Our horrendous public schools

Okay I'm going to keep this short because I'm actually quite embarrassed about it, so I just recently learned From one of my Brazilian friends that they are having their winter right now, Naturally because I attended public school I was shocked and asked exactly how it was possible that they were in their winter season when it's practically the middle of summer! Suffice it to say he had a good laugh at me and explained that the world has two different weather zones....

Though to be honest I find it shocking that even though I did not learn such a fundamental piece of knowledge in school that I did not run across it in one of my various and many research binges, just last month I researched all I could about South America, their Salt Lake's their mountain ranges and the history of the people that live there from 1000 A.D. to current. And yet somehow this valuable piece of knowledge eluded me.....

And I keep thinking To myself, How?

I actually explained that concept to some 9 and 10 year olds last year by driving a pencil through an orange and using a flashlight. If the Earth wasn't tilted that 23 degrees I don't life would have evolved on this planet.

When I started figuring out the basic patterns of the Sun, Moon and Stars I was shocked that this didn't make into my basic education. It is the primal orientation for humans. Without those god-like patterns we are lost in the flux of bizarre social patterns. Once you know the Solstice (Sol-Stist = Sun Stops) and Equinox (Equal-Nox = Equal Nights) by observing them with your own eyes then you can start figuring out the seasonal holidays and whatnot. I would also put the pattern of Full Moons and finding the North Star as basic, basic, basic facts. [Also Labour History and Local Politics but that's another rant].

Schooling is largely a baby-sitting service and accreditation scam that the internet is making obsolete. Yet if the alternatives are private schooling or religious schools (including religious home-schooling) than give me good old public schools. Hurray for Mass Literacy!

The worst part of compulsory education is the slave mentality it breeds, where education is a punishment not an unfolding of the mind. Add in the simple fact that 90% of media does not want to encourage rationality (rational people buy less) and soon everyone - teachers and students - are just passing time. I learned more European History from Europa Universalis than history class.

Schooling is largely a baby-sitting service and accreditation scam - yep

mass literacy - vital, and usually accomplished by what, first or second grade? So why keep those bodies in the seats for another decade?

is it just to eviscerate the pregnant energy of minds coming on-line for the second time, to convince these fledgling agents their only power is in the arena of purchasing?

I fully agree that fundamental earthling knowledge is almost non-existent in our education system. To the subjects already mentioned I would add health, (eating) and basic self-defence.

I think what a child needs to learn is to value itself (which should be easy) and then to be able to attach that value to the others on this planet (which shouldn't be too hard)

I had an elementary school teacher who told us it was more important to learn how to learn, than anything actually taught in schools

Seth Shadpw's story reminds me of a similar embarrassing episode a few years ago when I spent a few uneasy nights being unable to identify a very bright star that did not appear on any charts. I was actually a little freaked out until duh, Mars.

Being unsettled by the night-sky is one of my favorite experiences.

Even the benefit of mass literacy can be lost when no-one involved in the process cares about it. The deformation of humans that occurs in school instead of giving them basic self and world knowledge is nearly criminal. I fought it while I was in it and it broke me until I learned adaptive despair, the self-corrosive total cynicism of the unwilling slave, and a rage that thankfully existed more in my mind and my art than in the real world.

Most education does not want to touch the live-wire of the real world (from our bodies, to our night skies, to our recent history) lest it shock the controllable undead audience into life.