During the Second World War, the government of the USSR mass-produced a poster that reads Religion is poison. Protect your children. In fact, as you can probably guess, it says that in Russian. But that’s the idea. What the poster is driving at is that modern citizens must give up religion for education. And they’re right. But here in North America, we missed that lesson. Or perhaps we learned a different one in Sunday School.

We have a school system that was originally church-run. Here in Canada, it was church-run a whole lot more recently than in other places. And it only completely eliminated the church in the late 1990s in Newfoundland. Apart from my sadness that it took so long, the issue that we are addressing is that it hasn’t really happened.

My personal views on religion are extreme at best. But I shan’t bore you with an ecclesiastical rant. There are teachers discussing morality and faith. Creationism is seen by many to be a valid perspective for classroom use. Our school system is called non-denominational, which implies that it accepts all Christian sects but nobody else. These are symptoms of a larger problem.

Teachers are using the school system as a pulpit from which to preach religious indoctrination. Church groups have power over schools and the government departments that control their curriculum. We celebrate religious holidays in schools. We allow a system to exist that implies strongly that Christianity has a monopoly on what is right and goes so far as to actually state that we are all people of faith, when we simply are not. While teaching the right answer is a spurious approach to education, teaching the wrong answer is definitely a bad idea.

I am not saying that people who believe in a supreme being make bad teachers. I know many, including my parents, who are excellent teachers and also religious. I am not arguing for an elimination of religion from the minds and hearts of teachers or even from those of the students.

It simply must not be part of the educational experience. We are no longer in the dark ages. The church is not the holder of knowledge. We have creativity, we have science, and we have thought. Teach those.

By this point, you have likely already seen Ken Robinson’s ubiquitous Schools Kill Creativity Ted Talk. He’s right. But he’s only gone halfway down the road. Schools do kill creativity but that’s not ok. We need to do something about that. The problem comes in two forms – we test knowledge as if it were important, rather than understanding, and we award less importance to creativity than to correctness.

You’re going to tell me that these things are not bad. Knowledge is good and it’s important to have the right answer.

In a way, I suppose you could make an argument for these statements. But I won’t believe you and neither should you.

Knowledge is worthless and the right answer is irrelevant.

In centuries past, knowledge was the all-important concept and the right answer was prised above all else. But we live in the era of universal information sharing and, although schools often like to ban information-carrying devices from the classroom and pretend that nothing has changed since the age of Plato, we have left the cave.

There are other reasons for the death of in-school (and after-school) creativity in our students. These include the lack of funding for the arts, the blatant disregard for creativity in science curriculum, and a lack of respect for novel approaches in a framework of learning that is not a framework of discovery. But those are secondary to the two main reasons.

Understanding is the new knowledge. You think that it’s important to know the capital of Lithuania and the date of the Treaty of Versailles. But that’s because you know the answers and our personal knowledge is valuable to us. What about the value of a stamp bearing the head of King George V or the name of the hospital where your best friend was born? Is that knowledge more or less valuable because you don’t possess it? I can look up almost any piece of information in less than a minute. And so can you. And so can your first-grade child. Instant recall is almost useless in a world where action takes time; a minute is short enough that it makes no difference in all but the most severe of cases. So why do we ask our students to memorize dates, to define words, and to label maps? We did it. And we’re smart. So it had to be good for us.

That argument doesn’t fly for me. And it shouldn’t for you, either.

What should we be teaching? In a word, understanding. In another few, we should be teaching students to come up with creative solutions to problems, new ways to understand the world and not simply the accepted approach. If I want the historical argument, I can go to Wikipedia. If I want something new, I can ask a child. And I should. And so should you.

But, you say, the right answer is still the right answer.

In this world, the right answer is only one of many right answers, in almost all cases. The Second World War was caused by Hitler. It was caused by Chamberlain. It was caused by Poland’s lacklustre defences. It was caused by France’s delusions of military superiority. It began because of a piece of paper. It was started because England thought it would be easier than assassinating Hitler.

