Aching knees and the necessary pair of readers aren't the only effects of age that most of us over 35 have concerned ourselves with. Educating on the value of deep knowledge, keeping the pace of perpetual learning, awareness of diversity acronyms, securing jobs in a digital only, or gen z focused workplace and combating the mental fog known as cognitive aging, literally keeps us up night. What is cognitive stimulation therapy? Should we ask for age accommodations in learning environments? What affordances are there for aged individuals? Should we assume cognitive aging in individuals of a certain age and is that discrimination? What roles/jobs are a good match for quinquagenarians or better? Is America, or the world, growing more or less tolerant of the aging mind.

America is built off principles of diversity and cultural texture. You may know first or second generation immigrants who code switch for safety or for expediency. If it weren’t for the nationalism that pervades many aspects of our social norms, more of us would openly celebrate the rich culture texture we have, due in large part to those immigrants. With a Department of Education that classifies language barriers as special needs and in many cases does not recognize cultural differences and the resulting neurodivergence, one might feel perpetually misunderstood. If it is human nature to migrate, how can we better support the immigrant and transplant? How is Familiarity Branding building an “in-crowd” culture? How is gentrification creating unwitting and unwilling transplants. 

“Over the past half-century, America’s per-pupil spending on K–12 education has nearly tripled” and though there is variation in that spending it “is not correlated with academic achievement,” [or LLC thereof]. Remove from your mind, the thought that people in poverty would by default be receiving a lower quality of education. Remove the image that public schools are bare bones and as a result so are the lesson plans and teacher resources.  Break the assumption that families in poverty don’t value education as a monolith. And shatter any automatic link between income and educational potential. That doesn’t mean there aren’t correlatives. It simply means that the biggest impact on those correlatives are our own habits and patterns of being. 

A statistical search that rests at race or gender correlatives is short sighted, half hearted and does more damage than no pursuit at all. If there are enough minorities that have finished high school, women that have learned to read and non-binary that have achieved top honors, than there is some other impact other than race and gender that is causing the drop out, illiteracy and low performance rates. We generally lack measures for advancements provided by gender or cultural neurodivergence. And at the same rate that we come to understand the strengths that comes with being a woman and a BIPOC, the culture moves to singularity, non-binary and homogenized globalism. When we have a drastically lower number of black governors, an anemic number of women high school principals and a low college entry rate among BIPOCs, aren’t we counting how we as a society have failed to be democratic throughout the complete fabric of our constitution? How has keeping inequities unspoken fed them, even facilitated them? How will the non-binary and bi-racial boom affect gendered and racialized statistics? Can we awaken at a rate faster than propagandized missions can simplify the consumer to sleep?