At the stroke of midnight on Friday, the first of January 2021, many citizens will be celebrating the end of 2020, with hopes that 2021 will be better. But while that hope may come to pass in terms of fewer catastrophic events, year 2020 was never at fault:
We were.
And if we do not rectify our ways, we will be just as blameworthy in 2021 in terms of the foundational reason for our culpability:
Our ignorance.
As we entered the week that will bring 2020 to a close and inaugurate 2021, reported cases of Covid-19 in the United States had reached nearly 19 million, with deaths at approximately 330,000.
If most United States citizens had merely worn masks, avoided large gatherings, stayed at least six feet apart, health professionals estimate that 150,000 or so of those who died would still be alive. If in some fantasy world the citizens of the United States could muster the discipline and convey the respect for knowledge of counterparts in Taiwan and New Zealand, the lives lost might have been much more dramatically reduced.
Approximately 48 percent of the electorate voted to keep the presidential administration in power that had induced such a circumstance with its policies; two out of three Republicans think that Donald Trump won the November presidential election.
But the United States is a nation in which private enterprise and individual freedom are values pursued for private gain but little understood as expressions of constitutional principles. Immigrant populations, ill-treated during the last four years, have long sought the shores of the USA for freedom to sell their labor at a price far beyond that prevailing in the home of origin or to seek a profession or launch a business with the prospect of economic return similarly higher than in the immigrant’s nation of nativity.
The United States economy booms, with a per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $63,000, substantially higher than Japan’s $44,000 and Germany’s $54,000.
But life expectancy lags by comparison in the United States, health indicators are less favorable, and students score lower in mathematics, reading, and science on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) by comparison with students in those same nations:
The United States economy booms on the strength of minimally fettered private enterprise, but the absence of a collective spirit undermines the health and education of the United States citizenry.
The approach to education in the United States embodies our societal dilemmas and promotes citizen ignorance. The system of public education and curricula at colleges and universities produce citizens who have low information bases. At best, preK-12 systems provide tracks leading to Advanced Placement courses in which students gain a measure of substantive information and objective testing opportunities that, along with ACT scores, may be used to get into prestigious colleges and universities. But even the few students who so augment their records walk across the stage at graduation with gaping holes in their information bases, and the great bulk of students who manage to graduate in four years walk across such stages having very little knowledge to claim for thirteen or more years spent in school.
Most college and university undergraduate programs do not provide the broad knowledge base that students should have gained at the preK-12 level. Those who are mislabeled as best-educated matriculate in graduate and professional programs that give them highly focused training in a narrow specialty.
In the course of the typical educational experience, no one is educated very well. Very few people have grasp of the fundamentals of biology, chemistry, and physics. Historical knowledge is abominable. Knowledge of government and the United States Constitution is meager in the extreme.
Thus do we pay for these educational deficiencies in our denial of scientific reality as pertinent to a virulent pandemic that becomes more deadly than it should have been.
Thus do nearly half of United States citizens show little regard for constitutional principles or the electoral process.
People in the United States may be proud of an economy that booms, despite periodic busts, most of the time and under typical conditions. But they should be ashamed of the low value they place on mass education and health, and on the collective good.
We must have a national discussion about our values and the educational systems that embodies those values and makes of us such an ignorant and self-seeking people. Private enterprise is economically beneficial under most circumstances; public neglect of education and health is detrimental.
Particular catastrophes struck in 2020, but the calendar was not at fault. The year 2021 will not be better as to our social and political foundations if we do not build those more solidly on the basis of knowledge and on consideration for the public as well as the private good.
Let us blame not the year 2020 for our woes, but ourselves.
Then let’s be about the work of making of ourselves a better people through the power of education.
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