It's so nice to be a student again! Although we've had a lot of life lessons and cultural lessons over the last few years, we haven't really had any academic lessons. The great thing about classes is that they require you to read and think about materials you otherwise might never pick up. Here's a sampling of things we've read (individually) and discussed (together) in the last couple of weeks:
- Dylan read Savage Inequalities, by Jonathan Kozol, for his education class. It takes a very pessimistic outlook on education in America, noting especially the policy of paying for public schools through property taxes which leads to already advantaged neighborhoods having the best funded schools. This system is notoriously difficult to change because of course no one wants to give up any of the money coming into their school or pay extra money that would go to some other unrelated school. Hm.
- Christiy read Purple Hibsiscus, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for an Africa focused summer reading assignment. Adichie, a Nigerian, has written several award-winning novels set in both Nigeria and America. Purple Hibiscus tells the story of a young girl raised in an abusive home who learns to open up when she goes to stay with her aunt and cousins. The backdrop is a politically unstable and repressive Nigeria, which eventually forces the girl's aunt to immigrate to America. Beautifully written.
- Dylan read "A Mathematician's Lament," by Paul Lockhart, for a math class. This article laments that modern culture has turned math into a series of uninteresting formulas to memorize rather than the art it should be. He compares the loss to what it would be like if we required everyone to take music classes not to learn to play but to learn all the notations and rules without sound. Click here to link to the article. I read just the first five pages and found it really interesting.
- Christiy read "Making it in America," by Adam Davidson, for an economics class. Did you know that in the past decade manufacturing output in the United States has actually gone up by one third and yet, at the same time, employment in manufacturing has gone down by a third? Davidson explains that the level of technical ability required to work in a factory has drastically changed. Gone are the days when you could be hired to do a simple push-button job and then rise up through the company. There are some simple jobs left, but to jump from there to the next level, you probably need a degree in computer science. As Davidson says, this is good news for anyone in America with a degree. Not so much for everyone else.
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