I was reading yet another article on education and this quote grabbed my eye:

Remember when you were in school?  Was your daily goal to learn anything or to just get the homework done for a grade?  How much of the total BS did you promptly forget after passing the test?  Who cares how many rooms were in Shakespeare's playhouse?  Have you read any Shakespeare since school?  How often do you need to use a ‘number line’?  I rail once again about the everyday drudgery of the mundane in schools and the lack of meaningful subject matter.  I take Aaron & Ben to school every morning and at least once a week I see some grade school kid trudging to school carrying a large chunk of posterboard with a bunch of stuff glued or stapled to it.  Did you EVER need to use posterboard after you left school?  If you did it was probably at some do-nothing meeting at work.  You don’t see too many people wandering about with posterboard unless they are students, teachers, or fulltime meeting attendees.  Our children have better things to learn and all the ridiculous homework isn’t teaching it to them either.

I have noticed an odd trend in the technical sections of most web news outlets.  It used to be when you clicked on the ‘Tech’ links you were taken to articles about all the wonders modern science had to offer, or hoped to offer, in new technology.  Now you get to read articles about how much money was made or lost at various tech companies.  Who won or lost court cases about stealing each others technology.  And very little about actual technology.  We put men on the moon 37 years ago and we still don’t have an instant-on computer that doesn’t lock up at least once a day and the ‘tech sector’ is more concerned about Wall St. than about technology.  It’s no wonder we’re still burning fossil fuels for energy.

 

And speaking of fossil fuels.  What’s with the TV commercials about Clean Coal?  Is that an oxymoron or what?  Evidently these people have never held a lump of coal in their hands or seen the mess coal dust can make.  There will never be any such thing as clean coal.  One simple fact of life is that when fossil fuels are burned they pollute.  The fumes can be scrubbed and filtered but the pollution goes somewhere.  Whether into the air or into the ground to pollute our water table ... the pollution doesn’t magically disappear.