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I got up absurdly early this morning to take my son to rifle practice, and since I come back home and go to bed for another hour and a half, I normally make small talk and let my mind wander.
This morning's wander was over into education, and at what point our current methodology - which is already notably deteriorated from when I was a boy, which in turn was lesser than when my father was young in his turn - would fail entirely. Not from sociopolitical or economic movements, which is usually the debate in this arena, but from the volume of "basic" knowledge we've accumulated being to great to impart over the course of 12 years. To fit in all the sciences, history, and social movements has required increasingly more intense sessions in an increasingly dense schedule, with a decreasing ability to examine details.
When I was 12 or so, I had several Disney books-on-tape. One of those I remember the story for was set in the future, and followed the family of a "retarded" boy, who had an IQ of 160, where the average had been boosted via genetics to 210. His father had opted to keep his son rather than euthanize him, and eventually the boy found his place on a world they'd crashed into in space. It went into a fair amount of speculation on how people were modified and educated and "enlightened" - yet still found new and exciting ways to create and discriminate against the "other." I've tried over the years to identify which book this was, to no avail.
But still, I go back to the question: when will we run out of time - literally - in education? Where is the point where the normal person can no longer learn about how we got to a given piece of knowledge, because there's so much "basic" knowledge to teach that there's no time to go into such detail?
Ok, I'm going back to bed now. Cheers all.
This morning's wander was over into education, and at what point our current methodology - which is already notably deteriorated from when I was a boy, which in turn was lesser than when my father was young in his turn - would fail entirely. Not from sociopolitical or economic movements, which is usually the debate in this arena, but from the volume of "basic" knowledge we've accumulated being to great to impart over the course of 12 years. To fit in all the sciences, history, and social movements has required increasingly more intense sessions in an increasingly dense schedule, with a decreasing ability to examine details.
When I was 12 or so, I had several Disney books-on-tape. One of those I remember the story for was set in the future, and followed the family of a "retarded" boy, who had an IQ of 160, where the average had been boosted via genetics to 210. His father had opted to keep his son rather than euthanize him, and eventually the boy found his place on a world they'd crashed into in space. It went into a fair amount of speculation on how people were modified and educated and "enlightened" - yet still found new and exciting ways to create and discriminate against the "other." I've tried over the years to identify which book this was, to no avail.
But still, I go back to the question: when will we run out of time - literally - in education? Where is the point where the normal person can no longer learn about how we got to a given piece of knowledge, because there's so much "basic" knowledge to teach that there's no time to go into such detail?
Ok, I'm going back to bed now. Cheers all.