From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 06:52:23 +0800
To: David Kline <dkline@well.com>
Subject: Re: Dry Under the Waterfall
Message-ID: <2.2.32.19960730180444.0086bcf8@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 08:57 AM 7/30/96 -0700, David Kline wrote:

>A question though: What about the 3 million hard-working, reading, 
>middle-class folks who have been downsized into oblivion the last three 
>years alone? What about the tens of millions of readers who had the skills
>needed for the industrial age, but not for the information age?

I mean actual ability to read and write *meaningfully*.  Not the official
"literacy" handed out in thousands of local institutions designed to produce
mental retardation in this country.  It is a skill almost are capable of
(most had it in 1856 -- we know this because we can read the Lincoln-Douglas
debates), but monopoly government institutions can no more make genuine
literacy than they can make decent steel.

>Well, change means pain, and we'll get to the millennium one way or 
>another. But we can do it the hard way or the easy way. The hard way 
>means severe social dislocation, possibly even threats to democracy. The 
>easy way seems the smarter approach -- no serious effort at reforming 
>education and at skills retraining has ever been undertaken, and it seems 
>a better use of our tax dollars than most of the crap it's spent on now.

H.L. Mencken (always an optimist) said that a significant improvement in the
quality of American education could only be achieved if you dynamited all
the schools and shot all the teachers.

Whether that is true or not.  The governments have had the minds of our
children since 1870 or so.  If they haven't done a better job than this
perhaps it is time to retire them.

DCF