"Homer J Simpson" wrote in message
news:JYY7i.71289$g63.25753@edtnps82...

"Bill S." wrote in message
...


The bottom line: not only are Americans now fully fluent with metric
and decimal measurements

Say what? Most Americans of the US variety wouldn't know a metre from a
kilogram.



Unfortunately, it's not confined to the U.S. Our kids in the UK are all the
same now also. Can't do any math without a calculator. If you ask if they
know their eight times table, they will say " 8 - 16 - 24 - 32 " and so on.
All well and good, but if you say to them " so what is five times eight ?"
they will say " 8 - 16 - 24 .... " only now they will add in counting on
their fingers until they get to 5 ... I see pieces in the local newspaper
written by new reporters, and have a hard time of making any sense of
anything they have written. They all speak with some dreadful accent that
they have learnt from watching Australian soaps, where the last syllable of
any sentence ends on an up-accent as though they are asking a question. The
few that don't do this, do the exact opposite, which makes them sound like
profoundly deaf people do when they speak. I went to a Grammar School, and
had what I thought was a pretty reasonable education. I came out of there
perhaps a little more literate and numerate than some of my friends who went
to schools which had a slightly lower academic standard, but I did not
consider myself anything other than at the top end of average. I certainly
wasn't Oxford or Cambridge material, and I knew many other kids who were
whole realms above me. But when my own kids went to school, and we started
to get into the homework help thing, and when they got interested in TV quiz
shows, and I was able to answer most of the questions without hesitation, I
gained a whole new respect from them. My two daughters who are now 20 and
22, still refer to me as a genius. Now I find it really sad that as things
should be improving, they are actually declining, and what I considered to
be an average intelligence, is now looked upon as genius. I wonder how they
would refer to someone who genuinely is that clever ? So it's not just a
U.S. thing.

Arfa