As quizzes on late night talk shows have shown for the past 20+ years, the current education system doesn't accomplish this. Additionally basic numeracy drops of _severely_ after leaving school, which means a majority of people aren't really absorbing anything beyond arithmetic on the math side.
I used to be Ok at math. I would now fail any math test past 10th grade (forget college), and I’m not so confident about 8th or 9th either.
I also used to be pretty good at French. I’ve lost most of it. Rarely having a reason to use a skill means you lose it.
There is also, in my opinion, great benefit to just training your brain. Even if you forget all the details, I think someone who learned calculus and then forgot it is going to generally be in a better place to handle any general mathematics than someone equal who never learned calculus at all.
That’s my guess, anyway.
Sometimes going a few steps deeper helps you retain some useful bit of info. I ended up making useful of various bits of chemistry decades after taking the class, but understanding the basics was still helpful.
Finally basing things on utility is just a prediction. Some things that seemed useful turn out less so as technology filled in a gap.
The person who would fail that math or French conversation right now, would be able to get up to speed in days, weeks or months depending on what exactly you want if needed. However, learning French from nothing would take years again.
If I know a couple, there are probably many such folks.
I’ve not seen the same thing happen with any other subject.
Some televised "quizzes" are picked through for the dumbest possible answers (eg: Australian late night comedy shows doing VoxPop quizzes asking 'random' US citizens to name a country starting with the letter 'U'), other quiz shows audition contestents to select a pool of bright people.
Public schools or home schools should ideally teach about innate bias in sample selections.
We may expect other kinds of “basic” knowledge not to be much more widely-known than this. It’s easy to turn up similar results on fundamental civics and history. Stuff like “are Puerto Ricans US citizens?” you get a similar 30-35ish% who give the wrong answer and 15ish% “I don’t know”, pretty close to rates on questions about marginal tax rates.
Are you saying that none of these statements are true?
Or are you suggesting that the system claims to be instilling some level of competency in various subjects? Or perhaps you meant that the system is not doing what it _aspires_ to do. Or perhaps what you aspire for it to do.
I am. Otherwise why would there be standardized tests to attempt to measure this?
There's use in the education as a public babysitting service/meal delivery for young children, but that its it's main benefit, we should radically alter the way it's all set up. It could be radically cheaper as well as destroy way fewer children's love of learning.
That bunch in encompassing people with massive learning disabilities including mental retardation, neglected kids and kids from severely disadvantaged situations.
That same exact bunch wont have better results when being homeschooled, with possible exception of some learning disabilities where homeschooling parent still needs a lot of support.
which is probably happening in spite of school :)