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You might find amusing the RA Lafferty short-story "The Primary Education of the Camiroi" (1966).

Summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXNLUFeplI "A PTA delegation from Earth visit another planet to investigate their educational methods in order to figure out how to improve the school system back home on Earth. But the lessons learned, and the conclusions drawn, are rather… odd and disturbing."

From the story: https://uncabob.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-primary-education-o...

“How rapidly do you read?” Miss Hanks asked a young girl.

“One hundred and twenty words a minute,” the girl said.

“On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minute,” Miss Hanks said proudly.

“When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousands words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”

“I don’t understand,” said Miss Hanks.

...

“What is this business about slow reading?” Miss Hanks asked. “I don’t understand it at all.”

“Only the other day there was a child in the third grade who persisted in rapid reading.” Philoxenus said. “He was given an object lesson. He was given a book of medium difficulty, and he read it rapidly. Then he had to put the book away and repeat what he had read. Do you know that in the first thirty pages he missed four words? Midway in the book there was a whole statement which he had understood wrongly, and there were hundreds of pages that he got word-perfect only with difficulty. If he was so unsure on material that he had just read, think how imperfectly he would have recalled it forty years later.”

“You mean that the Camiroi children learn to recall everything that they read?”

“The Camiroi children and adults will recall for life every detail they have ever seen, read or heard. We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth. We cannot afford to waste time in forgetting or reviewing, or in pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”



Amazing story. I enjoyed reading this so much. The sad fact that this was written in 1966 - like the gentleman advocated for gutting the public school system 6 decades ago, and only now we are getting around to the business of defunding the dept of education. The story has foretold everything - the culture wars, the sacred cow/buffalo, utterly divergent visions of the left and right when it comes to what education means…Rafferty seems to be a futuristic mind reader. Amazing.




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