Just back from a driving trip through Colorado and stopping along the way to visit with old friends, at least those still alive. We had interesting conversations centered around education and economics. You can learn a lot by listening to people rather than arguing with them. At each stage the final perplexing question was if you were the king of America how would you solve this problem. The silence that followed indicated that no one had a suggestion as to a silver bullet.
Thinking about what is different today compared with 60 years ago is one word, READING. They also used to say writing and arithmetic but if you can read, then one can learn the other two. Back then nearly every family took a newspaper and when men got home from work, one of their evening tasks was to pore over the daily newspaper. Armed with this information they were able to carry on conversations with other people about events from local to world events. When kids went off to school they were relentlessly drilled on the ABC’s and spelling along with books called readers. The teachers then called on each student to read out loud which told them who needed more drilling. Each class had a small library of books available to the students. Today, 33% of all students that leave high school never pick up another book and 38% of college graduates never read another book. Yet all have an I phone that they are texting night and day and reviewing their social feed every few minutes and worrying if someone is putting something negative about them in the electronic world making them depressed.
Without reading it is easy to believe what anyone tells you and more and more people belong to that group of people referred to by Lincoln “some of the people you can fool all the time”
