education and literacy (was Lolita)

[Deborah Hoffman]

An important observation indeed. I was fortunate to have a grandmother who taught me to read, because the public school system where I grew up was and is not worth a tinker's dam despite its funding structure (which results in situations where a child born 20 feet west or east of a border will have an excellent and free public education enabling access to a good college compared to another similarly situated child who will go where roofs are leaking, not enough textbooks, and guns, gangs, and drugs are involved--in middle school) having been ruled unconstitutional 3 separate times by the state Supreme Court over the past decade. Adult literacy is an important issue, and one of the many things I wish I had the time to volunteer for. There are larger cultural issues as well regarding the value of education for its own sake in American culture, but let's maybe leave that argument for another day. It's more the ignorance among those who are supposed to be educated, rather than
 those denied the opportunity that is more disturbing. Perhaps it should not be.
   
  Please forgive for the extremely long parenthetical.

  Kore Gleason wrote:

>Dear SEELANGers,
>
>It has been a pleasure for the long while to read your posts as a
 tremendous 
>supplement to my understanding of all things Slavic, East European,
 Eurasian 
>and otherwise, and I look forward to many more discussions and
 contributions. 
>
>It has been, however, disheartening reading the accusatory tone behind
 this 
>recent string of comments...   
>
>Sure, we can find it surprising in our particular circles that someone
 has not 
>heard of  Lolita, but that is because we’ve had the privilege to
 read it. We can 
>find it surprising that a person doesn’t know where the Atlantic
 Ocean is, but 
>we forget that we've had the privilege of seeing it or being taught
 where/what 
>it is. 
>
>I would think that History, especially the specific histories of the
 gulags, 
>concentration camps and atrocities that have been mentioned in the
 same 
>breath of this discussion, would have taught us the invaluable need to
 
>reevaluate what one person’s ignorance means – and why it entitles
 another 
>person to feel better, smarter, greater. 
>
>If you’ve ever taught American adults how to read for the first
 time, helping 
>them string the alphabet soup of the shapes and sounds of letters
 together, 
>or held the hand of a Russian who experiences the ocean for the first
 time in 
>his multiple-decade(d) life, marveling at the smell and feel of
 seaweed and 
>waves, 
>
>then we’d all understand better that our inequalities in
 “intelligence” make us 
>no less equal in humanity. 
>
>Respectfully,
>
>Kore Gleason



Deborah Hoffman, Esq.
Russian > English Legal and Literary Translations

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life. -- R. G. Collingwood

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