Knowledge or wisdom
The major problem in our schools is the frustrated student. Concern lies within the hearts of mankind. We must ask ourselves: What does it mean to be educated? Who determines our school curriculum? We teach knowledge—but not wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to use your knowledge to make better plans and decisions for the future.
Every student is different, having diverse talents and natural abilities. After learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the student can be directed toward their best penchant, inclination or aptitude. Many students are bored, worried, distressed, and feel like failures.
All students can’t be computer programmers or rocket scientists. Find their interests—and then set their course upon their preferred and alternate educational goal. Then they will excel and there will be fewer disruptive classes with fewer dropouts. Better-adjusted students mean fewer mass shootings and fewer student suicides. The students will feel better about themselves, have better grades, more self-confidence, be much happier, and have a more meaningful life.
Learning a trade might be of more value than attending college, driver’s education of more value than algebra, a course in nutrition of more value than Shakespeare, a human relations course of more value than French, and balancing your checkbook (along with thrifty living) of more value than playing sports.
TOM KNIGHT
Little Rock
Protect state heritage
As a former Arkansas history teacher and a patriotic Arkansan, I am appalled that Gov. Asa Hutchinson would allow Stacy Hurst to run roughshod over the agencies in the Department of Heritage. The Arkansas Legislature should act to protect and keep our heritage safe!
LINDA BELL
Little Rock
Much beauty to view
It was good to see the letter by the mayor of Helena-West Helena, on behalf of himself and mayors of other Arkansas towns, promoting Memphis-to-Little Rock bicycling trails for tourists. Not mentioned were the cities of Forrest City and Brinkley. Highway 70 would make a neat bicycling path. Coming in from the east, the cyclists would pass over Crowley’s Ridge, where in the late 1860s Nathan Bedford Forrest (for whom the town of Forrest City was named) cut the roadbed right-of-way for the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad. (The kudzu-draped ridges in the spring and summer are a spectacular sight.)
They could also tour the St. Francis County Museum. In Brinkley they could walk through the Central Delta Depot Museum in the town’s old train station and check out the antique and collectible shops. A few miles out of town they would pass through the Dagmar Wildlife Management Area, view some of the stately cypress trees, and view some of the old Highway 70 concrete bridges built in the 1920s which are nearby.
Crossing the White River at DeValls Bluff, they would have a grand view of the 1927 railroad lift bridge. Further west they would pass through the Grand Prairie region. In the spring the bright green terraced rice fields there are beautiful. Further west is Lonoke, where cyclists could visit the Lonoke County Museum with its fascinating wildlife display and other exhibits.
BILL SAYGER
Brasfield
Dystopia and beyond
Studies flooding the market give the impression that all roads in the country lead to dystopia. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed argues that autonomous individualism, the Enlightenment’s gift freeing the West from medieval theology and absolutism, promotes such obsessive self-indulgence it’s dissolving cultural cohesion.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die predicts that current political discourse and public policy puts the country on the road to authoritarianism. Wolfgang Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End? notes that internal contradictions (wealth inequity, automation) and external factors (war, climate) will end capitalism sooner than later. Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine traces how decisions in World War II to target civilian populations progressed from bombing, to fire bombing, to nuclear bombing, to today’s massive array of weapons targeted to destroy cities, countries, even humankind.
Karl Polanyi published The Great Transformation in 1944, tracing the origin and solution to these problems. The industrial revolution crowded workers into privately owned factories where wealth and power concentrated. Liberalism split into an ideology that emphasized the freedom to make profits on a free market (neoliberalism), and one emphasizing liberties and justice for all (democracy).
Only in the West, he notes, did economic theory rise to primacy in shaping all other social and moral structures. And as more nations industrialized they sought expanded empires to assure resources needed for production, leading to endless global conflict. The transformation back to social health, he argued, is for capitalists to demand less profit, for citizens to demand fewer material benefits, for moral ideologies to supplant economic ones, and for all to take responsibility for social well-being. Who knows, his vision just might energize that slow-growing mustard seed that offered such high hopes centuries ago.
DAVID SIXBEY
Flippin
For that stinkin’ bill
I’d like to propose a rider to the bill sponsored by Rep. Jeff Wardlaw and Sen. Gary Stubblefield that would limit public comment on environmental permits on large-scale hog farms like the one C&H Hog Farms is operating in the Buffalo River watershed.
That rider would state that the next two hog farms permitted with open-air lagoons be placed as close to their homes as possible, preferably downwind. Additional permits would be issued to any legislator who votes for this stink of a bill.
CHARLIE HUGHES
Fayetteville
Not in job description
Trump wants teachers to carry guns. That’s not what they hired on to do. They hired on to teach, and that’s enough. Maybe they can get their doctors to say they have bone spurs. Big Bad Donald didn’t carry one during Vietnam.
BOB MASSERY
Little Rock