These answers are all right and none of them is the whole story. The right answer is available any time, any day, free of charge on the Internet. What I want from my students is creative thought. Deeper meanings. As I said, knowledge has become worthless as it is now available anywhere; the right answer is freely available and understanding is now key.

…we are asking the wrong question. We know why students hate school – it’s boring, it’s useless, it’s bureaucratic, and it’s as well organized as a drunken mob fighting over the last hotdog at a ballgame. And that’s only the beginning. But what is the right question, you ask?

Why is it ok to hate school?

I went on to list the twenty principal problems (nice pun, eh?) with contemporary education – curriculum, creativity, religion, evaluation, tradition, teacher training, age, timing, technology, marks, textbooks, classrooms, subjects, punishment, innocence, bureaucracy, government, unions, administration, and substituting. My plan was to talk about these in groups of five. And I still shall do so. But I’m going to split them up into individual posts every few days, rather than burden you with all five at a time.

Curriculum.

I know what you’re thinking. Standardization is good. Learning is good. Books are good. Bulk purchasing is good. So what’s wrong with curriculum? Curriculum is the closest thing in contemporary government to mob rule. I shall take for granted that most of you don’t know how curriculum is developed and explain it in brief.

A group of government functionaries (see government in part 4), educational theorists (see teacher training in part 2), and teachers who want to spend time in a boardroom rather than a classroom (see substituting in part 4), get together and spend vast amounts of time discussing what we can’t teach our students.

I know, the theory is that they get together and talk about what we should teach. And they do that. Right at the beginning. They ask the question, what do students need to know? and receive answers that have not already been filtered out by the sheer lack of representation of good information in the room. That takes a few hours. The remainder of the time is spent discussing what parts of that we can’t teach, we don’t have time to teach, we don’t know how to teach, or faith (see religion in this part) won’t let us teach.

So far, we have determined that curriculum development is a waste of time. But most things in society and all things in government can easily be classified as that. So what’s the problem? As I said, so far. At this point, there isn’t one.

Then they make it mandatory. Problem.

We, as teachers, are told by our passion for teaching that our job is to help the students in the best way possible to learn, to grow, and to think. We are told by our curriculum that this is not only impossible but prohibited. And, since we are employed by the very organization who creates this curriculum, we (yes, I included) teach what we are instructed to teach and let students down, not one at a time but by the hundreds.

What could be so wrong with the curriculum, you ask? Three things – mediocrity, modifications, and segregation. We’re going to talk about these three things in depth in other sections but there’s no reason not to begin now.

Mediocrity is the most massive problem with schools. We expect less from students now than ever before. And they continue to disappoint us. Every time we lower the bar, the students find a new way to walk straight into it and hit their heads. We need to stop lowering the bar. We need to get out of this painfully archaic way of thinking that we tailor our teaching to what the student is capable of (theoretically speaking, this is a concept from the early part of the last century called the Zone of Proximal Development) and raise our expectations. Not a little. Or gradually. Expect nothing short of what we think of as genius and students will not only perform but ask for more.

You’re skeptical, I know. You don’t think you could have performed at exceptional levels when you were in school. There are several reasons that you think that. One is that what you consider normal is no longer what is expected of students. What you were required to do in third grade is likely what is now expected in the sixth and so forth. Don’t believe me? In some regions, ninth-grade textbooks are now being used in twelfth grade. The same answers now receive higher marks on the SATs. Standardized tests have been renormed across North America because average results were so poor that it didn’t justify education funding.

Another reason is that you were raised in an era where the expectation was low and you didn’t have to work to achieve it. Who knows what you could have done if you had applied yourself at age 8? Don’t sell yourself so short to think that you achieved your potential at every step of the way. I assure you that you didn’t even come close.

Where is my proof? The Internet. Who is better at using a computer – you or your six-year-old? She’s managed to achieve more in the last year understanding technology than you have in the last ten. Don’t tell me that children are stupid. I tell you that they are underachieving because they are expected to be mediocre. And, as they would achieve what we ask of them if it were difficult, they achieve exactly what we expect of them now. Sad, isn’t it?

