People are declaring that the US system of education is broken. All right, people; you get a star sticker. And You get a Star, and You get a star! (Just kidding!)
These days I worry about how to sequence my thoughts, to take into account reader fatigue. Can you believe this? But a diatribe on US Exceptionalism was not what I wanted to draw your attention to.
One thing that I thought was good was the idea of referendums. You put these questions on ballots, and people get to express their opinions on the matter. But the questions, depending on how subtle they are, need to be phrased carefully. But it's my belief that citizens are gradually losing the ability to understand tricky language. Think about that.
Those who formulate questions for referendums are going to increasingly be able to phrase them in such ways as to confuse voters into voting exactly the way they do not feel. Some young people are only comfortable communicating in emojis. I mean, consider that they feel the need to have even secret meetings in a meeting app.
But seriously, though in certain quarters, reading at a high level is taken for granted, in other quarters, reading too much gets a child condemned by its peers as elitist, and blackballed by the parents of kids who are "emoji learners," to coin a phrase, and many school boards aren't happy about making demands of their darling children!
I think Henry Ford is indirectly to blame for the failure of US education. It works fine in the Third World, where kids can be brow-beaten into learning tough material in their large classes. In the US, though, education doesn't lend itself to economies of scale. US kids know their rights.
Arch
No comments:
Post a Comment