This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 18 Aug 2008, by elsamary.
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24 Sep 08
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18 Aug 08
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In my talks to people, I often mention a statistic from the National Constitution Center that almost half of Americans can't name even one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. A student stood up at a university in California and said, "That doesn't matter because you can just look it up on the Internet." But if you don't know what the First Amendment is in the first place, you don't know what question to ask the Web.
Garbage in, garbage out. The Web's only as good as our ability to ask questions of it. The ability to access information means nothing if you don't have an educated framework of knowledge to fit it into.
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We've always had more faith in technology than other countries. One of our problems with computers is that we believe in technological solutions to what are essentially non-technological problems. Not knowing is a non-technological problem.
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Politicians in particular tend to preface any comment by saying, "Well, of course we have the best education system," "We have the best health care," the best this and that. And people accept that even though we have clear evidence that it is no longer true.
SJ: Evidence involving infant mortality and life expectancy. Though the very rich in this country get the best health care in the world, by all of the normal indices of health, we are worse off than Europe and Canada.
TM: Our universities and particularly our graduate schools are still the envy of the world, but with the education available to everyone, that's no longer so.
SJ: Right, and to call arguments like mine elitist is wrong. I think that the basis of a society is what people with normal levels of education understand. That means we need to be concerned about elementary schools, secondary schools and community colleges - not what people at Harvard and Yale might be learning.
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