Modifications are another staggering area of curriculum development. By this, I don’t mean exceptionality, which is a whole other topic about which we shall have much to say in the future. I mean, how difficult is it to change the curriculum? In theory, theory is exactly what drives curriculum development. In practice, curriculum is exactly the same as it has been for decades. Sure, we put different names on it. And we talk about groupwork more now than ever before. But teachers figured out groupwork a long time ago. And the use of technology in the classroom. And student leadership. And teaching to individuals rather than to norms. And how long has it taken for any of these things to be adopted in the government documentation? Simply, they still haven’t made it in there in anything but name. And they won’t because change is an admission of guilt that it wasn’t already working. And we can’t have that.

Teachers are asked to teach to the students but strapped into a straightjacket of rigid curriculum outcomes and methods. So what comes first? The student or our jobs? I’ll leave that to you to figure out and I assure you it’s not the first.

Segregation used to mean different races having different water fountains. And I suppose, in a way, that’s what I mean, too. The maths don’t mix with the musics. The Englishes don’t even contemplate talking to the sciences. Curriculum talks about subjects as if they existed in small black boxes, rather than as an ocean with seas of understanding flowing freely into each other. And that’s wrong.

We’re going to talk about this in much more depth in part 3 but I’ll give a brief of it here. There is no boundary between history and English, between math and music, between physics and geography. We made it up to make things easier. And because teachers don’t want to teach everything. Which they should be doing. Some primary educators have got the right idea, creating projects that span the gaps between traditional subject areas, using math to build models in art class, writing English assignments on topics from biology. The educated person is not an expert in one thing and mindlessly unaware of all others. We mark separately, we teach separately, and we treat subjects as if they had nothing in common but the building in which we sit. Wrong is only the beginning.

So what’s the solution to this one? Throw out the curriculum?

That’s too simple. That being said, however, it’s a start.

But we are asking the wrong question. We know why students hate school – it’s boring, it’s useless, it’s bureaucratic, and it’s as well organized as a drunken mob fighting over the last hotdog at a ballgame. And that’s only the beginning. But what is the right question, you ask?

Why is it ok to hate school?

I know what you’re going to say. It’s not ok. You reprimand little Ferdinand every time he says school sucks and Anastasia is summarily grounded when instead of writing her homework she simply writes vulgarities on the paper to be submitted. But ask yourself if this is pro forma or for real? You hated school so it must be natural that your kids do. So you feel a little pang of guilt every time you say that school is good for you. You know that vegetables make you healthy so ensuring that the overcooked green peas make it into Frederica’s mouth rather than her pockets is your duty as a parent. But school was a waste of time and you can’t bring yourself to think otherwise, regardless of the hours of effort that you must put into the task.

If you think it’s ok to hate school, then, there must be others who think like you. The people who had similar experiences to you, I would expect. Like your friends. And classmates. And their friends and classmates. Oh my. That covers just about everyone, doesn’t it?

So we all think it’s ok to hate school and then we wonder why students go on the pip and feel justified in so doing. If we’re going to spend innumerable hours seeking educational solutions, perhaps we should begin our search from a place of truth rather than fiction. Just a thought.

I assure you, this has not been a pointless rant; neither was the point to spread depression and lethargy. We shall discuss twenty serious issues with education and potential solutions to them. Before we begin, I should point out that I have not said issues with public education. If you noticed the omission, I applaud your sense of the status quo. This is not a discussion of issues with the oft-maligned state education system. Private educators are just as guilty, often more so. I simply ask that you keep this in mind as you read further.

We’re going to tackle five of these at a time.

Part 1 – What’s in a school?

• curriculum – When you see a train coming, it might be best to step off the track.
• creativity – When we tell students to be themselves, perhaps we should actually mean it.
• religion – The infidel is smarter than you are.
• evaluation – We’re testing the wrong thing.
• tradition – Yesterday’s methods didn’t even work yesterday.

