Is School Today Easier?

Just read about a professor who, on the first day of his 4th year physics class, advised his students that they will all be getting an A+. Now the professor is fired from the university.

I'm in mid-50s with two teenage children. My sense is that their education is far more rigorous today than it was in my time.

First, you have the No Child Left Behind mandate of standardized testing through grade school and to college.

Secondly, they compete with children not only in their school district but from Asia, Europe, and Africa for slots in universities and good jobs.

Yes, kids today have Spell Check and Google. But school as a whole is tough-- tougher than what I experienced in the mid 1970s. On a case specific basis, there will always be unfair or mediocre teachers. So what? When those kids enter the work force, they will ecnounter unfair and mediocre managers. That's life.

Bright children from all over the world clamor to enter the colleges and universities of our country and they do so for a reason. The same is true with the conservative students of conservative parents. They too fight to be admitted to those so-called bastions of liberalism-- the Ivy League and the Big Ten. They know that such institutions give them the kind of education that they want irrespective of a professor here or there who may lean and little bit to the left of the lecturn. It is not by accident that the United States generates more Nobel Prize winners than any other country. The whole point of education is to teach critical thinking, and if they can only accept what is beautiful and familiar, then perhaps a church school is more to their liking.

As far as awarding students only 'A's, my response again is: so what. Stanford University's MBA program is generally regarded as amonth the best business school in the world, but its grading is pass/fail. The assumption, justified in my view, is that such kids don't need the additional incentive to master the body of knowledge that they are striving to learn.