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The Clock Came Off the Wall

In the spring of 2018, schools in England started taking analog clocks down from the walls of their examination halls. The reason arrived in the education press without a trace of shame: teenagers sitting their exams could no longer read a dial, they grew anxious watching a circle that told them nothing, and the schools judged it kinder to remove the clock than to teach the child. A deputy leader of the head teachers’ association explained that students were more accurate with digital displays. So the ladders went up, the hands came down, and an instrument that had governed rooms of learning for two centuries was carried to the storage closet as a courtesy to the people it once served. I have kept that ladder in my head ever since, because it shows the modern school system performing its signature move in a single gesture: confronted with an untaught skill, remove the evidence.

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As Braille Dots Fade, Blind Illiteracy Builds

We know when an economy sours, the first to suffer are the children and the disabled. As technology ascends, we also see the rapid deceleration of literacy. Instead of full words, we get text speak. Instead of logical arguments, we are flooded with irrational comments. Instead of the Blind reading books in Braille, they “learn by listening” to audio books instead — and become illiterate in the process: The Blind can hear and respond sound, but they are unable to argue against to what they hear in written form.

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Doing the Hundreds

There is great power in the semiotic image.  Sometimes it is simpler to grasp a complex idea with a simple vector graphic.  Here’s the seminal work of the “World of 100” and as you can see in the image below, only one person in a village of 100 would have a college education.

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Voting Shared Interests

In America, we have been trained to believe in the idea of “one person one vote” and that every vote counts. Forget, for a moment, the 2004 Presidential election where the Supreme Court discounted counting all votes cast, and go with me a bit as I affirm the defeatist cry “one vote doesn’t matter.”

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