Anguished Swan Songs from All of Our Slippery Rocks
Reader comment on item: More on the North Carolina Jihadi, Mohammed Taheri-azar

Submitted by Lucky O'Daly (United States), Apr 12, 2006 at 07:12

Education, like love, is more and more where we find it. What of value would be lost if our personal computers were to replace all of our brick'nblock Slippery Rocks?

[1] Breadth and depth of higher education? As always, at home or on campus, broad and deep and inspired education will appear when ready students seek it.

[2] The colleges' silent promise that graduates will enjoy lives of quite safe separation from our underclass -- a strata that our very best spiritualists, statesmen, AND economists have most passionately urged us to 'bring along'. Yes, "AND economists"!!: What costs our economy more than new adults who have not been successfully prepared to become honest earners?

[3] Teaching techniques that are logistically required to serve the brains that are at the center of the learning-ability bell curve -- at the cost of ignoring [and so belittling] gifted and difficult brains at both ends.

[4] The influence on young minds of all the profs who catch the highly contagious disease of tenured [!] cloistered comfy living and outlook.

[5] The affliction of eliteness that -- by force of frat life, hazing, "Skull and Bones" type clubs of all levels of dumbness, campus ambience itself, and administrations gone tweedy in the brain with "hallowed" this, and "hallowed" that -- so tins the ears of students to real life as to now leave the nation with brains and marketing skills that are -- on their faces -- not competitive with Asia.
[Witness our last pair of 'skull'nboned' presidential candidates.]

[6] Ivy, lots and lots of ivy.

Please see that all of the above troubles with brick'nblock education do NOT plague the wondrous campus that is now in most homes / libraries. Now let's study on turning our [misnamed] high schools into honest day care centers, and let our teachers become cyber-coaches to encourage and guide the natural curiosities of our teens. What then about parental involvement? Whew! Beats me.

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