Quote:
Originally Posted by Barefootsies
How many 'require' you know American Literature, History, Spanish, Biology, Chemistry, Religion, Women's Studies, and so forth? Correct. Next to none unless you choose them as a career. You missed the point. Yet most people have to do some form of "writing" on a daily basis. Assuming they leave their house. Which is the majority.
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You teach a kid cursive, Chaucer and Egyptian Studies. I'll teach another kid how to vett information, how to code and how to speak 3 modern languages. Then we can set them loose in the world and see which one does better. Biology, Women's Studies, Chemistry and Religion are still very relevant areas of learning. In fact, learning Women's Studies and Spanish makes a tremendous amount of sense because of the current demographic growth of those segments. Chaucer? Not so much...
We live in an age where we know more than we can teach. In 30 consecutive years of education you can only cover so many topics proficiently. Choosing WHAT to teach and HOW to teach it is much more important than it used to be. The only *tiny* reason to learn cursive is that it may assist a visual thinker with learning basic language skills, but even in that instance the person would be far better off learning American Sign Language than cursive.
99% of information can now be retrieved in seconds from any location in the world by anyone with a cellphone. Teaching people to memorize that information is not nearly as helpful as teaching people how to find it reliably, who to trust about it and who not to trust about it. That fact will only become more true by the time this generation reaches maturity.