Part 2 – How do we do it?

• teacher training – Who needs a class on chalkboard writing, anyway?
• age – Five-year-olds aren’t stupid. At least, not all of them.
• timing – It’s not just half of us who hate periods.
• technology – Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s good. Or bad, come to think of it.
• marks – What’s the difference between an 80% and an 81%?

Part 3 – Think inside the box?

• textbooks – If you write well, it’s a best-selling novel. If you don’t, it’s a textbook.
• classrooms – Chalkboards and tables and desks. Oh my.
• subjects – Why is writing a story and writing about the Great War different?
• punishment – What did you learn in detention today?
• innocence – Your students probably have more sex than you do.

Part 4 – Where is the box, anyway?

• bureaucracy – Red tape is an ineffective teaching tool.
• government – What do politicians know about teaching, anyway?
• unions – There exists a fuzzy world where mediocrity is rewarded if you keep at it long enough.
• administration – When was the last time you were sent to the principal’s office because you were good?
• substituting – Random never solved anything.

I shan’t bore you with the details at the moment, since I believe that you have enough to keep your thoughts busy for a short while. More soon.

driving is one of my few passions. and i do it as much as i can.

environment be damned.

you give me an efficient car that takes electricity under the bonnet and i’ll drive it until the end of time. no problem. until then, i shall stick with my saab turbo. it’s not that i’m against clean fuels, it’s that i drive a fairly fuel-efficient car (35-40mpg) and, until they get this electric thing into mass-production and within my pocketbook’s postcode, i shall continue with life as usual.

but yesterday we thought about change in the last ten years. and i said we’d leave cars until today.

certainly.

ten years ago, cars ran on petrol. lots of it. and we heard rumors of clean fuels, hybrids that would save the planet, electric sports cars, clean diesel, hydrogen lorries, and personal train cars.

all to be had in the next ten years or so.

we still drive petrol cars. on the same petrol, give or take a few percent, that we did ten years ago. except that it now costs more than gold. or frankincense, for that matter. they are just as dirty as they were ten years ago. seriously. look it up if you don’t believe me. i drive a car that’s about that old. and it’s just as efficient in fuel as a comparable modern version.

hybrids are a myth. no, not their existence, their efficiency. the toyota prius is the prime example. let’s compare it to one of its largest competitors in the uk – the honda jazz. the prius has two engines, an electric engine and a petrol engine. the jazz has a diesel engine. the prius has two engines, neither of which is big enough to, well, drive the car. the jazz is peppy and light. which is not something that i would typically say of a diesel anything. (tractor?) but what about fuel efficiency? in the city, the prius gets something like 45-50mph. and that’s the official united states government of transport statistics. there’s no official test for the jazz, since it’s not sold in the united states and the uk government doesn’t do those tests, but anecdotal experience tells me that, in the city, the jazz can attain almost 75-80mpg. and without a fancy engine.

oops. toyota needs to buy more advanced testing equipment.

like a scientific calculator.

save the planet. sell your hybrid. buy a diesel.

everyone talked about electric sports cars before the turn of the millennium.

they talk about them now.

but who’s actually got one? tesla roadster? fantastic concept. where do i sign up? and where are we getting that electricity from? hydro? nuclear? not likely. much more likely to be oil-fired turbines. or (gasp!) coal. seriously, you sell me an electric car for the same price as my beloved coupe and i’m there. today. until then, please go back to your laboratories and get cracking.

clean diesel. enough said. i place this strictly in the category with “healthy rabies” or “sensible government”.

hydrogen lorries sound fantastic. no more smoke plumes. hydrogen anything. but that requires several things. first, they have to exist. then we have to find a way to extract the hydrogen that takes less energy than using it. zero-for-two. call me when you’re at even odds, please.

