Talke talks – Un-Intellelo | nd-aktuell.de

Howdy from Texas, dear readership,

Did you read Aesop in the first class, truck capacity and look back and forth between different units of measurement? Not me either, but my daughter is expected! Her weekly homework, which are said to be very voluntary, but are handed over by everyone, drive me crazy. You should mark adverbs in long sentences, multiply and even name the literary genre of books (without previously determined what exactly is meant by genre ̶ This is about non-fiction books vs. fiction, children’s vs. adult literature, prose vs. poetry?). And no, this is not a creepy Chinese academy that forms future imperialists, these are the expectations of a stinby primary school in Texas.

My daughter cannot solve these tasks without parental help. Just as little as the majority of their classmates. When I address the teacher at this too high level, she is surprised: Nothing in the homework is new, she assures me that the children should be able to work on them independently. How can you expect to multiply six and seven-year-olds if they can’t even add properly? How should they distinguish adjectives from adverbs if you can hardly write a sentence correctly, let alone analyze the morality of Aesop’s fable? The most confusing is a math, in which three geometric figures are assigned to a different unit of measurement: inches, feet and centimeters! I, who have been upset for nine years, that the Americans are torturing themselves and me with their illogical units of measurement instead of finally taking over our damn metric system, I wonder how this can be that Texas expects more from first graders than studied adults.

Because let’s be honest, the people around us are not exactly blessed with a lot of general knowledge. You refer to the golf (formerly from Mexico, recently from America) as an ocean, you do not know the freezing point of water (32 is also more difficult to notice than 0) and you use adjectives instead of adverb when you press a “drive safe” in. An acquaintance with a master’s degree and 35 years on the hump only after their trip to India had the enlightenment that the country had once been colonized by the British. Another, publicist and over 40, claimed that Josef Stalin was the main player of the First World War. Other acquaintances did not know that there have been democracies elsewhere in front of the United States. Their ignorance does not prevent these people from being successful in their jobs, not even in jobs in which knowledge would be completely appropriate. So the curator of a surrealism exhibition recently said: André Breton, the father of surrealism, was a “Weirder type” that she does not want to talk about.

In general, it seems that intellectuality is just really out. Maybe that’s a worldwide problem, but somehow it hurts particularly in this country. Instead of letting more philosophers, scientists or critics have their say, the US company primarily focuses on comedians, models and reality TV stars. And if very rarely someone has to report what to report, the content must be “dumbed down”, so that nothing meaningful is left. For example, the pseudo-intellectual program »Pretend it’s a City« with the renowned literary critic Fran Lebowitz, filmed by Martin Scorsese. It is not talked about literature (perhaps the first graders would like to know among the spectators, as Fran’s literary genres defines?), But complain about older and money problems. Do these two reasons, the brilliant director, move to shoot with his youngest daughter Tumbe Tangbe make-up tutorials for Tiktok?

The magazine “The Atlantic” recently reported that students of Eliteunis would no longer read entire books: “Middle and High Schools Stoped Asking Them to”. Maybe intellectuality simply stops after primary school. Annoyed, I delete an error in my daughter’s homework, a missing apostrophe in the task.