One Room Schools for the 21st Century
There’s been a page lurking over on the left for “The CORS Project: A Modest Proposal” for a while. I know it’s already been popular, thanks among other things to a link from my friend Tonya Miller, but I’ve been putting off bringing it to the front because it’s associated with a Pajamas Media piece.
Give it a look. I wrote it originally as a sort of reductio argument to show that lack of money wasn’t the schools’ major problem, at least as far as educating kids was concerned ( what else do schools do now, though?) but as I’ve thought about it, it seems more and more like it might just work.
Update: It turns out that Tom McClintock in California made a similar sort of argument. I think he was really on the track of something with this suggestion:
So I will begin by excluding from this discussion the entire budget of the State Department of Education, as well as the pension system, debt service, special education, child care, nutrition programs and adult education. I also propose setting aside $3 billion to pay an additional 30,000 school bureaucrats $100,000-per-year (roughly the population of Monterey) with the proviso that they stay away from the classroom and pay their own hotel bills at conferences.
In the mean time, the full text of my PJM article follows after the fold.
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(1) 77,593 years — more or less. Neglecting the radial velocity partial, errors in the distance, the inaccuracy in my number of days per year, and the cosmological constant. 77,593.3421 is what Google Calc says but that’s more digits than I believe.
(2) Define “interesting”. The movie title, “October Sky” is one. On the other hand, I’m fond of “Cob Trek Soy” for its image of James T Kirk during his Iowa childhood.
(3) Yes.
Oh, you wanted argument. Okay, here are several. First, simply from the scientific standpoint, using remote-sensing robots to do science is a little like trying to eat with yard-long chopsticks and oven mitts. Every time we’ve sent a robotic sensor that survived the trip, we’ve learned of things (like the hematite “blueberries”, or the recent silica deposits) that we not only never imagined, but might have seen only by the wildest chance. The silica deposits, for example, only showed up because the rover has a busted wheel. If a new question comes up, it takes ten years, conservatively, before an experiment can be delivered in place to explore it. A human on site could try new things immediately, consider the answers, and try the next thing.
Second, from the standpoint of human nature, we simply don’t get as interested in something until there’s a person doing it. As much fun as it is to see pictures from the rovers, we need a person on the ground to make it real. Preferably a poet, like Ray Bradbury, or a writer like Hemingway or John McPhee.
And third, from a Heinleinist sort of viewpoint, the most moral thing a human can do is to take steps that increase the chances that the human species will survive and prosper. We need humans on other planets, and eventually in other solar systems; people need to aspire to the stars.
— Posted by Charlie (Colorado)