience learning how to take a host of ideas and assemble them to ponder a topic that isn't uniquely the purview of any one of those ideas. The course gives one a a very good sense of just how integrated and complex is the world in which we live. (Neither I nor my son knew that's what this course would be when he chose it, but it turns out it was just the right thing for him as he isn't exactly into science, but he likes bits and pieces of each of the "core" sciences. His counsellor suggested this course, so he "just went with it." I didn't care what classes my kids took so long as all their courses were AP in their senior year and they graduated with macroeconomics "under their belt.")
  • Biology
  • Physics -- That these are high school classes is seen in there being no advanced math in the physics courses.
• Math -- If one isn't going to pursue a technical career, choose statistics, otherwise, choose calculus or computer science.
  • Statistics
  • Calculus -- If one has any inkling of pursuing a professional STEM or economics-heavy career, this is the class to take. That said, seeing as calculus is all about measuring change, it's conceptually useful even if one isn't going STEM, but I doubt most, if any, high schoolers are going to make the conceptual connection between calculus' principles and real world application of those concepts/modalities of thinking in a non-mathematical way. It's still very good for honing one's logical reasoning acumen without regard to whether a topic is math-related. After all, that is why math is required coursework in the first place; it's certainly not because anyone is naive enough to think most folks have any friggin' reason to annually, or even lustrally, use the Pythagorean Theorem, operate on imaginary numbers, or factor a polynomial equation.
  • Computer Science -- This is the one two of my kids took. It's the non-programmer version of computer science. One finishes the course being able to write some code, but the aim of this course isn't to make one a skilled programmer. There is a different computer science course that does that. Computer Science A, as it's called, along with the art, music and language courses are vocationally oriented courses, which is fine if that's what one wants to do.
• Economics
  • Macroeconomics -- This is somewhat more useful than is microeconomics in terms of politics, but mostly because it directly addresses the macroeconomic issues that routinely appear in news and political discourse.
  • Microeconomics -- I wouldn't encourage not taking micro, but if one must choose, macro is the one to chose. I think most learners find micro a tiny bit easier to grasp, so long as they don't confuse/conflate its principles with those of marketing.
• AP Capstone -- This is a process as well as content program that's not entirely necessary, but it's a really good developer of the skills needed to be an outstanding "sanity checker" and subsequent investigator when need be.
  • AP Seminar
  • AP Research

Sidebar: Why AP? Isn't that college content?

Strictly speaking, it's college freshman content. The thing is that it's content that is and some years back was the realm of high school junior and senior year content. Given that, I don't focus on the "AP" descriptor and its present day correlation to freshman college survey course material for the reality is that what we now consider "AP" content is the same content that prior to about 1950 was routinely taught to prepare students for college, which back then meant every high school curriculum's content that wasn't explicitly vocational training offered as an alternative to college preparatory study. (I'm referring to the breadth and depth of content for any given class, not the variety of courses offered. Few to no high schools back then offered, say, computer science, human geography or Chinese language.)

I know this because I recall my parents having a "what's advanced about the AP classes" conversation with the headmaster at my high school and then deciding that I was going to take whatever AP classes were offered. (At the time, I wasn't very thrilled about that edict.) They made that declaration, I later found out, because they determined that the learning expectations (content and mastery of it) in the AP track were the same ones they'd faced when they were in high school in the 1930s and 1940s when there was no such thing as an AP track. (My father and I went to the same high school.)

Interestingly, even as today we draw pretty clear lines between prep school curricula and vocational curricula, in the late 1950s, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) provided for vocational training that in certain disciplines carried comparable levels of rigor as did prep programs, but merely offered a greater applied focus and less of a theoretical bent. (One can see this very clearly even now in geometry, which if it didn't have all that theorem proving, it'd be purely vocational/practical/applied math.) The disciplines stressed by the NDEA included science, mathematics, foreign languages and other topics deemed critical to the national defense.

I mentioned the NDEA for two reasons:

• To preempt the absurd rebuttal that some may feel fitting that I somehow am a "knowledge snob" who undervalues the merit of trades and vocational education. I don't; I just understand the difference in the nature of preparation needed pursuing a trade vs. that of preparing for a profession, and I understand how that preparation differs today from what it was some 40-60 years ago.
• To note that "back in the day," tradesmen were in fact, highly skilled people. That's particularly relevant because part of current Presidential campaign rhetoric is about "bringing back manufacturing," the idea being that doing so will make available high paying manufacturing jobs for low skilled workers.
  
  The fact of the matter is, however, that the highly paid manufacturing jobs from America's manufacturing heyday weren't held by lowly skilled workers, and the demand today for highly skilled manufacturing workers is not significantly different than it was some 40+ years ago. The problem is that fewer folks are highly skilled, and that is why they can't find the "high paying" manufacturing jobs their fathers held. The jobs, "good" ones, exist -- check the job postings at various manufacturing firms -- but many of the folks who want those jobs aren't qualified to obtain them.
  • Three million open jobs in U.S., but who's qualified?
    
  • http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/09/news/economy/america-5-6-million-record-job-openings/
    
  • Has America Run Out of Workers to Fill Its Open Jobs?
• To allude to the reality that well trained tradesmen, such as those of the mid to late 20th century, can readily parlay their training into even higher paid roles and into businesses of their own. For example, one who completes a metalworking vocational program can "apprentice" with an existing company, build skill, reputation and experience, and then go into business for himself. Ditto electricians, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, and a host of other workers. I've been seeing this happen literally for decades. Men who are my age and who took up a trade are now the men owning businesses that my family's company engages when we need folks to perform building and maintenance services on our various projects and properties.
  
  The point isn't that everyone will be highly successful (become millionaires, if you will) at doing that, but that is the career path and the "expectation" given the way the "American Dream" works, and with hard work and perseverance, it's a very viable and doable thing. Ask anyone who's done it. They'll tell you there weren't able to achieve it by sitting on their asses and complaining about what they can't do, what wasn't given to them, or what's too hard to do. They were just all "Nike." They just did it.

End of sidebar.

 

[ABikerSailor]

Know what one of the things I blame for the dropping intelligence of people?

Twitter.

It's damn near impossible to write a whole, cogent thought in 140 characters or less, and in trying to figure out how to do so, one reduces themselves to bumper sticker thinking.

 

[Fenton Lum]

Know what one of the things I blame for the dropping intelligence of people?

Twitter.

It's damn near impossible to write a whole, cogent thought in 140 characters or less, and in trying to figure out how to do so, one reduces themselves to bumper sticker thinking.

266 characters with spaces would keep them smarter?

 

[ABikerSailor]

Know what one of the things I blame for the dropping intelligence of people?

Twitter.

It's damn near impossible to write a whole, cogent thought in 140 characters or less, and in trying to figure out how to do so, one reduces themselves to bumper sticker thinking.

266 characters with spaces would keep them smarter?

Never said that. I said that use of Twitter has reduced people into bumper sticker thinking, and they would rather text each other than talk.

Me? I'm an old man, and still remember the days when people would call each other up to chat for a bit, or they'd meet somewhere for dinner, drinks and conversation, and the conversations would actually last more than 30 seconds.

On occasion, I've been known to talk for hours with friends. And yeah, during that time (using actual vocal words) we were able to posit a thesis, follow it through to it's conclusion, and both end up learning something.