Stupid in America?
I’m out of touch with TV, so I missed it last year when John Stossel’s “Stupid in America” piece ran on ABC; but after seeing a link to it on Steve Dekorte’s blog, I watched it online today.
Like a lot of documentaries, it was painful to watch.
You can see it yourself on YouTube and read online summaries here and here.
One of the most awkward scenes showed hopeful families at a lottery where kids would be chosen to attend a special school in their district. Their tension suggested that the winners would have bright futures and the losers would be left behind to struggle. The randomness of the situation was sad; but even more sad was the hopelessness of families depending on a system to save their children.
As a Ph.D. technology geek married to an Ed.D. education geek, I can’t say that I have a typical family. But my wife and I weren’t raised by an academic elite. None of our parents or grandparents had four year college degrees, yet every one of them pushed us toward education. My dad’s father, a mechanic and hospital handyman, often urged me to “get all the education you can,” and my mom’s mother regularly advised, “you make your own luck”. When my wife Linda came home from school and complained about her teachers, her dad usually replied, “I don’t care about the teacher, you are the one who has to learn.”
Recently I discovered the word “autodidact” when it was used to describe Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language. It means “a person who is self taught.” The wikipedia entry on autodidacticism names many notable autodidacts: mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, scientist Michael Faraday, mythologist Joseph Campbell, even drummer Neil Peart. But that word should not just label a select few. Who can learn any hard subject without the hunger that makes us teach ourselves?
Much of our problem is that our culture doesn’t love to learn. If big brains helped our ancestors to succeed, then we’ve been bred to think and learn. So why isn’t learning as much fun as eating and sex? Maybe our expectations aren’t high enough.
I’ve quoted Eric Hoffer once before on education:
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.
Here’s another of Hoffer’s ideas, a prescription that challenges both young and old:
Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunites for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
What’s your preoccupation? Have your kids caught it yet?
Postscript
Reading other reactions, I found this insight by Godfrey Parkin:
It was only after I left school that I understood the real purpose of homework was not to keep me from going fishing, but to get my parents engaged in the education process.
Comments (2) post a reply
Tim,
Definitely not a good sign for America. The school system is lousy, and our culture reveres athletes with little to no signs of intelligence and even lower moral standards.
Even here, in Palo Alto, I’d hesitate to call our schools “great”. I know that I was certainly taught better fundamentals growing up in the Mountain West.
We’ve been sending our kids to Bellarmine Prep. for summer refreshers…just so they can get to where we think they should be for their age.
If we could afford to home school, we would. It might be something we consider when (if) my wife’s parents come to live with us.
Thanks for the link(s)!
Parkin is wrong—the real purpose of homework is to rob the students of time at home with the family and time by themselves so as to make them dependent on others and to make them compliant consumers. In the type of economy we have, the argument is that we need few critical thinkers (managers); the others are simply “trained” to be half-developed human beings, butchered by devices like homework. I don’t agree with what is happening, of course, but it’s hard to ignore the evidence. :(