Dear Reader,Today I am writing you with my words. I am using my words to communicate. Communication is an essential element of every student’s tool box. Without the ability to communicate clearly, jobs will be lost. There will be a losing of jobs. Attention will waver, employees will drop parcels, some citizens will become lost in their pursuit of happiness, ending up in such places as the employee break room of a large supermarket in Lincoln, Nebraska. Newspapers will be printed merely for the paper, which people will use for starting fires they sit around, roasting buffalo on a stick. Sentences will be as worthless as Weimer-era money. It will take a shopping cart of them to write your child a note for school, and the sad children will complain bitterly as they wheel the racked wagon of rationalizatons from home through the snow to their principal’s office. All songs will have an oral version only, and they will be sodden with rhyme. Prose will be dismissed as too difficult to remember. Assembly instructions will, of course, remain unintelligible. Our greatest truths will be reduced to catchy phrases, and the President will wink and say “Working hard, or hardly workin’?!” This will seem familiar to many who lived through the Bush era of war and economic decline. Jerry Springer will be elected to the Supreme Court by a show of hands and quickly turn the vexing process of adjudication into a more playful, user-friendly process of argument that anyone can relate to. Size of biceps and breasts will become an important legal principle. There will of course be buffalo meat on sticks and popcorn served in the chamber, cooked over a fire of law books. Happily, photography will continue unabated, and classrooms will become entirely a based on Powerpoint and movies. Reflecting and revising will become suspect, and students will be expected to write one-word adjectives that reflect their experience of the subject only. Eventually this will be seen as too demanding, and they will draw simple pictures that express their feelings about historical, political, medical and social concerns. Exams will be multiple choice, even at the graduate level. In this, education will remain unchanged. The apprentice/Master relationship will be central to medicine and dentistry. Research will be discouraged, but the docent will be invited over a lot for Sunday dinners to soak up wisdom from the Master. In rhyme. After a few years of this, primitive scientists will develop special chants to curse and heal, and diagnosis will descend to the level of schoolyard taunts, with the evil spirits of illness shouted out in modified rap songs. And of course, most of of the patients will die of any number of preventable illnesses, leaving not a trace. In fact, anyone dead more than ten years will be completely and effortlessly reabsorbed into the obscure, undulating sea of forgetfulness and the camp fires will burn all night.
