We're not doing a good job now, so lets try to do additional stuff

I wonder if the six billion people on this planet live in different realities?

You know like in Star Trek where Kirk goes to an alternate dimension and meets the Spock with a beard!

Maybe the reason life seems a bit crazy is all these people may physically be on the same planet, but they live in different realities.

I thought about this while reading on a recent push to have public schools teach "niceness." My first thought is most public schools are doing a poor job of teaching the fundamentals. Maybe someone could figure out how to help more students write well, do some math, and know history. Yet there are professionals out there who think it is more important to spend time, energy, and money, figuring out how to teach children to be nice. The conflicting world view could be explained if they were in some alternate reality where their children are doing just fine in the core subjects.

Boston.com's article The other kind of smart starts with:

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FOR MOST OF us, what we were taught in school and what we remember from our school years are two different things. We sat through uncountable hours of lessons about denominators and organelles, about precipitates and dangling participles, about Boo Radley and Shays' Rebellion, and yet the memories that sneak up on us today are more likely to be the humiliations suffered on the school bus or the awkward moments from a pubertal romance, the triumph of a deftly parried insult or the sheltering solidarity we felt in a now long-dispersed clique.
Much of what we learn about social life, in other words, we learn in school. The learning process is a fumbling and painful one, administered not by teachers but through schoolyard intrigues and emotional outbursts. And in this part of our education, we are largely on our own. While some people - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one, Ronald Reagan another - seem born with a gift for emotional perception, the rest of us muddle through as we can. School is set up for one kind of learning, but when it comes to emotional matters, the assumption has always been that these are instincts we have to develop for ourselves.
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I think it is important for children to learn to be nice. This is the responsibility of parents. Government schools are not the right place. Currently public schools are failing in their core responsibility. They don't need to go looking for more things to mess up.

I'm afraid that if public schools teach niceness like they teach writing we'll end up with the rudest people in the world.

(Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs)


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