I made some comments over on Scott Dyson’s blog.  (Scott’s post is the genesis for these ideas.)  I’d like to amplify on them here and next week.  To summarize bluntly: reading in America is in trouble.  Maybe in the rest of the world too, but it’s clear that we’re in trouble here.  Let’s consider some numbers.

I’ve upped my presence on Goodreads lately.  Forget Facebook; Goodreads is where the readers are.  Authors too, but they’re second-class citizens for the GR team, and justifiably so.  My goal is to entertain readers.  To the extent that authors are also readers, I can entertain them too, but my goal is to reach out to readers.  (Warning to authors: All those writing groups you belong to won’t help you find readers.)

I can’t help but notice the numbers on Goodreads.  Three of the groups I belong too are huge!  Goodreads Authors/Readers has 21,534 members last I checked (why isn’t it Readers/Authors?); the Mystery, Crime, and Thriller Group has 12, 682; and the Sci-fi and Fantasy Book Club has 14,187.  Given that there’s probably some overlap (me, for example), those numbers represent a PR and marketing teams’ dream.  (Warning to them: PR and marketing efforts are frowned upon in GR and are generally relegated to only certain sections of a group’s list of discussions…and justifiably so.)

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Teachers’ unions and evaluations, Common Core, SAT reform, charter schools…education has been making the news lately.  In a week-ago Sunday’s NY Times magazine, there’s an article about Common Core champion and SAT reformer Dave Coleman.  He calls for data-based reform, a strange clarion call from a non-scientist who admittedly studied things generally considered impractical.  For the needed overhaul of our educational system, what works?  What doesn’t?  Not only here, but outside the U.S.  Coleman basically ignores the latter, by the way, committing the usual Ptolemaic sin of thinking that the U.S. is the center of the educational universe and looking for the epicycles to fix it within the same system.

The balance for the U.S. is negative, of course; the balance for everywhere else isn’t.  Our graduates rank far below many countries we compete with.  Is this a bad thing?  Is it possible that we’re right and the rest of the world is wrong?  Maybe the rest of the world is producing unthinking students who can’t really create new ideas or risk losing their positive human qualities.  In fact, is it even possible to compete in a cutthroat capitalistic world and still maintain our humanity?  These are the big questions the Times article ignores.  Maybe dumbing down the SAT is just what’s required to make our students happier and more human.

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In many states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures—even here in NJ with a Republican governor and Democratic legislature—teachers’ unions and public school teachers have come under fire.  The issue here isn’t black and white—issues rarely are.  I can’t pretend to be comprehensive in a simple blog post, but let me throw in some loose change to up the ante and gray up the issue even more (forty shades, remember?).

Most of us have heard the adage that goes something like “People who know, create; people who don’t know, teach.”  Like many stereotypes and adages, there is some truth to that statement.  Back in prehistoric times when I attended college (I’m a product of state-run universities–when I started, I paid about $300/quarter + room and board and everyone with a B+ HS average could enter some state university), this adage was somewhat formalized, at least in the math department—there was a track for math majors and another track for students who wanted to teach primary and/or secondary mathematics.  This bifurcation engendered a bit of what nowadays we call bullying.  Moreover, for whatever reason, students in the first track seemed to do better than students in the second.

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In the U.S., one of the myths we have lived with is that everyone has access to a basic education, grades 1 through 12.  Another myth is that if you want to go to college, there’s a way for you to do it.  Social engineers, often in service of elites, love to parade these myths, but they are myths.  Like religion, they promise a better tomorrow.  The problem with the first myth is in the definition of “basic education.”  The problem with the second is that it’s just not true.  And the problem with both is that the elites, that famous 1% (you pick the percentage you want—it depends on your stats), want to make sure that neither one is true.

The definition of “basic education” has been forever a moving target.  In colonial days, neither women nor slaves went to public schools (at that time, you could just lump both those two groups together as slaves as far as voting rights were concerned, because women were also treated as property).  Those few who went to these schools learned the basics: the famous three R’s.  Most of the “learning” was through rote memorization and repetition.  If you happened to be a leftie, you were whipped until you wrote with your right hand, not the left; but, oh my goodness, what penmanship they had (e.g. the signature of John Hancock).  But heaven forbid you learned to think!  That was the job of the private schools that taught the children of the wealthy elites.

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