This post is a summary of two articles. The first one, with the title above and published at http://www.c2educate.com/, on October 2012, written by Ashley Zahn. The second, "The Country that Stopped Reading." Published at http://global.nytimes.com/, on March 5th,2013.Written by David Toscana.
Education policy has gotten little play in this year`s election season and we were more than a little disappointed. Luckly, education did enjoy a moment in the spotlight during the presidential debate of tuesday, but only because of a creative twist on a question about gun control. When asked about gun violence, Obama deftly changed the topic of discussion. Rather than addressing a pointed question about his lack of gun control policies, Obama argued that initiatives intended to improve education would do far more to limit gun violence than would a new weapon ban. It is vital that education become a greater issue in our elections. Across the country, our schools and our students are in trouble. We are in the middle in most international educational rankings. We are facing a globalized world in which our economic well-being is dependent on our ability to produce skilled workers. And the only way to produce these workers is by improving the quality of our public schools. The question is: how can we make education more important to our leaders? In the short term, the answer is by voting for those candidates who demonstrate concern for the quality of education. In the long term, educating our children about their civic responsabilities. Part of the reason that politics have become so centered on flash and sound bites rather than on substantive discourse is because so many people choose not to vote. If we can succeed in raising a generation of future voters who will actively take part in our elections, we might also succeed in making sure that the issues that really matter, like education, are brought to the foreground. But beyond teaching the impact that voting can make and the basic outlines of the constitution, most schools do little to encourage activism or civic engagement. We can not depend on our schools to help themselves by teaching young people how to change the world. Teaching civic duty and the community involvement has to start at home. By teaching your children to pay attention to the world around them, and to take part in changing the things that need to improve, we can create a better future. And it is never too early to start.
Years ago, schools was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline and study. Teachers were respected figures. Nowadays more children attend schools than ever before, but they learn much less. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a UNESCO assessment of reading habits a few years ago. Despite recent gains in industrial development, Mexico is floundering and faltering socially, politically and economically because so many of its citizens do not read. When I spoke at a recent event for promoting reading for an audience of 300 teens who likes to read? I asked. Only one hand went up. I asked them to tell me why they did not like reading. The result was predictable: they stuttered, grumbled, grew impatient. None was able to articulate a sentence, express an idea. With no intellectual challenges, students can advance from one level to the next as long as they attend class and surrender to their teachers. This is not about better funding. Mexico spends more than 5% of its GDP on education, about the same as the U.S. And it is not about pedagogical theories. It needs to make students read. But perhaps the Mexican government is not ready for its people to be truly educated. We know that book give people expectations, a sense of dignity. If tomorrow we were to wake up as educated as the Finnish people, the streets would be filled with indignant citizens and our frightened government would be asking itself where these people learned more than a training of dish washer.
