Now I Know My ABCs





The problem?

Lack of education.




Often, the answer to my question about education, “How far did you go in school?”, is answered exactly like this:

“All the way.”

That person almost always means that they finished high school.




We have become a nation of people who value smart phones more than we value smart people.


We must turn this around.


This is not a luxury for us in the twenty-first century. It is a necessity.

4 thoughts on “Now I Know My ABCs

  1. I was randomly thinking back to my Japanese side of the fam who all grew up in Hawaii. People tend to think of Asian immigration in terms of the 1965 law that opened up immigration to non- Western immigrants, but my side actually immigrated prior to the Asian Exclusion Act in the 1920s. In fact, most Japanese Americans are fourth generation or more (every other Asian ethnic group in the country is mostly first, second, or third generation Americans) because such a high number of Japanese immigrated to work on the Hawaiian plantations in the 1800s.
    Anyhow, my point is that those Japanese Americans, the ones from Hawaii, actually tend to be less educated than Japanese Americans who are from the American mainland. Mainland Japanese tended to have immigrated with higher degrees, because that was what the 1965 law was gunning for. Whereas the Japanese descended from plantation workers are more level with your average White person (they weren’t being asked to immigrate because of their PhDs).
    It may look like Asian people are producing these huge generations of kids who are primed for higher degrees, but it’s mostly just the ones who already had parents with a higher degree. If you were to meet the Japanese who immigrated in the 1800s, who were probably lucky if they got through high school, you would think they were a bunch of idiots who were only good for back breaking manual labor on Hawaiian plantations. When my grandpa was growing up, high school wasn’t even mandatory in Hawaii. He “went all the way,” graduated middle school in Hawaii, and then got a job on a plantation.
    Weirdly, all of his grandkids, including me, graduated from college. One of his cousins was saying something like that too. Weirdly, all of his kids ended up with MD next to their names, and he never went to college himself. They have no clue how their descendants turned out like that.
    Asians really aren’t anything special academically. If you lived in Japan, and every White person from America who immigrated had a higher degree, you might start to think that all these White people from America are sooo motivated and smart and the Japanese need to play catch up! They’re taking over the universities!


  2. Just after WW II ended, my father came home in a rage. He was assessing for carpenter union apprenticeships in Los Angeles. Because so many had enlisted in the military at tender ages, the union decided to have preparation classes.He passed out math books with geometry, and told them to start at page one. That way they could assess the reading skills too. One kid stared at page one all night. He wasn’t a GI, He was graduated with a non-reader’s diploma. My father was so mad that he went to the high school the next day and cornered the principal.


  3. Like it or not, education has become an industry rather than a “calling.” It’s now a vital, standard component of our service economy, very much like health care. Someday soon, perhaps we’ll require an Affordable Education Act. With college tuition costs leaping ever upward and state support for public universities generally waning, keeping a college degree attainable for a large segment of the population will likely not be possible without additional federal wage and price controls which, to some degree, only exacerbates class friction. You’re right, Doc, things don’t look so good. You’re also right that it means much, that it’s worth the trouble—just like health care. We might have escaped the Dark Ages without higher education, but we wouldn’t be where we are now–still within reach of a better world, and a better life for nearly everyone. We have to keep believing this is possible, and desirable, and keep working toward it.


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