Stupid Has A Name

My first contribution is in no way profound, neither should it be. I basically just have one statement: If Homer J Simpson can work at a nuclear power plant as a safety controller, EOT students can work at ESKOM! And not endanger us all… (I’m being very optimistic…)

Sometimes you can forgive students for their silly mistakes, but then there are those super-human beings that come up with questions or sayings that should be pretty obvious. According to the Oxford Dictionary (something most students don’t seem to know) the word ‘obvious’ means “easy to see, recognize or understand”. And yet I am asked whether they should add their names to their essays (how else am I to allocate any marks to your name?) and some of them expected me to read a graph to them during a test. I was equally stunned when my Afrikaans students didn’t know who Martin Luther was and, far worse, they didn’t know what a Calvinist was. It’s like a Baptist that doesn’t know what a Baptist is… They seem to think that Ingrid Jonker, Breyten Breytenbach, MP van Wyk (sic) and Antjie Krog are singers and they spell Shakespeare as two words.

My students are also under the impression that the Angolan war of the seventies and the Anglo Boer War at the turn of the previous century is the same thing. And according to them Desiderius Erasmus – the greatest humanist in Western History – wrote his most famous book during the Second World War, despite the fact that he died in 1536.

As I’ve said, you can forgive them certain mistakes, especially in the light of our new school system, but the fact that they have no desire to know more, and God forbid they have to read, scares me. What will they teach their own children when they know nothing themselves? It truly worries me that young people who study at a tertiary institution have very few opinions and no desire to learn anything, unless it’s prescribed. And even then they think they’re wasting their time. When I think about universities in general and how they used to be places of protest and revolution, especially if you consider the French and American universities in the sixties and seventies, it surprises me that we have thousands of students who are simply numb with stupidity. And their legs buckle under the weight of their huge lack of interest.

It disturbs me even more when you have students who actually study important things like teaching, medicine or engineering and who can’t really think for themselves or read or write or calculate or argue a point properly. These are the people who will educate the minds of tomorrow, who will build our bridges, who will write “intellectual” articles in the Sunday newspaper.

But do I really need to be concerned about the state of brainlessness we encounter daily? After all, Homer hasn’t blown up Springfield just yet. Though he’s been pretty close…