Feeling better

and procrastinating.  SO, instead of an illuminating entry on a Jungian analysis of the Frog Prince, you get a response to a video posted on someone else's blog. 

The video is startling with its statistics, though the numbers are already out of date.  The 2008 updates offered on Youtube aren't actually worth watching (see what I do so you don't have to?) as they are quite the rehash with very little new in them.  A few years ago, I read Melvyn Bragg's Adventure of English in which he notes that there are 100million children in China learning English.  The number is remarkable as it is greater than the entire population of Great Britain.  English will change.  Texting, generational shift, and the geographical areas in which English is being taught and learned by non-native speakers determine this.  English is a very malleable, adaptive language.  I adore David Mitchell.  I've written about him and my nail polish at least once on this blog.  His book, Cloud Atlas, is an amazing build up and break down of English and language as a form of communication. English is not the domain or property of any one culture anymore (if it ever was).  The fact that there are so many people learning it as their second language is testimony to its dominance transcending geopolitical areas.  And with language comes culture.  Though I'm not particularly proud of what we do show the world, I would argue that culture is our most influential export. 

Sheer volume (I loved the stats on honor students) dictates dominance.  It's not something to be scared of.  Well, you can be, but its inevitability precludes that being very useful.  Instead, we should be more open and welcoming than ever. If we're not developing these minds from the ground up (early childhood education, healthcare for all, vo-tech programs and affordable college) here, we might as well take advantage of the ones developed elsewhere and welcome them in as adults.  But then that would mean straightening out our visa and immigration policies.  Just because it's a huge and daunting task doesn't mean that we should shy away from it.  The U.S. has excelled at stretching and adjusting and eventually assimilating disparate groups into one nation.  It's not easy, and it's not always comfortable, but no relationship worth having is without work. 

Well, I was going to say that we were losing out on foreign born students to other countries, but in fact the numbers are up.  Not quite to pre-2001 levels, but they are on the rebound.  Go here for more information:
Institute of International Education 2007 report
There will be a new report released on Nov 27th. 

Shift Happens, indeed.  And we can either go along with it, adjust on our own terms and foment change, or through our obstinant refusal to see it as a positive (oh god, I so did not mean to channel Who Moved My Cheese) be cast on the scrapheap of irrelevance. 

I've been thinking about this video since yesterday.   And one of the unfortunate side effects of this video is that one might think that everything is now available to everyone on the internet.  While there is a lot you can access through google, there are millions of pages and pieces of information that are not so accessible.  There are important books and journals that are not available electronically at all and others only via (sometimes hefty) subscription fees.  The Library of Congress has artifacts, photos and documents that are accessible only through their proprietary search engine, so while they are available to everyone with an internet connection, it's only those who know about it.   And how to sift through all the white noise to find the relevant information?  Hmmm, anyone know of a career field that's specifically trained to do that?  Requiring a master's in fact because of all the crap you have to learn?  Hmm, I wonder. 

If you were hoping for an organized narrative, you are way at the wrong blog.  Hope it wasn't too difficult to follow.  It's really just me emptying my brain onto my blog.