Education is a field hospital, where the little troops are patched up and turned round and sent back to fight in the great economic war that seems to be all that’s left of life.
via m.guardian.co.uk
The above comes from an interesting opinion piece in the Guardian about how a lack of language teaching makes us less interested in growing as people, as a people and as a culture. Essentially, the author describes a self-fulfilling prophecy—where you cut a program that actually encourages participants to learn. Therefore, they are less interested in learning. So, not only do they not learn the subject that was cut, but they learn less, over all.
I agree—this is why I’ve been studying Japanese on my own for ten years. I still suck at it, but I feel like I benefit from it as an artist and as a person even if I haven’t gone there yet and have no friends who speak it, as a native. I feel that it has helped me want to learn more in general, too.
But this post is filed under “the Absurd Disconnect” once again (it’s tAD day at ws666, apparently), since the author of the Guardian piece points out the sadly and painfully obvious—that all that this world has left is a “great economic war.”
I’m not slamming the author, Michael Hoffman, for “only now” figuring this out, since it hadn’t fully occurred to me, either—but the evidence is all around us. We’re barely going into space, we’re barely exploring the oceans, we’re not creating brilliant works of art, curing cancer, or going after world peace—most of us are just plugging along (or trying to), making our money and having lives that range from “not that sucky” to “pretty sucky.”
The Absurd Disconnect comes in with all of us for ignoring this sad reality and going about our business.
