Theme: Agency

My father used to hire delivery drivers. I would ride in the van, pull the order, take it the door, knock, and delivery with a smile. I started (really) in second grade, on holidays, and I pretty much understood how a business ran by the time I was eleven. At twelve I had the largest paper route in the city, and did baby sitting for ‘rambunctious boys’ that girls couldn’t manage. (boys are simple. so simple it’s painful.) At sixteen I had a job running games at the amusement park, and building the end-displays at the super market, and had a crew of four or five. This is before I got out of high school.

From my perspective, after eleven or maybe twelve, about two hours of school a day is all that is necessary or valuable, with reading being the only exception. you can’t read enough. And the only way to read well (as to write well) is to just do it until you don’t think about it any longer.

I know why we don’t teach logic/rhetoric, history, money/accounting, economics, and warfare.

I don’t know why we don’t teach the electrical grid, the water, the sewer grid, the data grid, the highways, rivers, rails, airports, and ports and how they work together to move people and stuff.

But they are a far better investment for most people than the sciences and maths. I mean, I think it’s important to understand the hierarchy of structures in the physical universe from the subatomic to the ecological to the sentient.

But I would rather people people understand my table of grammars so so that they know what grammars exist and why, rather than know how to use them. Most of what we need to know about physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, can be taught absurdly young.

Everything else is (a) reading, (b) learning application and (c) socializing.

Why do I care: re-socializing the polity around WORK rather than IDEOLOGY turns out to be the most important product of education.