Letters

From the December 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Wayne Luney
Sacramento, CA

Questioning Consumerism

While I appreciate our current bounty, I'm not sure I want to live in James Twitchell's America ("In Praise of Consumerism," August/September), a place he would have consumed by consumption. As our choices in cereal and cell phones have increased, our interest in anything of lasting value has decreased.

Many Americans may agree that "getting and spending have been the most passionate...endeavors of modern life." That's just the problem. What happened to personal achievement and growth through learning, leading, or building in business, the arts, education, or one's own family?

Americans have confused broad choi-ces in consumer goods with virtue and personal liberty. Our kids believe having a cell phone and a car confers adulthood and freedom. Political campaigns are packaged marketing messages that feed on our shallow desires for a knight on a white horse, cleansing our public spaces of any real social or political problem while leaving a springtime-fresh scent to cover their lies and personal follies.

Americans should be more reflective about how we spend our wealth, rather than just contemplating whether to add leather seats to the new SUV. What does all this consumerism for the middle and upper classes gain our country when 50 percent of the kids in metropolitan school districts cannot read or write?

America's commerce should be exported but not its consumerism. Maybe other countries are resisting our consumerism because they want a culture based on something more.

Dale Stange
Folsom, CA

Workshop Nightmares

Jerry Jesness' adventures in "Workshop Wonderland" (August/September) replay a nightmare for intelligent teachers who have had to undergo the obligatory re- indoctrination known as "professional development."

One of the unsavory features of monopoly education is that the same set of teacher trainers makes the workshop circuit, scarfing up taxpayer dollars and dispensing nostrums as though they were tested ideas for immediate classroom application.

Workshops tend to the cutesy. Everything from "authentic assessment" to "multiple intelligences" is fodder for captive teachers, while rarely are there workshops on how to teach the fine points of grammar or U.S. history.

Were education a competitive industry, the workshop circuit would offer more substantive fare because consumers-and teachers-would be in a position to demand it.

Robert Holland
Lexington Institute
Arlington, VA

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