The question is, will we continue to fight what may be a rearguard action to defend universal literacy as a central goal of our education system, or are we bold enough to see what's actually happening to our culture?
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My feeling is that if you can make a big impact on the global literacy problem, you can uplift a big portion of society.
As education becomes dematerialized, demonetized and democratized, every man, woman and child on the planet will be able to reap the benefits of knowledge. We're rapidly heading toward a world of education abundance.
If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.
Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.
What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of nature and recognized that the great secret of education lies hidden in the maxim, 'Do not educate'?
Everything that we used to think got taught at home now seemingly has to be taught in the public school system, and something is going to get lost in the process.
I've heard from pre-K and kindergarten teachers alike that the Common Core is inappropriately pushing written literacy standards when the focus should be on the development of oral literacy skills. And that's actually delaying the development of literacy.
I'd love to see more middle and high school teachers who are not teaching English develop classroom libraries. Our message to kids should be that reading is for everyone.
Our experience at Teach For America has been that the more people understand educational inequity, the more they want to do something about it.
We're promoting such a narrow version of literacy that we're not including what a lot of boys like.