Thoughts

I was reading a "professional" journal today, an article about teaching, making it more relevant to students for want of other words. I read about four or five paragraphs before tossing it in the trash. These words were glaring: "fun," "exciting," "easier." No!!!!! Now, nobody enjoys learning more than I do. And, I dare say, I took exception to the author's contention that teachers rarely have "fun" in class--I do almost every class. But when are people--dare I say the "education-types"--going to learn that learning (and teaching) aren't always "fun?" When are they going to learn that some things worth doing, such as learning, require hard, sometimes quite tedious work? Not everything has to be "fun" to be worthwhile. I know my reputation among people concerning scholarship (and, I'd guess my college mates, too, and I don't really agree), but do they think I learned all this stuff by osmosis? Do they think it was "poof, magic?" Do they know how many books I've read, how much stuff I've written (including just "stuff," not just the published works), how much time I spend thinking about things? No, I guess they don't. No wonder we get such silliness as "Everybody goes to college," "Cool cities," etc.

I'm also just stressed about how blind our media are. I wonder, though, unlike a lot of bloggers and other online columnists, if their blindness is willful (i.e., a liberal agenda/bias) or if it's just ignorance. But how can the media constantly ignore realities? That CBS reporter who was raped in Cairo, right out on the streets, is a case in point. So is the 14-year old Pakistani girl who was raped by a older relative, blamed for it, beaten, and then sentenced (she, not her relative, was the guilty person under Shar'ia law) to 100 lashes. She lost consciousness after about 80 lashes and died from them less than a week later. OK, why isn't there any coverage, front page stuff, about all this? Why do the Western media ignore that women and non-Muslims are less than citizens in Muslim countries, that they can be beaten and even killed under Shar'ia? Why do they ignore than Muslims are flooding into countries, not to become productive citizens of those countries, but to make those countries Islamic? (It may take longer, but isn't that another way of conquering a nation?) Is this what diversity and multi-culturalism have led to, a blindness toward an invasion of sorts, of an attempt to undo the ideas and principles of the Enlightenment, arguably the greatest advance of the human mind in history?

There was another one of these types writing about multi-culturalism in today's papers. Apparently the failure of it in European nations isn't the fault of those unwilling to assimilate, but of the European nations themselves. The guy made some colossal errors of reason. He tried to make comparisons with American "multi-culturalism" with that of Europe. There's a difference. European people gathered together in nations on the bases of ethnicity, language, religion, force, etc. The US remains the only nation whose birth/basis came from principles of liberty and freedom. It's hard to take authors like this seriously.