naftali @11
“It’s too bad that there is no coherent opposition party–one that across the board understands economics, with candidates who see themselves as teachers as much as orators.”
I have a lot of experience in the field of educating people (or trying to). I’ve taught in the classroom in high school and college. I now work as a securities’ analyst for a small firm. I began to notice what I am about to describe back in 1985 when, as a Jesuit seminarian, I had to be plugged into a high school classroom as an emergency fill in for a semester. I was not prepared for this experience, and I did not study education courses in college. However, I did bust my tail in long hours of preparation before and after classes in order to impart the material and make it interesting and challenging. What I learned was quite a shock to me. It was almost completely out of synch with how I remembered my high school years: the kids already, in the Eighties, were showing that their brains literally did not work the way mine was trained to process. For starters, they have much shorter attention spans. That was the real shocker. In the years after, while I was immersed in my grad studies, both while I was still a Jesuit seminarian and after I had left the Society and gone on to MBA studies, I gradually assimilated an understanding of how their brains work. For many kids, being brought up on the video habit – and particularly a video habit that caters to very limited attention spans – their minds literally work like a machine that flips through picture cards in a rolodex. Their brains literally flip pacards.
Now, the bulk of the population has a brain that is more or less in this mold, to varying degrees. Explaining economic principles and finance concepts is a challenge. Those topics are not conducive to an exciting presentation. You need to be patient. You need to pay attention. You need to be disciplined to understand and integrate it all. I know a LOT of college grads who have trouble with this.
And yet it must be done. Most people are not stupid, but there is a fair amount of ignorance of all kinds out there. We are all born into a condition whereby we do not know a lot, but we all (hopefully)grow up assimilating and integrating as much knowledge as we can. Ignorance, on the other hand, is kind of a condition that we choose to remain in. It’s a combination of both sloth and pride that cements this.
Many people do not want to know. There is nothing one can do about it. Even if you package it in an appealing way, if the recipient wants none of it, then that is that.
Therefore, even the most charismatic and engaging “leadership” can only do so much. People have to inclined towards wanting to learn and to suffer the arduous task of gaining that knowledge. It’s called having the ability to delay gratification. This is what most worries me about the nation’s future. If our population is showing marked deficiencies with being able to delay gratification, then we are in big trouble.
