Recently my husband had surgery. It went well for the most part but any general anesthesia surgery cant ever be taken too lightly.
Interestingly enough my husband had to answer many questions during the course of the day but never more than with the last nurse before he was moved to the Pre-Operative area.
During that long line of questioning came something like this (I'm paraphrasing here).
"How do you learn best? Is it through being shown, reading or being told what do to?"
I was instantly fascinated and asked the reasoning behind the question. At this point our nurse was comfortable enough with us to elaborate and the response was,
"Many times people come here and they really don't know how to read but they wont tell us that so we have to figure out the best way to teach them to take care of themselves after the surgery".
To me the question now becomes this: Is the health industry is only just now taking greater precautions by trying to understand how the patient learns or have there been so many issues with illiteracy that the health industry has had to respond by making such a question a standard practice?
From my viewpoint, in light of what I know about how many people are struggling from childhood onward I believe that the hospital awareness is stemming from an increase in the amount of population that is not literate.
I believe in the last 20-30 years there has been a surge in illiteracy in this country. I think this line of questioning the hospital had to ask to insure the health of their patients is even more evidence of this.
If I am right, then as a society we are going to have to remedy this at some point. We are going to have to admit that things have gone badly and start changing our methods.
Writing this I'm not terribly hopeful that this will ever happen. I know how political this is and it saddens me.
The way things to work in my state it goes something like this:
A big University has a (lucrative) program that doesn't work at all to teach dyslexic children how to read. Don't underestimate how connected these University folks are, they just got a 5 year grant from the federal government to re-promote their scientifically-proven-not-to-work for 20% of the population (dyslexic children) program.
Anytime any laws try to come through the state government changing what is required they quickly use their lobbyists to step in the way by insisting on the inclusion of their program. Constantly pushing competing ideas out of the way is their mantra despite the fact that their program only works for the small segment of the population that has simply never been exposed to literature in the home and isn't dyslexic.
Teachers in my area aren't taught the first thing about other methods like, for example, Orton-Gillingham which has been around since the 1930's and is scientifically proven to work for dyslexic children as well as any slow readers.
Generally it's well known that teachers cant identify a dyslexic child and they certainly cant remediate them (unless they were trained in a different state or are truly old and using methods that haven't been popular since the 1970's).
My teacher friend has asked (and so have her peers) for training other than the one being shoved down their throats by the University (and their district) and sadly, they have been turned down. The teachers sense that they haven't been prepared in college for what they actually end up facing in the classroom.
Does anyone go into teaching wanting to do a bad job of it? Of course not, but if they aren't getting what they really need to know in college and then they cant even get the training they are requesting later to help themselves then who is the real culprit here?
I try to remind myself that there has always been corruption and that there will always be corruption it's just that when the whole teaching profession is suffering due to big money politics like I mentioned above with the University and lobbyists I cant help but see a whole country back sliding into the murky and dangerous waters of ignorance. To me it seems the health industry already knows this.
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