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"How can we fix that? ... demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read." The education sy
by pmoriarty 6y ago
"How can we fix that? ... demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read."
The education system needs to be radically reformed to teach kids to value reading, knowledge, and learning for its own sake and not just to pass tests and get in to schools that will get them high paying jobs. Critical reading and thinking skills also need to be taught more effectively.
Unfortunately, such reform is difficult to undertake in a society which mostly doesn't value any of that, and when politicians consider critical thinking among their voters to be detrimental to their own interests.
- vagrantJin 6y agoI agree. Its not in decision makers interest to fix education. It's a lot of work and elections won't wait for you to finish. A crap education might even be politically expedient - and I'm sure politicians have been campaigning to fix it for over 5 decades at this point.
- tryonenow 6y agoThe presumption that the average person is interested in learning, or can be taught to be interested in learning, especially regarding difficult subjects like science and math, is completely false. The average person is fundamentally incompetent and lazy, and that's the danger of excessively optimistic and unrealistically empowering western culture - you end up with an army of ignoramuses who drastically overestimate their knowledge and abilities, and simultaneously as a consequence become less able to recognize competence or it's value in, for example, politicians or authority figures. I think this is one of the major accelerants in the decay of western society, at least in the US.