English, Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew. My dad speaks English, Italian, and German.
It's maddening. In universities, you can see the privileging of hard sciences over other fields (which I think is partly responsible for the soft sciences' failed attempts to be more scientific) you can see it in the public schools, where there is a huge emphasis on the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) at the expense of history and literature (because if you can write technical paper and read an instruction book, that's all we really need out of you readers). You see it in the scorn scientists and doctors feel free to level on equally knowledgeable intelligent people... Arg.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-09-09 07:28 pm (UTC)English, Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew. My dad speaks English, Italian, and German.
It's maddening. In universities, you can see the privileging of hard sciences over other fields (which I think is partly responsible for the soft sciences' failed attempts to be more scientific) you can see it in the public schools, where there is a huge emphasis on the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) at the expense of history and literature (because if you can write technical paper and read an instruction book, that's all we really need out of you readers). You see it in the scorn scientists and doctors feel free to level on equally knowledgeable intelligent people... Arg.