College kids can't understand basic credit deal
from: http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/news/national/012006b3_literacy
There is a story floating around about how disappointing it is that the kids in college are not too smart. This has been a teaser story on all the cable channels and now on the broadcast channels. However, there are paragraphs that never seems to make it to air:
"There was brighter news.
Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly (italics mine) higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education.
Also, compared with all adults with similar levels of education, college students had superior skills in searching and using information from texts and documents."
Whoops! If you just heard the story on TV you would think we were raising a bunch of dopes. Again, rather than looking at the story objectively and asking critical questions like:
Is it important to know basic math skills, or does relying on calculators and computers make this obsolete? Does the rise of spell checking result in a better looking paper, but does it hurt true communication?
Nah, just give people a 10 second sound bite and they are happy.
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