opinion: Allergic to Learning

by Matt DeNoto

People are strange. How many of us go about our lives making the same mistakes over and over again? Even after we’ve been made aware of the mistake, it can still seem impossible to change our behavior.

Unfortunately, the same seems to hold true for us as a population. Change is slow and painful, and circumstances must become extreme before the motivation exists to take action.

Now that the Swine Flu ‘Epidemic’ seems to be doing exactly what logic and history have suggested it would – that is, fading from the public consciousness after being blown out of proportion – have we learned anything about rational reactions?

It has to do with the Green Revolution only insofar as we can’t concentrate on saving the planet if we’re busy being terrified of this week’s ‘disaster.’ And sadly, outside of trying to point out to those around us that there are better things to worry about, I fear there’s not very much that can be done to bring people around.

Climate change will continue to rear its ugly head, which means that in some form or another it will sporadically return to the public consciousness in frightening ways. But if we are unable to react in a reasonable way to a new strain of the flu, what’s really in store for us all when climate change ultimately begins to invade our lives in ways that we have not yet imagined? How will our panic-stricken, quick-to-judge, manic-depressive friends and neighbors react?

We are not, as a population, terribly level-headed. And to be frank, that part scares me more than climate change itself.

Will there ever come a time when we stop quibbling about silly distractions like trying to hold up gay marriage, or change children’s textbooks to weaken evolution, or wasting any journalistic resources to report what some celebrity did?

I remember not liking Math class as a kid. Especially Algebra. It didn’t make any sense to me why we had to learn all these bizarre formulas to manipulate variables. What made it worse was that I was GOOD at math, so my folks would encourage me to take more, harder Math classes.

Looking back now, it’s easier to appreciate the value of Math class. It was just never presented to me in the right way.

Math classes teach us more than how to work with numbers. They teach us how to solve problems, how to take a set of circumstances and analyze it to determine the best possible outcome. Other classes like History, Foreign Language, and even Science, generally deal more with rote memorization of facts and processes. The analytical tools we learn in Literature and Art classes are more subjective. Only Math teaches us something beyond what’s there in class. Math teaches us a skill. Math isn’t about numbers at all, it’s about learning how to process information.

Based on the grades our educational system has been getting over the past couple of decades, my conclusion is that our ability to think critically about the world as it is presented to us will continue to be severely underdeveloped.

Hopefully that’s just me making the same mistake again.