A feeling of worry befalls me every now and then, when I gaze at the shelves with books for students who want to become teachers. Not only does the sight of books shelved off kilter sadden me, the implications of such carelessness scare me: a certain doom is pending.
The cause of my fears is not the dumbing down of education: the fact that kids aren’t required to read books any more, because it doesn’t suit their attention span. The educational system tries to lure them in with entertainment, because they see no other way to engage the baby-like ADD lack of focus in today’s youth. Instead of molding kids through teaching, it seems like the curriculum is molded to fit the gauge of puerile desires—as if it is a cause for celebration when they learn anything at all.
There has been a shift in educational goals from conveying knowledge to developing skills or, with a fancy word that no one will understand unless they look it up first, competencies. A competency is seen, hardly as something that needs to be acquired, but more as something that is intrinsically present in someone. Everyone needs to be adhered to according to their own available skills. In other words: learning should not be too hard but come naturally. The obvious result is a copy-paste generation with no critical assessment of the sources they use: why, if it is on Wikipedia, it must be true!
What ultimately worries me, then, is the incredible stupidity of those who are supposed to teach the youth. The only requirement seems to be that they love working with kids and occasionally wear a silly scarf in summer, I suspect with no other purpose than to hide a hickey. They are unable to spell or do math beyond adding up single digit numbers.
The result of shifting educational paradigms and lack of any observable intelligence in those who teach is an avalanche that has been aptly shown in the Hollywood movie “Idiocracy.” Only, I fear that they have misestimated and the process will take, rather than the 500 years they suggested, a mere 5 decades (for all those would-be teachers who have come this far: that’s 50 years): the educators have themselves been educated in competencies instead of knowledge, and will thence perpetuate this process.
The above development worries me, not because I will have to expose my own kids to the nurturing nitwits, as I am unwilling to procreate, but rather because they and their intellectual offspring will display their diminished intelligence in ever growing numbers as customers at the register. Expectations of convenience will rise, actual knowledge about the products they desire will fall, and giggles will clamor loudly as they misplace ever more books: what use is sorting books alphabetically anyway?
