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(So the laptop is acting up again at the most inopportune time. Oh well, I did have a topic in mind for this evening so we'll see how this goes!)
I've been thinking lately about the entire topic of education in light not only of Fla. Governor Ron DeSantis's attack on the Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum but just...all of it.
How did we get from the Sputnik moment and John Kennedy's proclaiming at Rice University in 1962 that:
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
...to a President of the United States proclaiming that "I love the poorly educated" and to a state legislature ready to pass a bill banning the teaching of scientific theories? (How will we ever go to Mars or even the Moon if students don't learn scientific theories?) The arts and humanities have been under attack for decades. Civics education...I can increase the list.
I know many of the reasons; racism and the fact that Black and Brown people have more and better access to getting a college education, overall increases in college costs, the inability to find a job in the field one studies, the unwillingness to go through job retraining for new and current and employment, are among them.
I mean...people are proud of having anti-vaccine sentiments, for example, and "doing their own research" into all matter of bullshit. And it is costing lives. (I know this personally from a first cousin who died from COVID because he bought into the anti-vax and even some QAnon bullshit.
Many of "the poorly educated" ain't bringing no Promethean fire nowadays; the fire that builds civilizations.
I wasn't raised like that. I received more education at home than in school...and a major portion of that education was by "the poorly educated."
My grandmother only had a third grade education. But I am indebted to her because of the fact that she had done a lottery "numbers rundown" for as long as I remember (even before the time Michigan had a state lottery). Reportedly, I learned how to count, add, and subtract (and possibly multiply) just by observing her, asking questions, and her teaching me. And I mean, she did some tic-tac-toe stuff with the numbers; was she unknowingly introducing to rudimentary matrices long before 11th grade algebra?
I've always had a love for and the facility to do math because of a woman with a third grade education, no doubt.
I would spend summers over my grandfather's house; a man who grew up in Columbus, Georgia under Jim Crow and made a living doing all sorts of things when he came north to Detroit during the Great Migration. All I know is that I was meant to do none of those things that I saw. The Sunday morning news shows were required TV and they spawned my interest in politics.
(After the Sunday shows, we would watch football and I will never forget this snotty looking white kid about my age predicting football games...it was before the Lions-Colts game in '77 which he got wrong and I got right! I did think of a career as a Vegas bookie at one and even nowadays...my cousin reminded me of my facility for all types of stats a couple of months ago.)
What better way to learn the close reading of text than through close reading of The Bible, as I was taught by my aunt. She graduated from high school, but she's no fancy academic-type person or anything.
The so-called "poorly educated" educated me, in small part, bringing what Promethean fire that they could.
Kids nowadays should be so fortunate but fewer and fewer of them are. Which is really sad.
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