Education Kills

In my last post I mentioned exactly how upset I am with the fact that many (not all) readers are getting complacent, and thus there is a rather large proliferation of typographical excrement being bestowed upon the unsuspecting masses – if you prefer – there’s a ton of shit in the slush pile. I’m not really an expert, but I do have some theories as to why this is happening.

Firstly, as the title suggests, education is destroying minds, one year at a time. Recent changes in the education system mean that kids are getting dumber by design, are having to work less, and are being passed with failing grades. All of my classes have some amazingly smart people, but are also home to some absolute wonders of human futility. Permit me to demonstrate an example from my math class:

S = 25 + 0.45S (Solve for S, if math isn’t your strong suit don’t worry, I’ll explain it in a second.)

The answer is that S = 13.75. (Bring the 0.45S across the equation and subtract from S, which is actually 1S, then do more crap that you probably don’t care about.) The point I’m belaboring is that this math would have been taught somewhere around 11th grade, if not sooner. More than half of the class had to be re-taught. This applies to almost all of my classes, disturbingly enough, my English class falls prey to this as well.

Schools aren’t teaching a love of books (or any subject, for that matter) and it shows. My Lit teacher must constantly ask “who read the story?” Invariably, only about half the class has done so. What’s the problem, assholes? Sure, some of the fiction can be pretty dry (the choice of newer stories pales in comparison to the classics included), but it’s by no means the bottom of the slush pile. The folks that do read are left to “help” the folks that didn’t, and frankly it’s ridiculous and wrong. (Lit prof actually agreed with me, told my group to think for themselves.) I do believe that educators need to take a better approach to teaching, wait…they need to take a more modern approach to teaching. The world is changing, the classics aren’t exactly regarded as such by people with little to no passion for reading (I actually cringed while thinking about certain classmates reading The Murders In The Rue Morgue), and since the trend seems to lean toward the degeneration of the educated mind, adaptations are needed. Sadly though, I don’t think they’re coming. As higher education becomes more of a business than a barometer, sooner or later we’re going to see functionally illiterate idiots getting college degrees.

I’m getting a bit ranty, but this has been bugging me for years, believe it or not. So after a deep breath and that giant wall of text, I’m going to end off by begging that we all do our part to make reading as accessible and fun as possible. In my next post I’m going to chat about society, and I may get a little punk rock, who knows?