AMERICA'S SCHOOLS
I saw a headline in several web pages today that said that a quarter of Americans don't know that the earth circles the sun and that half don't believe in evolution. The second part of that does not surprise me, considering the religious primitivism (i.e., snake handlers dying of snake bites -- also in today's news) found throughout the States.
That first part though kinda astounded me.
Thinking about it I guess that's probably about right. I think back on my high school class and about a quarter of them were more than functionally illiterate but flat-out illiterate, after spending most of their waking hours in schoolrooms since they were six.
The thing about primary and secondary education in the states is that it serves to educate the elite and to baby-sit the others, so the parents can have jobs. Teachers naturally gravitate to the smarter harder working students and try to ignore the others, or at least keep the disturbances they cause to a minimum, and think, rightly, that trying to get them to learn something is so contrary to the anti-intellectual culture of not just their peers but their families and neighborhoods, that there is no point.
So America produces the best doctors and engineers and lawyers and artists and designers and architects and even educators, in the meantime leaving a huge chunk uneducated and perfectly happy with themselves being that way.
The only thing that gets me is that in a democracy those people are encouraged to vote, and where a political machine is in place, in a close election, they do vote.
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