Nobody Remembers the Educational Concerns of George Gallop

Nobody Remembers

When Mitt Romney lost the last election— he was shocked, and why? The ‘polls’ told him he was going to win. Even Dick Morris, a man who thrives on the science of polls, predicted Romney would win the Presidency. (Polls don’t factor in fraud, do they now?)

The polls are telling everyone now, that nobody could beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. But Obama did once before. Hillary is a lousy speaker…next to Obama, she sounded like everyone’s most hated school marm.

Polling people may be all well and good, but unless you know who DID the poll, who was asked, and how the question was framed, it’s hard to believe any of them. More often than not, polls now are pure political propaganda used to further an agenda.

So…Nobody Remembers some words lifted from a speech given by George Gallup, the granddaddy of pollsters, from a speech he gave at the University of Iowa, April 14, 1953.

Mr. Gallop was distressed about the astounding ignorance of the American people.

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“One of the real threats to America’s future place in the world is a citizenry which daily elects to be entertained and not informed. From the time the typical citizen arises and looks at his morning newspaper until he turns off his radio or television set before going to bed, he had unwittingly cast his vote a hundred times for entertainment or for education. Without his knowing it, he had helped to determine the very character of our three most important media of communication—The press, radio, and television.

The present lack of interest in the informative type of television show is shocking.

During the last war one of the sadder sights to me was to see grown men, most of them with high school or college training, poring over comic books in railroad and bus stations and apparently wholly unconcerned with the happenings in the world, which would almost certainly affect their destiny.

In a recent study of metropolitan newspapers, it was found that the average amount of time which a reader spends daily on the important news of his country and of the world is less than four minutes. He spends ten times as much time on sports, local gossip, and the service and entertainment features.

Despite the fact that we have the highest level of formal education in the world, fewer people buy and read books in this nation than in any other modern democracy. An Englishman who leaves school at the age of fourteen read about as many books as our college graduate.

The ignorance of these college graduates about the classics was overwhelming. One adult in every four throughout the country could name the two men selected as vice presidential candidates. A good many college students and former students cannot take an outline map of the United States and put their finger on the state of Illinois.

I believe that the great hope of the future must lie in our educational system. I have come reluctantly but inevitably to the conclusion that the enemies of learning at the university level are the textbook, the classroom lecture, and our course system. At Oxford for example the student is left pretty much on his own. He reports at weekly or biweekly intervals to his professor or don who offers his guidance and criticism. In this country, we lean heavily on textbooks which consist for the most part of bits and pieces of knowledge cannibalized from other textbooks. Too often he teacher in his classroom lecture, merely repeats the material covered by the textbooks, And the student, once he has memorized and then regurgitated the textbook material in a true false quiz, can forget the whole business

Obviously the whole school system, from the grades up to college, must be revised if we are to turn out a more mature product.

So in a real sense, the education of every person should begin and not end with graduation.”

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But in the end, and up to that point, Gallup still believed in the common American:

‘In the course of polling the American public over a periods of nearly two decades, I have found that our people are wonderfully endowed with what is best described as “horse sense.” The collective judgment of the people, up to this pint in history, has been extraordinarily sound. There is a mountain of evidence to prove that the public is generally right in its opinions and usually far ahead of its representatives in government.”

I wonder what Mr. Gallup would say today, don’t you?

Do the American people still have good “horse sense’ or has the horse kicked the proverbial bucket never to return?

May 22, 2014 Posted by Joyanna Adams | education, Uncategorized | education | 1 Comment