In Nineteen hundred forty-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
That makes Her Highness still quite young; (if Isabella only knew).
The nation's students no longer care how or why we got here,
When they're tested on those facts, the answers come out queer.
Hard to keep the facts all straight. Are Arabs fighting Jews?
Some thought it was over in Ireland. (They heard it on Faux news ! )
Some might know that Hitler was one of history's vermin,
But it's difficult for some to fathom, that Adolf wasn't German.
Listing all those presidents of ours? Boy! there must be dozens!
Two of them were Clevelands. (They probably were cousins)!
Placing them in order from 1940 is a task that’s really rankling,
How does one remember where to place Benjamin Franklin?
Who invented the automobile? Wasn't it Henry Ford?
Giving answers such as these, it's no wonder students scored
So low on high school exams. How did so many Cuban regals
End up in Miami, Florida? They couldn’t possibly all be illegals?
This country's knowledge base must grow. Our future on it rests,
We need to instill learning goals to achieve educational quests.
Aggressively seize the initiative. Turn out kids who are smarter,
Show them that to be a success, they need to work much harder.
We had an “education” President to be used as a rule of thumb,
We could have used his own good example to prove this premise some.
George W. Bush wishes he'd studied more and done a lot less frattin'
For when he visited Latin America, he would have been able to speak some Latin!
Copyright © 2013 by Frank Koerner
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Still and all, your satire is smack dab on the money, and too, too funny!
Roger
Aside from the laughs that I had while reading this, your poem is fine satire. Since Socrates, we have been lamenting the failure of youth to learn. In my long tenure in higher education, I noticed a gradual grade inflation (only professors who gave good grades became teachers of the year) that has almost matched the rate of salary inflation for higher ups.
World knowledge is probably expanding faster than population. We can't expect our young people to parrot facts––like in standardized tests––and find that they are brilliant because they know a lot of facts. The result of all this testing has been that teachers are forced to teach the test and the students are forced to memorize a lot of facts without understanding a lot of underlying (particularly historical) information. Hence, school history books are boiled down to a nice little myths about people like Columbus, George Washington, and the like, that bear none of the reality of their life and times.
In the twenty first century, we must teach our children how to learn and how to think critically among all the myriad opportunities and distractions they are faced with.
I don't know everything and don't really have enough room in my brain to. So I conveniently Google what I need to know, and viola! I have an answer.
Ron