Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Calculating the Price of Ignorance

I just realized, this is the 2,100th of these I’ve penned. If you’ve read them all, or at all for that matter, you have my gratitude (otherwise I’m back to the sound of one hand clapping and other activities for which only one hand is used) and, in no small part, my sympathy.

That you are able to read them at all (willing is another matter entirely) is due to the efforts of someone, somewhere at some time teaching you how to read, and hopefully to think. I’m not sure we’ve traded those skills in for feathers and beads, not just in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, but year round across our culture and society.

I really wanted this to be a joke, preferably something that was delightfully tongue in cheek, brilliant, refined, wickedly acerbic, inspired, terrific tomfoolery, and whatever other superlatives you care to supply. 

Instead it is, as near as I can determine, a collection of actual responses and answers developed as part of the pedagogical exchange between teachers and students. I get nauseous when confronted by the totality of ignorance on display.

Our children were born and raised in another country on another continent so I don’t really have a good guess (which is why I welcome yours) on where a moron who thought the following was taught….“foreign countries ejaculate emissions and pollutions to China in order to keep only themselves clean.” I cannot even parse that much less grasp it.

In case we haven’t noticed, The American Century was the previous and not our current one. Not sure how many of us you think are going to be able to make a living as a Solid Gold Dancer, or as a PED’d professional athlete, but my money is on the Dave Thomas Retail Associate career path because when we regard education in these United States, from pre-school to post-doctoral, as little more than warehousing, we need to start to practice making the Big Fries (shakes pretty much make themselves).

As Patrick Henry (nearly) so famously said, per one of these best and brightest, “Get me library or dead.” Let me help you with that queue at the window ledge. Wouldn’t want anyone breaking your fall

-bill kenny

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