or, “Why Today’s Public Schooling is Screwed Up.”
Today’s post comes to you from a civics course I took in my second year of college/senior year of high school, with most of the rest of the class composed of other freshman/sophomore college//junior/senior high school students (see Washington state, Running Start (Wikipedia)). It stems from the section we were on for the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
On the test for this section of the course was this question (paraphrased):
What does the Second Amendment state?
a.) [some incorrect answer]
b.) The right to arm bears.
c.) [some incorrect answer]
d.) None of the above.
Now, which choice do you think was most chosen by the class? If you thought answer (B), well, you’re correct!
Our instructor was a little flabbergasted by this, along with being concerned that nobody attempted to ask him if he actually meant ‘arm bears’ or ‘bear arms’. We had to explain this to him (something to which almost every student in the class attested to, most seeming truthful):
Most every student in the United States public schooling students has had at least one teacher that wrote something like “the right to arm bears” instead of “the right to bear arms.” Often times, repeatedly through a school year. After the first or second test with multiple people asking “Did you really mean this, rather than that?” we would keep getting confirmations of “I meant that, of course!”
And some people wonder why our testing scores suck so much compared to other countries. The public schooling system forces us to build a complete filter which turns off the reasoning that should have gone on behind for that question.
Now, what happened with those points on the test? I don’t rightly remember. Hopefully jinkside remembers, both of has having been in this same class; I assume, though, the several points associated with that answer were just dropped from the final score.