Politician Aptitude Test

Have things changed at all since the Revolution?
Should every gun lover be permitted to carry?
Do you believe in the theory of evolution?
Do you think gays have a right to marry?

Do you think more guns make this a safer place?
Does a 2-cell zygote have more soul than a cow?
Should colleges look at an applicant’s race?
Is the climate changing with effects right now?

Do you believe in public education
Or any assistance for struggling poor
Like access to healthcare and medication?
Should we drill for oil both on- and off-shore?

Can you quote the party line each time you pander,
And not have to fallback on insight or candor?

The Education Thing

There's always a lot of arguing and hand-wringing on the subject of education in this country.  Are American kids dumber than kids in other countries?  Do we spend too much on education?  Or not enough?  Should we test kids more or less?  Pay teachers more or less?  And so on.

We know kids have innate learning abilities.  Eight year olds can memorize the names of 500 Pokemon, along with their powers and weaknesses, evolution, etc.  Yet they don't know the names and dates of a few dozen presidents.  They can master all the Latin spells from the two thousand pages of Harry Potter books, but not the differences among "there", "they're" and "their" (and, in some cases, "Thayer")  They can gather reams of data about human reproduction, and yet learn nothing of biology.

So how do we get kids to learn?  Simple.  Forbid it!

That's right. Make the school day all recess, and you'll find kids sneaking books onto the playground.  Lock up all the textbooks, and smugglers and dealers will emerge.  Use parental filters to block public television, and kids will crack the code.  Run news stories about how multiplication leads to the harder stuff, and everyone will want to experiment (and inhale!)

This is undoubtedly the thinking behind such moves as the Kansas Board of Education's attempts to block the teaching of evolution.  Clearly Kansas was trying to encourage students to study evolution on their own, perhaps through extra-curricular experiments.

This is also the motivation for banning books.  What could increase a book's appeal more than making it taboo?  A quick glance at a list of banned books shows that they're almost all classics!

And what about the straight-arrows who always follow all the rules?  It may sound harsh, but there are some people you just can't reach.

Education and Entertainment

Entertainment is education. Unfortunately, the converse is not always true. That’s why made-up words like edutainment are redundant. It’s like saying infodata or buggy software.

So what makes something entertaining? Usually it’s a story … something with characters the audience cares about facing some conflict. So how can we apply this to teaching something like, for example, the Pythagorean Theorem?

Pythagoras (from the Greek Pythagoras meaning “a guy whose name is Pythagoras”) had this theorem, which is like a theory but in math. His theorem said that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

Digging further, we find that in math, a square is something multiplied by itself. Of course, all literature from the Bible on down tells us you can’t multiply by yourself. It takes two to be fruitful. (So when one angle says of another, “Hey, that’s acute angle. We’d be so right together,” it’s not just being complementary.)

Suppose the sides of a triangle are streets in the heart of a town, and Mr. Pythagoras wants to build a store on one of these streets. Stretch the imagination even further to suppose that each block in this town is a perfect square. This picture sums it up.

So, if Pythagoras wants the biggest possible store, does he build on East-West Street, or on North-South Street, or on Hypotenuse Street? Pythagoras came up with his famous theorem that the block on Hypotenuse St. is the size of the other two blocks put together.

But then he said "Screw it!" and decided to build right on the triangle in the middle! He gets more walk-in traffic, and he has three sides facing main streets to put up windows and show off his stuff. If he needs more room, he’ll just build up. Besides, a triangular building will get some interest.

But then Amazon put him out of business.