It is an odd thing that many young people are being told that higher education is possibly irrelevent at the very moment Americans need to pull up their collective boots and work harder than ever before. This is a historical moment that calls for gumption, wit, brains, and what we used to call "Mother Courage". My own people, the Finns call it "Sisu"–a word that combines stamina and fierce determination. In any event I was put in mind of the aforementioned oddity when I read today a headline over at NPR that says only 1 in 4 American high school students is ready for college at graduation. This is a story that doesn't seem to go away.
I am not a Ph.D. in Education and I'm not a policy wonk. I like to think of myself as a citizen educator–an academic with a passion for ideas and teaching. Like all university faculty who care about teaching I like to think of myself as having a young spirit–a contrarian's spirit, for the thing that scholars and young people share is the desire to ask why and how circumstances happen. Accordingly it seems to me that the NPR headline signifies that young people in American high schools are being bleached of their curiosities. This in the age of intellectual explosion! In a time when post-molecular medicine is locating the genes that cause hereditary blindness and when ophthalmologists can look forward to a near future when certain kinds of eye disease are a thing of the past. These are tremendously exciting times. One may fair surmise that if young people are not experiencing curiosity in this, the most electrifying age in the history of ideas, then perhaps our nation's academies aren't getting their stories "out enough" as they say in the vernacular.
I'd hazard that these United States could use a Works Progress Administration for the dissemination of remarkable ideas for young people. Again, as they say in the vernacular, "I'm just sayin'"
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 