It’s Cool to Learn

The other day our lovely suburban neighborhood was Rosetta Stone Spanish V3 saturated with police presence. No wailing sirens or skidding stops, but cars rolling up and down all the streets which form the perimeter around the public high school building.It was a special event, setting off fear in the hearts of officialdom that it might be exploited for vandalism and other public disturbances. Apparently long experience had informed their behavior. You never know what fuse might be ignited at such a time. In the end nothing happened and the flammable moment fizzled. What was the occasion? It was the last day of school. The police may be forgiven their presumption. Most of them grew up like me, at a time when attending school was a despised activity. We went because we had to and the notion it might be enjoyed was remote from our consciousness. School was a place of pressures, of niggling obligations, of confinement in cramped spaces, of neutered individuality, of people making themselves big by making you small, of boring information delivered by boring people. Teachers sat at the head of the class looking every bit as miserable as we felt. When the last day game we ran riotously through the schoolyard yelling: No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks! And we meant every word of it. One friend of mine since childhood, now the principal of a large school, told me in all earnestness that from first through twelfth grade he looked at his watch every five minutes on average. Rosetta Stone Italian V3 All this brings us to a fascinating observation, one which I am convinced is true. It has become a shibboleth in conservative circles to grumble about decline in education. They tell us that in Togo they know more math and in Malta more science, in Brunei we are eclipsed in language while in Ghana they outdo us in history. Here too, we hear, once stood rickety schoolhouses cobbled from planks but brimful of learning. Once folks knew the sonnets of the Bard, now we are lucky if they know Mary Had a Little Lamb, and then only if the lamb is housed in humane conditions. To which I say bunk. Todays kids know as much as we did, and they have the advantage of doing so happily.When I attended in the 1960s the same sort of Jewish parochial school my kids do today Jewish studies from 8 to 11:30, lunch, secular studies from 12:30 to 4 the teachers were permitted to spank. Even those who spared the rod were caustic in verbally flailing the weak. We lived on the defensive, moaning when the vitriol struck us, cringing when it targeted our friends. Those educators presumably meant well, but this was their sense of how wisdom is imparted: in an adversarial context, by subjugating the will of the recipient. Rosetta Stone Software Today all that is gone, at least in this country, merely an unpleasant memory. Teachers speak pleasantly, give children positive reinforcement, do a lot of politically correct mumbo-jumbo about how everyone is a winner, and allow rules to assume a frightening degree of elasticity. They send mixed messages by instituting competitions and then giving an award to most everyone. You have to stand on your own two feet, they say, unless you can only spare one and a half, or one, or a half, or none at all. And yet despite a total lack of spine and an overabundance of heart, these children know every bit as much as we did, and they do it while loving school.