Bill Gates is Right
There is no value in being stupid. Illiteracy bears no dividends. Then why does America worship illiteracy and cringe from intelligence like a barefoot maiden attacked by a sadistic field mouse? This bothers Bill Gates a great deal and it bothers me.
Bill Gates, whose charitable foundation has given away more than $3 billion since 1999 for educational programs and scholarships, noted that about 30 percent of U.S. ninth-graders fail to graduate on time. "As a nation, we should start with this goal: Every child in the United States graduating from high school," he said.
A federal study released last month showed about a third of high schoolers fail to take a standard-level curriculum, which is defined as including at least four credits of English and three credits each of social studies, math and science.
"We simply cannot sustain an economy based on innovation unless our citizens are educated in math, science and engineering," Gates said.
As long as the culture and news media of the United States continues to consider being smart as an aberrant "geeky" thing on par with halitosis, this country is in deep trouble.
This country celebrates non-intelligent people who deliberately choose to not be intelligent. Hence, Dear Leader.
When your local newspaper employs more reporters to cover high school sports than to cover old people going without food or heat, something is deeply wrong.
This administration has declared war on science. It is no different than the Catholic bishops who ordered Galileo to deny and renounce what he saw with his eyes through a telescope aimed at Jupiter.
FOX news is the official network of those medieval bishops. FOX news wants our young children to put down their science books and spend their time instead cheering on their favorite Black NASCAR star.
And look at the reasult of that sort of education - Ann Coulter (who obviously got her world view while watching The Simpsons)
But what we gonna do? Drag people like Ruppy Murdock out behind the barn and beat him senseless with a stick? That wont work, he's ALREADY senseless.
The 30% drop out rate sounds alarming. But the year I graduated from highschool (65) the rate was 37%. 5% of that figure was seniors 17 and older who had their first brush with the law and were given a choice by a Judge to seek induction into the Hall of Horrors (Vietnam) or juvenile detention. On the other hand, the high rate of graduates who went on to college was not due to a love of learning, but an avoidance of meeting up with those same ruffians in DaNang. A love of learning played no more role in one's choices then than it makes today.
Today a highschool diploma is worth zilch in the job market. Sure it might help you get your first job, but by 25 the dropout and graduate are making close to the same pay. The real difference in earning power (as far as education is concerned) is the college degree. Yet how many highschool kids either drop out or (more substantially) take sluff courses simply because they know they'll never get a shot at college? Would making a college degree more affordable, or even free, create more and better educated highschool graduates. Of course it would.
We live in Reagan's shadow, in a society that rewards greed as the only virtue worth pursuing. That indeed spurs the ambitious on to better education. But, paradoxically, it also means that society is hostile to having all of it's greedly little hoards raided to fund education. Too bad, ALL of those kids are going to need an education to be able to figure out how they are going to pay for our retirement, let alone make the money to do it. Grasshoppers reap what grasshoppers sow.
March 8, 2007 5:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Kache, the line about 'Ruppy Murdock' is hilarious. (The rest is well-put, too.)
War does not determine who is right - only who is left. Bertrand Russell
March 8, 2007 9:26 AM | Reply | Permalink