For many years, I have been unable to ride the buses, streetcars and subways of Toronto without remembering that in my teenage years virtually everyone afoot in the city was European and that in my short life span I have actually seen more than half of the population replaced by immigrants from the third world.
For many years, I have been unable to read a newspaper without remembering my days of employment in factories and offices, the fact that everything was decided by committees and that the brightest half of these committees was neutralized by the other.
For many years I have not been able to pass a school without remembering that I was forced to listen to educators talk for the better part of ten years when I preferred to read books.
For many years I have been unable to associate words like education, school, university, politician or school board trustee with anything but hideous stupidity, ignorance and illiteracy.
For many years I have spent some part of everyday, wondering how the twentieth century would have ended if humanity had understood that success necessarily tends to indicate a mediocre ability with words.
As a member of Mensa for over twenty years I am well aware that many members, perhaps a majority feel positively about education. However, I am not one of them. The fact that letters to the various editors of Mensa vary from one extreme to other has been noted and commented upon by others. At the highest levels of academe, I have read that the struggle for existence is intense and since there is no arena of life that I know of where some Mensans have not succeeded, I do not doubt that had I submitted to such pressures and prevailed, I would think long and hard before forsaking or abandoning the project. Negative, though I be, I am satisfied that someday, somewhere, somehow, some Mensans will create an honest school. In that school, honest standards of literacy will prevail, honest evaluations of students will prevail and each succeeding generation will not be pressured to be as ignorant, stupid and illiterate as the last. Best of all, I imagine that in this better world that is to come, perfection of the human personality will no longer be presented everywhere as an adult with the language skills of a child, Canadian businesses will hire our own descendants rather than people from the other side of the planet. If average is still average, if the medium is still the message, if the race is still not to the swift, in the better world that is to come, each succeeding generation will be somewhat more intelligent and literate than the last.
____________________________________________________________________


As a child I often marvelled
At the wheels upon the track
How the drivers never steered them
And I often looked back

Then the pole on the wire
Would grab my attention
Zing, bob, and spark its way
Through another intersection

My ambition, you see
Was always to be
Streetcar driver
On the TTC.

http://www.hcry.org/ttc2424.htm

http://www.hcry.org/


This item by George Noviss was included in Montage September 2004, The Mensa Newsletter for Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener/Waterloo, London, Windsor/Sarnia

HOME