Briefly

Here’s more evidence that the modern U.S. school system is badly broken. It was once a reasonable assumption that a high school graduate who was accepted to a major college could read and write competently. For years, colleges have known their incoming freshmen’s writing was mostly dreadful, so they’ve been forced to teach students to write. (They’ve done it very poorly.) Now it has become obvious that basic reading skills among freshmen are so terrible that some colleges must now teach kids how to read. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, all incoming freshmen will now take a mandatory three-course sequence which will teach them how to read and understand what they’re reading, in addition to trying to teach them how to write. If a student has made it this far in life without learning how to read and write, this probably won’t work, but the system will eventually be dumbed down to ignore the failure. Parents who trust the modern school system to educate their children are gambling with their kids’ lives. The system is broken.

Catholic priest Richard Rohr is a well-known writer and teacher on several subjects, one of which is the Enneagram. Most of his work with which I’ve been familiar is related to spiritual and psychological development. I recently discovered that someone has posted a good bit of one of his Enneagram workshops on YouTube and I’d like to recommend that if you have any interest in the Enneagram personality typing system. It was only about six months ago that I discovered I’m actually a Type 1 (instead of a Type 4), so I’ve been watching various teachers talk about that type lately. Rohr happens to be a Type 1 as well, and his description of the type — and especially his self-criticism — struck home with me. Here are links to his teaching about most of the types: Type 1, Type 2, Type 3, Type 4, Type 5, Type 6, Type 9. (Types 7 and 8 are missing.) You might also enjoy an interview that Krista Tippett did with Rohr for the On Being podcast two years ago. It was listening to that interview again this week which prompted me to go find his Enneagram teaching. I don’t always agree with Rohr about everything, but he’s always thought-provoking.

It’s still not a common pattern, but more families are deciding today that it makes sense for a dad to stay home with the kids while a mom is gone to a job. The specifics of such arrangements vary. In some cases, the wife works outside the home all the time and the husband runs the household. In others, the man works from home and the woman works outside the home part of the time. In such an arrangement, the parents switch who’s supervising children depending on who’s home and who’s busy. Society still seems to collectively have a problem with non-traditional parenting arrangements, but they can make a lot of sense for many people. Of course, the far-more-common pattern is a father who works full-time elsewhere and a mother who works full-time as well, but who still has to take care of kids and home when she’s finished with her paying job. Different arrangements are going to work for different families, but it’s clear that the worst of all worlds in the expectation that the woman work a full-time job and then come home and work another full-time job raising children on her own.