Reply #26: You lost me on the last point [View All]

[Prophet 451]

I think it would be safer to assume that the 15% would split evenly between Obama and Clinton.

That aside, I have to agree. I would also add that it's too easy for ridiculous theories to be forced into school curiculums (witness the ongoing battles over evolution or read Molly Ivins acounts of Texas schooling). What disturbs me more is that American's don't read. The average American, discounting their work life, reads around 99 hours a year. For a Brit, it's slightly under four hundred; for Western Europe, it's higher still and that disparity of voices and that in-depth analysis in something which can only be done in print. I don't watch TV but I'm not automatically anti-TV and it's true that the best of TV can be classified as genuine art but the problem is that Americans watch an awful lot of TV (by far the most in the western world) and, by and large, they aren't watching the best of it. They're not watching the Discovery Channel or it's competitors, they're watching American Idol and When Porn Star Midgets On Crack Attack During Surgery Gone Wrong!.

The nature of TV (the producer tries to get a product (us) to a customer (advertisers) dictates that in-depth analysis of any issue is rare and usually confined to specialist channels. Even on the news networks, analysis is usually superficial so print is the only way to gain the mix of voices necessary for proper evaluation.

How is this related to the education system? Because by and large, people don't learn to enjoy reading in adulthood, it's instilled into them as children. I was raised by my grandmother and every Saturday, she would take myself and my sister to a local bookshop and buy us a new book. When it started, it was things like Topsy & Tim but they got more complex as time went on and that led to a love of reading which persisted my whole life (to this day, I cannot throw away a book, something in me just rebels at the thought).

Leaving aside my desire to promote reading, the main problem is that the US (and my own England) tries to do education on the cheap. We don't devote nearly enough money to it. Michael Moore made the point in one of his books (back to reading again) that the people who we entrust with a good portion of molding young minds get paid less than an entry-level civil servant, school libraries are falling apart and more and more, education is politicised. Not just on the evolution/creationcrap side but even in things like the teaching of history, civics and literature. About the only thing that hasn't been politicised is math.