Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

House on Fire
about the football team than the curriculum and hire only
submediocre, flag-waving, God-loving automatons to teach.
What kind of students can emerge from schools that oppress,
punish and neglect logical thinking?
• Release schools from the stranglehold of the ACLU [American
Civil Liberties Union], NEA [National Education Association],
and others engaged in the breakdown of the discipline and
competence in the schools.
• I'm afraid you have no understanding of the country in which
you live. The people are incredibly ignorant and fearful. They
will not tolerate listening to any [new] idea . . . Don't you get
it? The system survives only because it has an ignorant Godfearing
population. There's a reason lots of [educated people]
are unemployed.
• I'm sometimes required to explain technological issues to
Congressional staffers. Believe me, there's a problem in science
education in this country.
There is no single solution to the problem of illiteracy in science -
or maths, history, English, geography, and many of the other
skills which our society needs more of. The responsibilities are
broadly shared - parents, the voting public, local school boards,
the media, teachers, administrators, federal, state and logical
governments, plus, of course, the students themselves. At every
level teachers complain that the problem lies in earlier grades.
And first-grade teachers can with justice despair of teaching
children with learning deficits because of malnutrition, or no
books in the home, or a culture of violence in which the leisure to
think is unavailable.
I know very well from my own experience how much a child can
benefit from parents who have a little learning and are able to pass
it on. Even small improvements in the education, communication
skills and passion for learning in one generation might work much
larger improvements in the next. I think of this every time I hear a
complaint that school and collegiate 'standards' are falling, or that
a Bachelor's degree doesn't 'mean' what it once did.
Dorothy Rich, an innovative teacher from Yonkers, New York,
believes that far more important than specific academic subjects is
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