This Is Just Sad....

[AFTT47]

Here is the thing about education:  one only truly retains knowledge of that which one is interested in learning.

It is one of the reasons why Europe has this curriculum set up where you only study for the career you want.  There is none of the bullshit where you have to take unnecessary classes that merely weigh you down intellectually and veritably sucks your motivation.

I agree with this.

I think there should be some base education that everyone needs to function. This would obviously include reading and writing ability and arithmetic. A person should know what science is (the process) and should have a grounding in logic and critical thinking. These are universally applicable skills and knowledge which would handicap a person if they were deficient. Beyond those basics though, it should be a choice. It's a case of, "You can lead a horse to the water but you can't make him/her drink."

We all have a finite ability to store knowledge. It can certainly be argued that stored knowledge of the relative positions of various sovereign states on Earth is a waste of such finite space as that knowledge can be easily obtained as needed.

I cannot recite word-for-word the First Amendment of the United States Constitution - a thing that I personally consider to be of the utmost importance and deeply agree with. But I can recite word-for-word most of the entire dialog for the movie Spaceballs. That's pretty fucked-up when you think about it. The relevance of the First Amendment is orders of magnitude more important to any American's life than Tim Russ holding a giant afro comb proclaiming, "We haven't found shit!" But Spaceballs makes me smile. My brain involuntarily allocates more memory space for that than it does for the First Amendment. We have to make some allowances for how we are wired. That's a human thing, not an American thing.