Picking Up Connectivity, But Losing Knowledge
An erudite man is less prone to the charms of propaganda that politicians routinely inflict on people to win their votes. Hence, politicians wanting to improve education is an oxymoron.
It is de rigueur in politics to sing paeans to accountability in education that is based on standardized test scores. Such posturing, however, is politically safe, because these measures merely erect a facade of scholarship and literacy.
Education poses no threat to politicians so long as students are trained to pick their answers from four or five choices on questions whose likes have been paraded before them throughout the year.
The real danger to the political ambitions of the inferiorly qualified arises when students stray outside the rails to turn a few pages from, say, Emerson, Voltaire or Thoreau.
Judging from H.L. Mencken’s comments, it would seem that mediocrity has long been the goal of public education in our country.
He wrote: “And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point.”
Sham politicians have other dynamics working for them.
A burgeoning entitlement class used to extensive, long-term handouts promises to show no desire to unsettle the status quo, even if the benefactors are less than honorable people.
So it comes to pass that in the guise of helping the poor and the disenfranchised, the yoke of government perpetuates the slavery of mediocrity and poverty.
The other friend of rogue politicians is technology. The new obsession with cellphones and social networking leaves little time for reading a newspaper article, an essay, or a book. It is so much easier to swallow a capsule of information someone posts on Facebook than it is to gain personal insight with independent research.
Before some acerbic antagonist flings a brick in my direction, I hasten to add that I am not a Luddite, but merely someone who sees inexorable addiction to technological gadgets abetting a climate of anti-intellectualism that infects America today.
During my college years in Calcutta, it was common practice for groups of students to gather at tea stalls and coffee shops in the evenings to discuss the day’s events, to talk about football (soccer) and cricket, and to pontificate about world issues.
Our daily ritual, which went by the name “adda,” was a veritable feast of ideas and opinions.
Today, when I see groups of students at fast-food eateries or at the mall, their conversations appear to be mostly with their cellphones. When there are interactions, the cellphone is still cynosure, as students share images or text messages that have popped up on the screen.
Technology has brought the world closer, for sure, but only in terms of connectivity, not knowledge.
“To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr.
In other words, teach children to think for themselves with salient and useful information that has been tested to eliminate apocrypha and prejudice.
There is not one child out there who would not embrace and be energized by a quality education.
That is what makes the accountability game as it is played today pathetic and tragic.
