Pre-college aptitude tests have reported that the examination scores are lower this year than ever before, supporting a downward trend in educational achievement. These assessments, evaluating the basic skills that students should have learned in high school, prove that modern students and educators are failing in their basic purposes.
This suggests that American youth are becoming less and less scholarly, creating a further reason for the older generation to lash out against the young with disapproval. This increases the furor of adults who see today’s youth as a television-motivated, music-obsessed, drug-crazed, free-sexed group of radicals.
These tests do not consider that this generation has many strikes against traditional learning: experimentation in teaching methods, placing more emphasis on different areas and types of education, which has resulted in giving students a broader range of knowledge; also, expanded areas of extracurricular activities, giving today’s students an added advantage by enabling them to experience a wide variety of vocational training. Modern education has taken on the role of career orientation and social adjustment rather than the rote learning of former years.
Tests reflect the values of the persons composing them; therefore, students who do not measure up to their ideas of importance are made to appear uneducated. We feel the opposite is true; today’s youth know more of every phase and aspect of life than any previous generation. A higher standard of living has enabled students to have access to every means of communication, which has increased the ready availability of knowledge. To even suggest that this generation, because of an outdated method of examination, is not as educated or intelligent as those in the past, points to the ignorance of those who consider any test a superior means of measuring knowledge.