Mehkurydiaries

In a remote village in Enugu State, I taught Basic Science and Basic Technology to junior secondary students. The curriculum contained electricity, ecosystems, machines and materials. The children were not short of intelligence. They were often short of explanations that remembered where they were starting from. That classroom taught me something: complexity is sometimes unavoidable. Confusion is not. DNA is complex. A power grid is complex. So is a national budget, a software architecture or a doctrine of faith. Serious subjects have layers. But layers are not fog. Some experts wear obscurity like ceremonial clothing. The audience leaves confused, and the speaker leaves feeling profound. Fog is not altitude. Research on cognitive load shows that poor instructional design can consume mental capacity needed for learning. Jargon can do something similar: it forces the reader to spend strength opening the box before meeting the idea inside it. This does not mean every truth must be red...

Morocco has held an election. That sentence is true. It is not yet the whole truth. On September 23, Moroccans voted for 395 members of parliament. Twenty-seven parties competed. They argued about jobs, wages, housing, education and healthcare—the ordinary matters through which politics either serves people or rehearses speeches at them. Yet Morocco is a constitutional monarchy in which the king still holds significant political, military and religious authority. The winning party can form a government. It does not inherit the entire house. The ballot can rearrange the furniture while someone else keeps several important keys. This does not make voting useless. Parliament legislates. Governments administer public services. Elections can widen representation, punish incompetence and force neglected problems into public view. But democracy should not be measured only by whether citizens were given paper, ink and a queue. It should also be measured by how much power enters the polling ...