Please read...or you are likely to get sucked into the quiet vacuum and the world as you know it will be no more!

All this talk about giving our future students the tools they need to be critical thinkers of the media in all its forms--I think we also need to teach them to critically analyze literature/textbooks they are being given to read in their classes at school. But we already know that. Before we can do this though, we need to do this for ourselves and take a critical look at the books we are required to read for our college classes. After reading Friedman all semester (I'm a little slow) I started to realize that he writes with a political slant towards liberalism and anti-Bush. For example, Friedman said that after 9/11, "our president didn't summon us to sacrifice, he summoned us to go shopping" (326) and then only a few pages later he says "and most of all, (we need) the right inspirational leadership--to enhance and manage the flow with the flat world" (329) This implies that we don't have that leadership now.
So anyway, I want to invite all of you to be aware of what we are reading even in our college classes--why do our instructors select the books they do? I'm not saying I don't like this book. It is actually very interesting and it is opening my eyes to a whole new--dare I say it?--"flat world" we live in now.

I found dirty little secret 3 fascinating: the ambition gap. He discussed that the American culture work ethic has weakened. One teacher that wrote to him said students lack creativity, problem-solving abilities, and passion for learning. THe parents of his students from India and Eastern Europe don't think kids are given enough homework and it isn't challenging enough....and American white middle class parents say the 5th grade work is too hard!

I really liked what Friedman said on page 344 about an ideal country in a flat world is one with no natural resources because then they "tend to dig inside themselves"
Taiwan, for instance, has "nothing but energy, ambition, and talent of its own people--and today it has the 3rd largest financial reserves in the world." This is amazing to me and I'm starting to realize that we really need to open our eyes to the rest of the world and how fast they are catching up to us.

I will just leave you with this one last quote which I think sums up the US mentality to a T:
"In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears--and that is our problem."