Jaywalking with John Hinderaker (Part II)

I recently linked to a post by Powerline's John Hinderaker, in which he describes how an encounter with a young desk clerk at a gym left him wondering about the state of education in our country. Hinderaker had asked the clerk if she recognized the man on the $50 bill. She didn't. Then he asked her if she had ever heard of Ulysses Grant. She hadn't.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/07/026773.php

Hinderaker acted boldly in giving the young clerk a pop quiz in history, and so did Jay Leno in his "Jaywalking" routine. My hunch is that Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" routine made a lasting impression on many people as to the state of education in America. I have no idea whether Hinderaker was inspired by Jay's routine, but it wouldn't surprise me if he was. If we were to construct a timeline of major events in the public consciousness of education in America, Jay Leno's Jaywalking deserves to be there, just as suredly as Rudolf Flesch's 1955 book, Why Johnny Can't Read, the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk," by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. But I digress.

The very next day I had my own Jaywalking encounter, but unlike Hinderaker, I did nothing to initiate it. Meek and mild as I am, I am a milquetoast to all the young people who serve me at the restaurants and stores I visit. I would never set out to - in the lingo of today's pedagogists - conduct "a probe" into an unsuspecting person's knowledge of history, geography, or any academic area. Unlike Hinderaker, I wasn't going to be giving any pop quizzes. Nevertheless, I found myself confronted with "another sign of the apocalypse" as Hinderaker would put it.

I walked into a McDonald's in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. The computers had just crashed and the cash registers weren't working. A young lady took my order, but she wasn't sure what to do after that. Her supervisor told her to figure the cost with pen and paper. The employee looked flabbergasted. "I can't do that," she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. Her supervisor told her it was easy, that all she had to do was add the amounts and multiply by a decimal to get the tax. At that, the employee became very upset. "I don't know anything about decimals," she stammered. "I can't even add. I was in retard math." The young McDonald's employee was genuinely upset, almost beside herself, and I felt really bad for her. But I didn't ask her any questions. All I did was smile and wish her a nice day. If I wasn't such a wimp, I would have asked her whether she had a high school diploma.

Then again, that would have been pointless, as it's safe to assume she was in school long enough to have learned how to add. And the stories are legion of newly minted high school graduates who lack basic reading and math skills, never mind Ulysses Grant.