and then we get to my favorite. personal train cars. that’s the concept whereby all roads are replaced by tracks and we have intelligent train cars that we get in by our homes and link into the electric train lines to get us where we’re going. and they link with long trains that share parts of our pathways to improve efficiency and are only large enough for one person.

again i say it, you first.

build it and i’ll be there. today. tomorrow. whenever.

until then, could someone please answer one small question for me?

what’s changed?

forget it. i’m going for a drive…

and without further ado.

computers. ten years ago, we were using windows 98. it was a painful time. apple was a bit-player, linux was simply painful (although that hasn’t changed) but at least nobody had heard of it, bsd was confined to servers (ok, some things never change), and the machine of the day was about 300-400mhz (even apple’s new imacs and amd’s k-series machines). today, my phone is over 600mhz. and has more storage memory than my windows 98 machine. not, to be honest, that i had a windows 98 machine, but let’s talk about the big shift.

what did we do on those computers? i can tell you what 300mhz buys you today. a dialtone, a keypad, and a very sluggish web browser that forgets my username every time i open it. or a clunky windows 98 gaming computer for the more geeky among us. not that that’s a bad thing. but old versions of windows are almost as much of a pain in the posterior region as the new ones. and that’s quite a statement.

in 1999, we happily sent email, surfed the web, played graphics-intensive video games (baldur’s gate, anyone? simcity 2000, which game out in 1996, if memory serves?), chatted online, edited photographs, typed documents, and researched.

i don’t know what you do today but that sounds like a fairly comprehensive list of what the average computer user will do in the next twenty-four hours. what’s changed?

computers have gotten faster to allow slower software to run. hard drives have gotten larger to allow us to store larger, more inefficient software and our collections of music and video, which we used to keep on other media. screens have gotten larger so that we can use our computers as home theaters. which we already had. mostly because we had home theaters. i ask again. what’s changed?

mobile phones, perhaps, you ask?

my 3g iphone is the nearest thing to the star trek transponder unit that i can think of, to date. and i don’t know what i’d do without that level of connectivity.

but it’s really just a computer that i can fit in my pocket. and that’s exactly how i use it.

ten years ago, i carried a laptop and a mobile phone to dial up to the internet. and i could use the phone to talk.

in 1999, cellular reception was awful. even in large cities. you couldn’t talk in elevators. or underground. and calls got dropped while you drove. and people complained if you talked on the phone in your car. or in the mall. or in a movie. phones were massive devices with extraneous things like web browsers on them. and cameras. and digital media players.

oh yes. did i say 1999? i meant now. or did i? i can’t remember. i can’t tell the difference.

that leaves us with cars, television, music sharing, and long-distance calling.

cars i shall leave until tomorrow, since it’s a lengthy topic.

television, though. that one bothers me. we have been told that broadcast media is dead. and it should be. years ago, it should have been. ten years ago, we could tape and play television, pause it with a dvr, watch it on our computers, and download video. but we couldn’t have any show, when we wanted it, commercial-free.

sounds like today.

so tell me how television has changed? better resolution? sorry, i’ll just get the dvd.

music sharing. we did it then. we do it now. now, service providers try to stop us with bandwidth caps and mindless traffic shaping. then, it was easy. i give you that it’s changed. would you like to go back?

which brings us to the end of the list – long-distance calling.

now it’s mostly free for anyone who wants to use a computer. then, it was mostly free for anyone who wanted to use a computer. the only difference is that it’s now publicized.

oops. shhh.

change is good, they say.

i say, show me a change and i’ll think about making a judgement. until then, change simply isn’t good. it simply isn’t.

but that’s a discussion for another day. today’s thought is how to divide people. or perhaps more accurately, how people divide themselves without any interactivity and the subsequent results.

i am what i would call a polarizing personality. if you have met me, you either like me or you don’t. usually a lot of one or the other. you are not indifferent. i find this to be curious, since most people are willing to fight to the death that they don’t think of things in black and white, as i do. makes me rather curious, though. i’m open to suggestions as to why this is the case but i’m going to explore a few of them. i believe that people react this way to everyone but that they are not prepared to actually display it. i’m not sure why but i think it has something to do with an ancient concept called tact.

