Elite courses

A spate of articles and letters in the Post-Gazette preach that our schools must weed out “elitist” courses (i.e., literature, art, music, civics, history) to make room for more “practical” courses (technical training). Recent events show the folly of that assumption.

Americans produced COVID19 vaccines in record time, but millions of Americans refuse to use them. Americans invented smartphones, the internet and self-driving automobiles and are able to pilot a helicopter on Mars, but millions of Americans believe that Donald Trump won the election, that reducing taxes on the rich helps the poor, that freedom of speech includes freedom to lie and slander, and that the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol was a patriotic act.

According to Thomas Jefferson, democracy cannot survive without an informed electorate. Due to the trend away from education and toward job training, American schools are turning out graduates who are highly trained in technology but ill-informed, misinformed and uninformed in all other areas, unable to tell fact from fiction or truth from lie — in other words, nowhere near the informed electorate that our democracy needs if it hopes to survive.

Which is more important, our toys or our survival? If it is the toys, we can continue the focus on technical training. If it is our survival, then we must switch — quickly — to a focus on those courses that produce an informed electorate, whose members are prepared to take their places as family members, citizens, members of society and human beings.

PAUL A. ALTER Wilkinsburg