The state of American education

I sometimes wonder about the state of education in America. Just how good, or how bad, is it? On one hand I know that high school kids study some really advanced stuff in many classes. On the other hand, the worst textbook I’ve ever seen was American. A geography text that taught nothing about why the world was the way it was, but was merely lists of points to memorise arranged into chapters. Also, I’ve never understood this whole ligament is to string, as earwax is to shoe polish business. What is that all about? They spend hours on these bizarre comparisons. It’s as if they are preparing their children to major in gibberish.

But the most damning thing about the state of American education I’ve ever seen was in Disneyworld, Florida. In the room where you waited prior to going on a dinosaur ride, there were labelled pictures of a variety of animals. One of them was of a centipede. Dust had worked its way between the persplex and picture, indicating that it had been there for quite a while. The picture of the centipede was labelled, “Insect.” I can’t imagine that mistake of that magnitude lasting for any length of time in any of the countries I’ve live in. Some kid, or a schoolteacher, or my grandmother would point out that if it has more than six legs and it’s not a caterpillar, it’s not an insect. It seems so strange to me that hundreds of thousands of people must have walked past it and it never pointed it out to the management, or if they had, the management felt no need to worry about it.