i don’t do tact, though, so i don’t tend to receive it.

i have narrowed impressions down to a short list of factors – speech, thought, action, aura. it’s going to be one or more of these that do it.

people react to the way that i speak. i know this. it has been mentioned repeatedly. i speak like i write. and you can see how i write. it’s not how you expect words to be handled. oops. i don’t know why that would make people love or hate me, though. moving on.

thought. ah. that’s a more dangerous proposition. thoughts are the realm of dissent. there are two schools of thought, pardon the reference, that exist. one is that all thoughts are equal and that people have something valuable to contribute. the other is that thoughts are meant to be just that, thought, then processed, defended, and spoken. it’s not that i don’t believe that you have something valuable to say. i just don’t think it’s a given that everything out there is worth listening to. i’m not going to change my mind unless i have a very good reason to do it. it’s not that it’s not going to happen. it’s that if i’ve bothered to think something, i’ve got a very solid ground for it. and that means that to shift it, it’s going to take some doing. and i’m easily bored. i don’t like debate and argument. i simply want to act, to enjoy, to exist, and to teach.

which brings us to action. i act without regard for tradition, common thought or practice, or some antiquated view of right and wrong. can you say that you’re that free? this could have something to do with the black-and-whiteness of it.

and the aura.

do you feel what i feel?

is it confidence? arrogance? enjoyment? hate?

your turn. black or white?

but what has happened to the experience?

dirty rooms with larger and larger walls and poorer quality projections fill with unwashed masses who speak on mobiles and talk throughout the production. and that’s only half the problem.

trailers take up the vast majority of the average attention span, before the film has even begun – and that’s with ever-increasing admission costs. advertising for products that i shan’t ever purchase followed by trailers for films completely devoid of interest sap the life from my viewing eyes. this is then followed by the introductory scene of the main production, at which point i am ready to go home. and that’s when the film begins.

but that is an incipit problem and cannot easily be solved. it is the tradition of an industry devoid of thought but flush with currency.

what i do not understand, however, is what happens once this vast harang has been relegated to the void of past experiences and the collection of photographs that will make up the memory of the film begin to flash before the eyes.

the forties and fifties saw film noir, the sixties and seventies, the drama, the eighties and nineties, the action film, and now, the comedy.

there was a time when comedies were funny. there were banana-peels. there were characters like donald and daffy. comedy was where it belonged. in the realm of the ridiculous and the animated. but it has become a mainstay of the modern film experience. and it lost something in the translation. the funny.

so where did the funny go? it was replaced by the disturbing. food humor, toilet humor, death humor – you name the depths of depravity that you’d like to sink to and then pick the currently-running film that uses them as a basic premise for existence.

and people watch it.

and i’m sad.

i want to see plot, writing, and an alternate reality that is believable, complex, and lifelike. i don’t need to see people behaving stupidly for the sake of non-existent humor. i don’t need to see illness in the guise of comedy.

pshah. i’m going back to the sixties. they knew how to write back then.

go away.

that’s not to say that you shouldn’t call me to rant. i’m here for you all. but at least define your words well.

i’m going through a hard time. life is not being nice to me at the moment. and that’s putting it mildly. and hearing about other people’s problems helps. makes me feel like i’m not so alone with it.

being forced to do something involves actual force. go figure. i’ve been through this in relationships before. if i say i don’t like your hair, that doesn’t mean i’m forcing you to change it. if i say i don’t like that you drink, that doesn’t mean that you have no choice but to stop drinking.

there’s a massive gulf between doing something because you care about someone and doing something because you have no choice.

i have recently been reminded about what “no choice” feels like.

i am going to be delayed in my pursuit of the educational profession to which i have committed my life. that’s not because i love you. that’s because i have no choice.

i can’t drink coffee. i have no choice. i’m not doing it because you’ve suggested it. i’m doing it because it hurts like fuck. pardon my italian.

