Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

When is a Vidalia onion not a Vidalia onion?

Tucked inside that seemingly simple question is the state of our citizens and their children’s future.

You might scoff at this, but recently, we went to the grocery store. On our list were onions. When my wife stopped in the onions section, she saw a sign indicating Vidalia onions. She picked up two because that is the only type she likes, but she knows January is not Vidalia season.

Now, there are many good reasons why she shops for groceries, one of which is that she reads labels, signs, ingredients, and cash register receipts. I, on the other hand, just grab what looks right and move along.

As she read the label stuck on each onion, she learned that those onions came to our grocery store from Peru in Central South America. She knows that Vidalia onions are grown in only one place–the region around Vidalia, Georgia, USA. Even I, the grocery store rube, know that if it’s not from Vidalia, it’s not a Vidalia onion.

We acquire knowledge by being exposed to facts and information. Reading is how children and adults sop up information to store away in their brains.

U.S. test scores have now been released, and the results aren’t good. In fact, they are really bad. Foreboding, they are. (To imply that something bad is going to happen.)

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills was 33 percent, the largest it has been in the last 30 years.

A most telling fact is that a fourth-grader who scores “below basic” is incapable of sequencing events from a story or describing the effects of a character’s actions.

As we enter what could be the biggest undermining of public education funding in our history, both on a state and national basis, reading comprehension is dropping like a rock in an abandoned well. As children fall further behind in comprehension ability, they become more susceptible to myths, conspiracies, movies, gaming and social media “influencers.”

A slightly different but equally true story showing clearly where we are headed came to me recently. One evening, a local couple out for dinner overheard a teacher telling her tablemates about a school experience. At the end of a class, the teacher asked each student as they left the room what they would like to be when they grow up.

Out of a standard-size classroom, seven said, “An assassin.”

Not farmer, police officer, firefighter, teacher, EMT, or even doctor or lawyer. Assassin. That should make adults shudder.

But what about the adults?

An American Enterprise Institute education researcher, Nat Malkus, has reported that the decline in children’s performances is matched in the tests of adult skills over the same time period.

There are those who scoff at this decline or even poo-poo the importance of reading comprehension. They believe education is overrated, especially college education. They point to themselves and their success in making money without more than a rudimentary education and say, “Who needs it?”

The fact of the matter is that, as a country, we need to be more educated in a broad fashion so that we can understand what is happening and why it is happening. Otherwise, we will continue dropping like the rock in the well.

Larry McDermott is a local retired farmer/journalist. Reach him at hardscrabblehollow@gmail.com