99 Weeks

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The Senate will vote to extend unemployment benefits is this coming Tuesday. For all our sakes, let us hope that the votes to extend these unjust and unwise payments are not there. All we need is for one more Senator to have enough sense in him or her to see that giving money to people who do nothing ends up benefiting no one. Some people will be angry, and their disappointment is understandable, but there is too much at stake to allow frivolous sentimentality get in the way of good decision making. America’s children will pay a hefty price for the financial folly of the last few years. When I meet young Americans now in Singapore, they no longer seem to be as confident or as self assured.

Tells me that cutting education in favor of promoting more militarism is a foolish endevor that only leads to wars that destroy the country and that the only way to true success is through successful education and encouragement of both industry and innovation. None of which is really encouraged other than in the military field where not everything has a practical use in the private industry.

Cutting education spending is a negative only if you believe that American per capita expenditure on education is insufficient. By the time they finish grade school, the average American child would have sucked up more public money than the average Indian or Chinese college graduate. Yet the average American college graduate compares poorly to the average high school graduate from Indian or China. As I have mentioned, discrete math and calculus are requirements for high school graduates in these countries. Most American college graduates do not even bother to take calculus and the vast majority would have trouble telling you what a binomial distribution is.

Language requirements in China and India are equally stringent. The Chinese and Indians are required to learn English. Can you imagine Americans being required to learn Chinese or Hindi? Americans do not even want to learn Spanish, which is a very close relative of the English language. Many Americans I encounter in cyberspace, including those with advanced degrees, actually have trouble rubbing a decent English sentence together. It appears to me that for all the money spent, language and logic are simply not taught to Americans. Do they go to school only have their gonads rubbed and buy pot?

It would not matter how much they spent on or how much they cut from the education budget. The fact is that Americans are not learning what they need to learn to stay globally competitive. The failings of the education system have nothing to do with funding. There is more than enough money to go around. It is the will to actually master the more difficult and non-intuitive subjects which is lacking. In a nutshell, Americans do not seem to want to learn.

Wrong. English is a Germanic language so it has much more in common with German, Swedish, and Finish. Spanish is a romance language that has more in common with the other latin-based languages: French, Italian (which is pretty close to being Latin), Portuguese.

Many English words are variants of Latin and Greek words. English as also borrowed from Asiatic languages as well. Honcho, Ich Ban, Gung Ho. That is one of the charms of English. English speakers are not the least be bashful about borrowing words from other languages if they are useful. As habits go, I would say word borrowing is kosher.

ruveyn

You need to learn the history of the English language and also the history of England. Olde English is similar to Germanic languages. But after the successful French invasion, the English language underwent a dramatic change. The use of French in court literally transformed how English was spoken on the streets and the English vocabulary was greatly expanded by French words. For this reason, without training, none of us would understand the bits and pieces of Olde English that remain. In fact, most of us would have a great deal of problem with Middle English. And it is this doggerel nature of the English language that made it possible for it to unify a fractious Western Europe and thus dominate the world.

Because of its close association with French, for English speakers, learning Romance languages is easy. The same Latin alphabet is used and there are tons of cognates. I am fluent in Chinese and at some point I might learn Hindi/Tamil/Sanskrit (why not?). I can tell you that for Chinese speakers, learning English is truly a difficult task. Everything about Chinese and English is different. Classical Chinese grammar, like the type used in ancient manuscripts, was reduced to the absolute minimum. It was only in the last hundred years or so that a more expansive grammatical syntax was introduced. Even so, there are no cases, gender, tenses or any of the inflections that modern European languages depend on. Can you imagine how confusing it would be for the average Chinese to try and understand the words “come, came, coming” which are all described in one Chinese word? Hence, although they do not do it very well, I am filled with admiration for the Chinese who work so hard to master English. Incidentally, quite a few unemployed Americans now make their living teaching English in China.

Learning Spanish ought to be an American priority. The Americas is after all shared between Northern English speaking peoples and the Southern Spanish speaking cultures. Yet, one would be hard pressed to find a non-Hispanic who speaks Spanish despite the money which has been spent on promoting a bilingual education. Most Americans do not even know that no one in Mexico uses the word “gringo”. The bottom line is, Americans simply do not want to learn.

They're bred and reared to not want to learn. Which goes back to my problem with religion and conservatives and democrats (aka, slightly, barely moderate conservatives).

Lots of anti-intellectualism, especially on the Right.
There's the glorification of hucksterism.