The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the educational shortcomings of American high school graduates compared to their peers in Europe, particularly emphasizing disparities in Alabama.
Gore Vidal's quote addresses the significant gap in educational achievement between American high school graduates and those in countries like England, France, and Germany. It suggests that American students, particularly in states like Alabama, are not receiving the same quality or quantity of education, thereby lacking critical skills and knowledge that are essential in today's global society. This commentary on the education system raises awareness about regional disparities and the need for improvement in the American education curriculum.
In practice
In a speech about educational reform, I mentioned, 'As Gore Vidal said, the American high school graduate is two years behind his peers in Europe.'
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.
In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.
One of the biggest complaints readers have about my work is that I don't tell them often enough what they can do. I do think this is an area where journalism sometimes falls short. We describe a really grim situation but don't really explain to people what they can do about it.
That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it has been amassed - to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generations to come.
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