"Veeduber" wrote
- PS -- Reading over that, maybe the joke IS on you. Or on America. A
lot of
the stuff I was taught in gammar school more than fifty years ago is now
considered College Level material. I was about eleven years old when they
hit
us with 'Mechanics of Motion,' a chapter we were expected (and required)
to
master before the Christmas break. Today, 'education' appears to have
become a
largely SOCIAL activity of which the acquisition of knowledge is a mere
by-product, given little emphasis.

Nowadays they need a seventy dollar text book the size of a coffee table
to
teach that one chapter. 'Newton's Laws' or some damn thing. Mostly white
space except for all the pretty pictures. Then they spend a full year
spoon-feeding that pap to youngsters already old enough to vote.

Americans may not be any less intelligent now as then but devoting a full
year
to what every schoolboy picked up in a couple of weeks isn't what I'd call
smart. -- rsh

Yup, this is the difference between rote learning, which is just
memorization, and actually learning, which is knowing the reason behind
things and and how to calculate things yourself.

Eric