education and literacy (was Lolita)

[Olga Meerson]

What can we expect of a culture where becoming a teacher is not PRESTIGIOUS enough for our current students in first-rate colleges (because salaries are the only measurement of success)! In intellectual matters, as well as in all others, this country has stopped believing that those who receive have the obligation to give or to further transmit. Where I teach, students are, admittedly, especially prone to having bourgeois ambitions. I wonder if it is significantly different anywhere else, for the current generation of students. Please prove me wrong and give me hope!
o.m.

----- Original Message -----
From: Deborah Hoffman <lino59 at AMERITECH.NET>
Date: Tuesday, February 5, 2008 8:29 am
Subject: [SEELANGS] education and literacy (was Lolita)

> 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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