Dumbing down doesn't help

Two FB posts intersected this past week and caused me to groan loudly. The first was an article describing a list of words the NYC Department of Education thinks should be banned from standardized tests. Okay. Maybe they planned to get rid of every 7 syllable word under the erroneous belief that students would not know what they mean. Nope. Turns out words like divorce, disease, poverty, and dinosaur. And the reasons were unbelievable. They might upset a child who did not believe in dinosaurs or didn't celebrate a particular day, such as a birthday, or may have a sick relative.

The second post was an image of President Obama carrying a book as he boarded a plane. The post asked friends to send it on to at least 20 others, with the clear connotation there was something horribly wrong with the photo. And what was that horror? Our president was carrying a copy of Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. 

 These seem to signal a deep-seated mistrust of words and ideas. How can we be expected to function in a world-wide society if we actively court the level of ignorance that would have our children protected from actual words and our president dumbing down his reading list? I'm afraid that active fear of ideas is part of the reason there is such a schism in American society today.

A third event, only tangentially related, but troubling nevertheless... This semester a student objected to the "liberal crap" I was asking students to read. He took his concerns to his father who then took them to the vice president of instruction. The irony is that the text being used was only an example, and students were asked to examine and challenge the writing, not to accept it. The student chose to drop the class rather than be exposed to such unacceptable ideas.

Derek Sivers' unique perspective

This is the coolest way of interrupting my thinking!

"There are doctors in China," [Sivers] says, "who believe it is their job to keep you healthy. So any month you are healthy, you pay them. Any month you are sick, you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job. They get rich when you are healthy, not sick."

Changes...

For the few of you who ever stumble across my thoughts, it seems appropriate to point out the changes that are happening on this blog. It started out as a space for my classes and for posts about education. Now I find that I'm posting more about the events and ideas I find most disturbing in today's world.

Recently had a student drop a class because of all the "liberal crap" I was teaching. Since when is teaching people how to read and write "crap"? It is dangerous, of course, to those who would prefer not to think or not to have their own ideas challenged, but that's tough. I'm proud to "live conservatively but think liberally".

So, who am I? I am a woman, wife, mother, Latter Day Saint, and an American. I am proud to be each of these things because they combine to inform my personal values. I value fairness and honesty and compassion, and much of what I find most disturbing in the world is because those characteristics are missing.

Worried about women

It's nearly impossible, especially for those of us who came through the battles to make birth control the province of women, to envision the vitriolic turn in the politics of womanhood. The double standard is alive and well and becoming sufficiently powerful to effect a return to oppressive regulation that should not even be a question on political radar. How dare a woman want control over her own life?! How dare a woman think birth control should be insured just as Viagra and other such drugs are for men?!

Cynthia Beard has done an exemplary job of articulating what I feel but have been unable to write. I hope that everyone will read and consider her thoughts carefully.