if i say i don’t like it when people get drunk and you stop drinking, that’s fantastic. i’m very happy. and you’re going to be healthier, have more fun, and be less likely to spend your evenings praying to the porcelain gods. but get it right. you’ve made a choice to stop drinking. you might be doing it because you love me. you might be doing it because you are tired of being sick from alcohol consumption. but that doesn’t matter. ok, it matters, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve chosen to do it. you could choose to drink right now. yes, right now. and i won’t stop you. and neither will anyone else, i’d expect. except perhaps your lack of having a beer in the fridge.

i appreciate what people do because they care about me.

and i’m sure other people feel the same way.

but if you’re going to think about being forced to do something, please think again.

i’ll take the martini out of your hand if you’re hurting yourself beyond a reasonable point. i’ll drag you back from crossing the street if you’re going to get hit by a truck. but i’m not going to make you get a haircut, give up your friends, your pot, your booze, or your views on relationship dynamics.

i’ll suggest it.

and may the force be with you.

but i’m going to deal with that at another point.

there’s something else that i’ve been thinking about. newness. i am told every day (yes, really, in this industry it actually comes up on a daily basis) that so many things have changed. i’m tired of hearing about it. because it’s a myth. in the next little bit, we’re going to talk at length about the myths of web 2.0, internet openness, the death of privacy, and some other related issues. but let’s start with progress.

everyone knows that humankind is a progressive species. by definition, we evolve, as we are alive. but does that mean that we improve?

applied to a more everyday scenario, think of what has changed about life in the past ten years and what do you come up with?

let’s see if i have the whole list – computers, mobile phones, the internet, cars, television, music sharing, long-distance calling. we can add to that a list of things that haven’t so much changed as become more prevalent in our non-technical lives – yoga, organic foods, environmentalism.

we’ll start with the second list.

yoga’s been around since the beginning of time. alright, not the beginning of time. but about 3300bc is slightly before my memory ends so we can think of it that way. i know what you’re thinking. you don’t think that yoga is new, just the rise of its popularity. and i’ll give you that. to a point. but these at-one-with-the-earth rituals have been floating around a lot in the past half-century and, if we are to believe that history is cyclic, which it is, i give you one decade in particular to contemplate – the nineteen-sixties. that’s a time when everyone and her dog was a child of flower, consumed more marijuana than the modern artistic community as a whole, and danced to music that resembled an acid trip more than the blue man group does today. so tell me again about this rise of yoga, if you please.

organic foods. now there’s a concept. if you told a farmer from the first half of the twentieth century that we’d have a rise of organic produce, things grown properly, healthy diets, they’d give you one answer. all of them would. i guarantee it. “what do you mean? there’s going to be a time when this declines in between?” we simply fell off the wagon. welcome home.

environmentalism is beyond farcical. at least, the way that it is exercised in our modern world certainly is. you tell me. how much do you care about recycling? how much do you take transit because our cities are badly designed and how much do you take it because it’s good for the environment? or because you can’t afford a car? if we want to improve the environment, there are many things that we can do that will have enormous effect. let’s look at a list of some of them. if we all consumed no meat, there would be a massive shift in production of greenhouse gasses, transportation costs, and foreign trade. food quality would improve, waste would be de-facto eliminated, plant life would increase, carbon production would go through the floor, and people would be healthier, not to mention live in a healthier world. if all transportation were to be fueled by electricity and that electricity were to be produced by means other than fossil fuel consumption, we wouldn’t have to stop moving, only change the way in which that movement was powered. and improvement would be immediate. if we were to eliminate alcohol consumption and other non-essential activities (read, drug consumption, eating in restaurants, purchasing of music and videos rather than duplicating them), and give that money to clean-energy research, that would mean an increase of trillions (yes, i’m serious and conservative in my estimate at the same time) of dollars worldwide and an imminent delivery from that industry.

are you prepared to do any of those things? i will if you will. step up.

i’ll tackle the other list next time. ta.