Smarty Pants

It makes me sad, and not a little exasperated, that “educated” has become synonymous with “undesirable.” Your immediate reaction might be to argue that stance with me, claiming that my status as an educator gives me a heightened sensitivity to such things, but, think about it, everywhere you turn people who have formal, advanced schooling are suspect these days. They are elitists who eat arugula and listen to NPR. They are Wall Street, not Main Street. They don’t plumb or actually work. They aren’t in touch with the real America. They have book learning but no common sense. And so on. As a natural knowledge-seeker, I find that tragic. As an academic, I find that deplorable. As a parent, I find that terrifying. If the message my children are consistently getting from their world is that being smart means being shunned, what can I do to convince them otherwise? What should I do? In times like these, it feels like raising bright kids is almost doing them a disservice. When I read articles showing that people who were in the Greek system and have minimal education are twice as likely to get hired as less-hearty partiers with PhDs, I wonder if I would give my kids more of an advantage by teaching them which letter of the Greek alphabet Pi is rather than what the square root of pi is. But it’s all I know. So, we read Sarah Phillips’ My Picture Encyclopedia and I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Picture-Encyclopedia-Sarah-Phillips/dp/1846104459

http://www.paperbackswap.com/Sarah-Phillips/author/