ericqbx

I am interested in making education more interesting. It doesn't have to be so boring. My website www.stopdown.net has a science section, art, and other good pages I hope people will check out...... There are too many kids saying school is boring so they are going to ignore it. The problem is, they're right. What we need to be doing is not give up on education but figure out how to change it for the better......... Also, when people do go on to college these days, they usually study business administration. Until the middle 1980's few people studied business. That was considered sort of weird. Most people went into business but they got an education first. As corporations have taken over the economy, the ticket to a good paying job is a degree in business administration. But someone who is actually going to make decisions for a corporation, or get rich on his or her own, should be educated in, for instance, science so they understand environmental issues, medicine, technology and so on, or history so they understand how society and the economy change, or foreign language for the global marketplace. I am talking about 4 year degrees. A two year degree to study for a type of certification makes sense for that purpose. It is trade school, really. But a 4 year degree shouldn't be trade school. I do not mean disrespect for people who have business degrees, it's where the money is. But I think we should change things so that the people running the corporations are not 90% business graduates. .............. With respect to science I would like to cite a comment made in 1995 in the journal Science: "Molecules in a cell behave like insects in a colony," and went on to argue that this is a mystery. I do not disbelieve in evolution, but I think the next twenty years is going to reveal aspects of life chemistry that will add whole new dimensions to the subject -- kind of like what relativity and quantum did to physics. In fact "quantum tunneling" -- a reaction shortcut in which electrons and protons turn into waves to speed up enzyme reactions -- is an example of what I am talking about. (There is a discussion of this on www.stopdown.net, science.) It is worth learning some science just to watch life chemistry blow the scientists minds. What most scientists are doing now is snapping their fingers and saying evolution explains everything, the comment cited above notwithstanding -- which was by two German biochemists. There are a lot of lab scientists who agree with the claim that life molecules are unexpainably intelligent in their modes of interaction............. In history I think is important to understand the Cold War, in which the U.S. supported and created dictatorships as the way to fight the spread of communist dictatorships. There existed the option of supporting democracies, like Guatemala, Iran, Congo, instead of replacing them with dictatorships. Both sides have an argument. But instead of inviting students in school to think about this and debate, we provide an account of some facts in the textbooks and leave it at that. We should study the Cold War because the world is still living in its political wreckage, and because the U.S. related conflicts in the Muslim world are mirrors of the Cold War past, with Muslim fundamentalist replacing communist. We "won" the Cold War, but maybe the long hard way compared with simply supporting democracy .............And if you doubt that the U.S. has long posed a threat to Muslim culture, remember that until our current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. preached separation of church and state to the Muslim world (although it was O.K for Israel to have a church involved in government). Now, as we try to create Afghan and Iraqi democracies, we have learned that their cultures won't accept that model. ............It is also pure hypocricy for the U.S. to carry on about democracy in a part of the world where we have only and always supported dictatorships. In Iran we destroyed a democracy in which the church and state were happily mingled, rammed the murderous Shaw down their throats, and as a result got the Khomeini backlash. (One argument here is this: if we left Mossedegh -- the leader of Iran's democracy in the early 1950's -- he would have become a Soviet ally; a different view: if we'd left Mossadegh, there would be a Muslim democracy and ally in Iran instead of the post-Shaw fundamentalists.) In Iraq the U.S. supported its attack on Iran, which resulted in a very bloody war, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein while he gassed the Kurds and exterminated Shiites and dissenters --it was all just fine until he invaded Kuwait. Then we started preaching about democracy. Our foreign policy is phony, and the people who live in the countries we push around know it. In World War II the U.S. fought for democracy, but since then U.S. policy has been to support dictatorships that play ball with us -- no matter what horrors these governments cause their own people, and to crush democracies that we think might veer from a path we define as acceptable. ........There is beautiful art on my site and lots of articles that are examples of superb journalism. The Wall Street Journal used to have great research articles and some nice local color pieces until Murdoch took it over.