A Note to a "Retired Educator"

The author of this piece is one of the countless and innumerable retired "educators" who like to identify people who know even less than they do, so they can call them "stupid" and "ignorant" -- because they think that is what smart people do, and gives them their false sense of superiority.

The only thing one needs to teach these days -- is how a student can become their own teacher, which is simply how to search for any answer they actually need at the moment -- and not simply being able to regurgitate the same vapid irrelevant lessons and facts they've repeated for the last 30 years as though what is meaningful to learn doesn't evolve with every passing moment and generation.

That is the reason for the crisis and collapse of the old institutions -- like the mass media which includes the newspapers and the schools, is their failure to distinguish that which is worth knowing from the countless trivia -- and publish and teach the trivia -- as though it were very important and critical to know. Really, is it important to be able to name a blank map -- or simply find a better one?

And does one really need to be able to name all the generals in the Civil War in order to feel competent and confident in any discussion with the editors of the New York Times or the vaunted Oregonian Editorial Board? There isn't a "fact" presented by this author in his long list of things most students don't know, that one really needs to know anymore, and could not be easily found by anyone who simply knows how to operate any internet appliance.

But of course, the schools will not only not teach those skills because they would jeopardize their own job security, but even want to ban the tests so we know what exactly they are teaching -- so it truly becomes a random and arbitrary experience determined by their capricious whim and authoritarianism that is characteristic of such screeds to denigrate and diminish everybody else in society to their deference and benefit.

Enjoy your retirement; you have nothing of value to impart to society but your own self-importance, and imagined superiority. That's not because you're retired -- but because you yourself haven't learned anything beyond what you learned in school, as though that was all there was to know, and the limits of what can be known.