Regarding Ron Grossman’s “Blue book blather” (Perspective, Aug. 3):
I am 19, a National Merit Scholar and recently named to the dean’s list at Northwestern University. Yet ask me who was the third president of the United States, what exactly my funny bone really is or how electricity works, and I will draw a blank. The most basic of facts, from U.S. history to the fundamentals of science, escape me.
I do not blame myself or my teachers. They taught me how to write an essay that would properly impress an advanced placement board–without actually having read Hemingway or Thoreau. They taught me what they were supposed to and what they thought I needed to know to be accepted by the university of my choice. In that, they succeeded.
Yet the frustration I and my friends feel when we do not know the things we really want to is often amazing. How did we survive 12 years of schooling without learning what a dangling participle is? Perhaps the best example occurred the other day when my mother commented on a news program she had seen. It focused on King Edward of England and how he vacated the throne for his beloved. “King who?” I asked. I had never heard the story. I have been educated in Illinois schools my entire life, and I have succeeded, according to their standards. But from my view, something is missing.
