As we get more deeply into the fall semester here at the Manoa campus, to quote the late, great Yogi Berra, it’s “déjà vu all over again.”

One of my colleagues just wrote me: “As part of the curriculum in my second year foreign language course, students must learn the names of countries. In order to test students I use a blind world map.”

He went on to say that he had a 24-year-old student who thought Brazil and Chile were in Central America and couldn’t locate a single European country. When he asked her to locate New Zealand, she pointed to Iceland. Auwe!

But you should know, most of our students are not stupid at all, just bone ignorant – especially those who come to us from the Hawaii public school system.

PF Bentley/Civil Beat

And they also often are so absorbed in their friends, their phones, and their pop music that they walk around unaware of their surroundings. I am always afraid that they will bump into trees on campus or get run over by one of our legion of skate-boarders, because they are looking down at their iPhone screens and plugged into their ear-phones while going between classes (and so are some of the skate-boarders).

Nowadays (in contrast to, say, any time before 1980) a majority of incoming UHM students are generally unprepared for university level work – particularly unprepared in three areas (beyond critical thinking, which is a major sore spot in U.S. society in general):

• history (what happened before last week and anywhere outside of Hawaii and the West Coast of the U.S., except in the world of celebrity entertainment and/or sports)

• geography (where anyplace is, outside of Hawaii and the West Coast of the U.S. — and even then)

• and the ability to read, write, or construct a sequential paragraph in the English language.

You think I’m kidding?

What I do is deliver the basics as described in the course syllabus as best I can, hope to inspire those who actually want to learn, and expect little else beyond hoping they do well on the exams, so I can give them a decent grade before they move on. When I do happen to be lucky enough to get some well-prepared and eager-to-learn students (and I get a couple each semester), I devote my time and energies to giving them every opportunity I can possibly provide. And I keep in touch with them as long as I can be of help, often even after graduation.

OK, I also run across students who are “consumers,” who think that “the customer is always right.” These are the students whose attitude is “it’s not my job to learn — it’s your job to teach me, OK?” Those guys I make every effort to instruct in a couple of life’s important reality lessons.

So what to do? As with many state universities, there are no campus entrance exams per se for admission to UHM – if you’ve managed to graduate from high school with a C+ average, taken a short list of college prep courses, and gotten a mediocre score on the SAT or ACT, you’re in. To get through the typical Hawaii public high school with a C+ basically means you’ve scored 98.6 on the Fahrenheit scale and are sentient at least eight hours per day.

But Hawaii is not unique, alas.

If the United States as a whole is ever to catch up with Japan and Singapore or any of the Western European countries in educational achievement at the university level, we may have to require what is already the case in the UK and France, which is a year between secondary and higher ed, a year in which students must prepare and be tested to make sure they are ready for prime time.

Otherwise it’s not only a waste of time and public funds, it’s totally unfair to our students themselves and their future in a highly competitive 21st century global economy.