Reply #120: Whoa!

[Raejeanowl]

Welcome to the Dark Ages.

My answer to the stats is that I know one of the families purchasing the other 20% of the books VERY WELL INDEED.

You know, I was involved in a thread yesterday where I and several other posters thought the OP might have been just a little guilty of unnecessarily bragging on his own impressive I.Q. corollary to a point about average intelligence. Our jabs for inserting his self-pride into a redundant comparison were met with cries of "anti-intellectualism!"

I thought that was merely amusing, whereas this story is the real thing, and totally appalling. The "arrogance of ignorance," is becoming a millennial social philosophy that (curiously) even celebrates itself in books and folklore; books its own hapless converts might struggle to read once they are socially promoted and graduated out of school. Had I taken the opposite tack in the example given above, I'm sure adherents of this brainwashing program would have accused me of elitism. I ain't no snob, either.

We're not talking about the "Get a brain, morans!" kind of petty ridicule we earn ourselves over unfortunate, embarrassing, lazy or inadvertent mistakes, but the mindset of the person who accuses his boss of being anal retentive and gets fired because the boss dares to expect consistent mathematical accuracy, or the auto mechanic who gets angry when his tickets are repeatedly rejected by the office because there is no repair code for "fixed breaks," or the college student who thinks her professor is just being petty when she is docked two full grades on a history paper because it is poorly constructed, horribly punctuated, and barely readable.

Technology and the virtual universe are obviously not improving our preparation for the real world to any significant degree; they have yet to fulfill their initial promise as an educational tool.

Are you as annoyed as I am by Internet shorthand evolving into a "real" written language, cashiers who can't make change without electronics, so-called journalists who can't spell or construct a coherent sentence, students who know every level of the hottest video game but can't do effective research for homework, and posters who are lost without spell-check but still don't bother using it? Are you as saddened by kids who can't do everyday math in their heads or on paper without a calculator or tell you what countries comprise North America? Are you as disgusted and frightened by the lowest-common-denominator, brain junk-food popularity of printed tabloids and trashy "reality" television programming? Yes, I know I digress a little; but I suspect it's all part of the same disease: Ernest-In-Earnest Syndrome. Cultural entropy.

Forgive me for being a product of a generation where college was not expected or even necessary for all, but then, a high school education also used to be a valuable basic education for everyone except "the professions" and "the skilled trades." Rather than leaving no children behind, perhaps we should concentrate more on leaving no children without, and adopt another paradigm for school completion requirements.