Ho's Pleasant info and Thoughts for the day: September 2006

About Me

Name: HoJo

Location: St Augustine, Florida, United States

Among other things I am a father, grandfather, brother, uncle and fortunate member of a large and loving family without a throw-away in the bunch. Now a writer of quips, essays and short stories, I started serious writing and my first novel at age 70. A chemical engineering graduate of Purdue University in 1949, I am a dreamer who would like to be a poet, a cosmologist, a true environmentalist and a naturalist. I've become a lecturer on several subjects. That's my little buddy, Charlie, with me in the photo. He's an energetic, very friendly Lhasa Apso born in September, 2003. He's a good one!

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

2nd Timothy - 4:3-4

For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

A testimonial to the great advances in our education system in the last 100 years.

Sometime during the last eight or ten years I read about a test given to several hundred recent college graduates from a number of different colleges. The test included questions on math, science, English, history and geography. Don’t hold me to the exact figures as I am reporting from memory, but the point remains the same. The result was: on average, more than half of the questions were answered incorrectly. None of the college grads answered more than about eighty percent correctly.

The test? It was from a 190? Minnesota school system standard requirement test for graduation from the eighth grade. To pass a student had to answer 85% or more of the questions correctly. In most years - early 1900s - more than ninety-five percent passed. Hmmmmmmm??