Even more troubling for the “learning” story, however, is the fact that even when useful material is taught, students don’t retain it long enough to apply it later in life. They may cram well enough to pass their final exams, but if they’re given the same exam years later, they won’t do much better than students who never took the class. For example, while most high school students must take two years of a foreign language, less than 7 percent of adults report that they can speak a foreign language better than “poorly” as a result of schooling (and less than 3 percent can speak it “well”). In
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