Echoes of Pink Floyd

The boys are having to do an excessive amount of "preparatory" homework in anticipation of our upcoming trip to Hawaii.  They are NOT pleased with this, at all.  When I picked them up from robotics at 8:00 pm last night, they let loose.

"I am going to be up all night doing my English assignment.  School is horrible.  It's all about the grade.  It's not about learning at all.  The American school system is ridiculous.  Everyone says so.  WHY do I need to know about somatic cells?  Who cares?  Why do I need to memorize minute details?  School should stop after you learn to read.  Everything from the 8th grade on is completely pointless.  All I need to know is what I'll need to do my job, and I will never need to know about somatic cells."  This went on for a good long while.  The boys were really working themselves up.

"Well," says I.  "It's not just about having enough knowledge to do your job.  You should have a basic understanding of the world around you.  You should have critical thinking skills.  You should know enough to ask questions and know how to find answers.  And you should be exposed enough to things to find what you have a passion about."

"We've done all that.  The rest of this stuff is stupid and pointless.  I should just take the classes I want and do them online."

(The boys will be angry that I'm lumping them together in this blog post, and not delineating who said what, but they were both piling on, and saying essentially the same thing, and so it doesn't matter. This next thing, though, I remember was specifically from Colby....

"Mom, do you know that it's been proven that we are the smartest generation in all of human history?  Research has shown that we have the highest IQ of any previous generation.  And there's this thing called the internet.  Anything I'm curious about, or anything I need to know, I can just Google."  Essentially, he was saying that because he's so smart, and he has access to the internet, he doesn't need to go to school.  Hmmmm.

OK.  Stop right there.

"Colby, they've only been doing formalized IQ tests for the past 100 years or so.  And IQ is highly diverse.  The intelligence required to survive in the jungle without prior knowledge vs the intelligence needed to make good economic decisions on Wall Street are incredibly different.  Humans are highly adaptable and respond to the problems they face in their daily life.  You cannot tell me that the inventor of the arch in ancient Rome was dumber than you.  I just won't believe it. Scientists today still haven't figured out how Stone Henge was constructed thousands of years ago, or the statues on Easter Island erected.   People may be better at taking tests on a computer now, and solving those puzzles, but the genius of people in the past shows that they weren't any dumber than we are.  We are where we are today because of the store of knowledge that THEY discovered for us, and generations have built upon."  The arrogance of such a thought was astounding to me.  But neither boy  was buying it.  They were very vocally (and loudly) disagreeing with me.  Everyone is apparently full of angst in the middle of February.

Quinn has sent me two follow up videos on the horrors of the modern education system.  This has led to a branch-off discussion on knowing which sources to trust and which ones are essentially "fake news".  The boys purport that "they can tell" when something's not true.  Because they can.  They're not stupid.  But when I pressed them on what criteria they used to determine whether something was factual or not, they couldn't even begin to say.

"What about you, Mom?  Just because it's from a certain news source, it has to be true?  Or because it comes from a website followed by .edu or .gov???"
"Absolutely not," says I.  "I do rely on trusted sources, but that can't be the end-all be-all.  That's the importance of the scientific process - peer reviewed, repeatable, scrutinized.  I usually go straight to peer-reviewed journals for a lot of factual information."  But even that has it's limitations.

((SIGH))

Bottom line, the boys are NOT dropping out of school in the 10th grade.  I don't care if they don't like it.  I will not raise ignorant children.  I agree, however, that the education system is not all it can and should be.  It would be great if we lived in a reality where we only had to learn the stuff that meant something to us personally, but then we would be very deliberately illiteraete about a whole lot o' stuff, now, wouldn't we?

Another Note from the Teacher

It's so nice to get these little notes through the mail.

Just for Fun

Quinn came home from school and wanted to show me his project.  He apparently had worked all day on this geometric figure - a 72 point thing that connected each point with every other point.

"Oh!  Was this a geometry project?" asks I.  Apparently no.
"Extra credit?"  Still no.
"So.... why are you doing it?"

Quinn informed me that his geometry teacher, Mrs. Hocking, had a 36 point picture hung on the wall of the classroom from a student who had drawn it several years ago.

"If I do a 72 point one, she told me she'd frame it and replace that other one."

Ahhhh.... legacy.

Nice job, son!