Why Janie Can't Read

Related Link » The United Federation of Teachers A Union of Professionals [!!!]
“Anecdotal records should address specific learning and/or behavioral issues, for example, when a student takes twice as long as his or her peers to complete short answer questions in American history class; or when a student refuses to do independent math sheets, involving word problems and, instead, walks out of the classroom; and, when a student is asked to read a passage from a work of literature and, instead, begins to mumble derogatory comments or throws things at others.”
— ‘From Section 2: Anecdotal Records’

Related Link » The Great Escape
“Many of the issues of our times are hard to understand without understanding the vision of the world that they are part of. Whether the particular issue is education, economics or medical care, the preferred explanation tends to be an external explanation — that is, something outside the control of the individuals directly involved. Education is usually discussed in terms of the money spent on it, the teaching methods used, class sizes or the way the whole system is organized. Students are discussed largely as passive recipients of good or bad education.”
— ‘Thomas Sowell, August 25, 2009’

At some point in the late 1980's, if memory serves, what used to be called "report cards" for generations of American schoolchildren, were banished from elementary schools. The age of anecdotals had burst upon the education industry, and its tenacious grip has produced millions of young people with degrees in conventional wisdom. Unfortunately for our Nation, such conventional wisdom, an oxymoron of monumental proportions, has displaced what once was American common sense, a far more useful attribute in so-called modern society.

If you are wondering, as I have been for some time now, what in the world could have happened to our way of life, one that made sense in the traditional sense of that word, I now believe that it has been hijacked by a bureaucracy of lowest common (in the basest sense of that word) denominators, who in a few years time have created an enourmous flock of sheep masquerading as voters. Naturally, this flock is drawn to an idealization of one of their own, a conventional wise man of grandiose proportions and rhetoric, who has street smarts (not to be confused with common sense) where scruples had ordinarily resided, and, what is now valued above all else, charisma, though I have yet to hear a cogent explanation of what is currently meant by that ephemeral term.

This is why Janie can't read, and why she and her legions of cohorts are stampeding off the cliffs of sanity with grins on their feces-smudged faces.

Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University
h/t Craig Newmark

Post #906 Why Janie Can't Read