Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

To the editor:

I wonder how many readers of your guest editorial, “Changing times call for a new approach to education,” became as befuddled as I.

Specifically, your scribe delineates as essential educational attributes: “career training,” “employment opportunities,” “the work world,” “skill gaps,” and similar aspects of vocational training, hardly “education.” Admittedly these attributes appear important in “viable industries,” as suggested, but they certainly were not proffered as education when I commenced government schooling 80 years ago.  Such degradation of “education” appears to be perversion of true educational objectives such as preparing students to think, to reason, to use good judgement, and to solve problems.

Considering the abysmal academic rankings United States students continue to achieve among advanced industrial nations (for example 30th in mathematics and 19th in science per Pew Research Center), I do not understand how the “new approach” proposed in your guest editorial would help students discover truth, the primary purpose of their education.

M.S. Medeiros Jr.

Kitty Hawk

FOR MORE COLUMNS AND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR, CHECK OUT OUR OPINION SECTION HERE.