i like to read

i just got back from watching "waiting for superman"... if you haven't seen it, go watch it. i'm willing to assert that even if you don't give the briefest concern for education, this movie will make you think twice, and you will 1) be so thankful that your education was provided for 2) be shocked how such a fundamental system is at such a rudimentary level.

i LOVE to read. read books, read magazines, read blogs, whatever it is... i wish i had more time so i could read more! if i owned my own house, i would turn my walls into a library... and it'd look like this:


i can't really place where my love for reading and learning began. perhaps i got it from my mom, who although she grew up in taiwan and attended school through her undergraduate degree there, was surprisingly an english major (english was not her first, second, or third language), who went on to get her masters in english as well at the university of new mexico. still to this day i have no idea how she comprehended shakespeare or godot, but hey, whatever...

anyways, tangent. sorry... that wasn't the point of this post. back to the point... after the movie, i started thinking about why the system is so messed up, and i could come up with two main points:

1) American culture. uhh let's save the bulk of this argument for next time. this alone is a subject heavy enough to deserve its own post.

2) "Generation Y", otherwise known as "The Millennials". if you're unfamiliar with the names of the generation... educate yourself more here. this is the generation most likely you and I fall into. what separates us from the others is that we grew up with the internet and the boom of social media and what we call the power of "word of mouth". unfortunately, with this, a lot of our facts are "raw" and "filtered", meaning a lot of the time the information we end up receiving is either inaccurate or unconfirmed to be true, or selectively delivered often with important details intentionally or unintentionally omitted. it doesn't help that google reader, rss feeds, twitter, and facebook all give us the option to screen only what we want to hear (which i agree, for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and even awareness i love), but unfortunately for educating myself, not so much.

so its great that i get these news streams and i'm aware of what's going on, but it doesn't help that i can't speak knowledgeably to these topics that i'm aware of. and that's the problem. i still come off as ignorant... if not more ignorant, because now that i've heard about a world crisis, its inexcusable that i didn't try to learn more about what was happening. my life is getting cluttered with things that are supposed to revolutionize my life, but detracting my focus and time from being able to actually get back to [what may have been] the original goal of what all these social media tools intended to provide.

moreover, the invention of technology (ipods, smartphones, and the such) doesn't help us be more in tune with society either. we tune out what's going on around us in our society by plugging the earbuds in the moment we leave our door, immediately isolating ourselves from mankind. i wonder how many people one could meet if he didn't have earbuds, and along with that, how many additional interesting and educational conversations he could have! we get 75% of our updates on our friends from facebook, and of that 75%, probably 90% of those people we never have regular, direct interaction except for maybe once a year (when we wish them happy birthday on facebook or something).

there's even a significant gap between my younger brothers and myself. looking only as far as a 5 year age difference, the ratio of time spent in front of a computer vs. reading educational material would be something like 10:1 to my (disappointing and shameful) 5:1. they are disinterested in anything that consists of text on a piece of paper, with the exception of ESPN magazine and the sports section of the newspaper. sigh... their reading test scores, compared to other academic areas, are significantly 20% lower.

in this new generation, our knowledge is fragmented and distracted. we're constantly dealing with the problem of misinformation. i'd be interested how much more educational material i would be able to sponge up if i limited my internet use to 1 hour a day (for efficiency purposes of checking my bank accounts, paying the bills, and e-mail correspondence). unfortunately, that's not really practical anymore and... our lives do revolve around use of the internet. if onlyy i could...