Why do so many of us force feed our children with garbage from the public education system without making sure that their grasp is not on facts but on how we acquire knowledge and how we learn? As I sat here arguing with my daughter about how many states of matter there are, I felt myself getting angry. I always tell my children that had they been born mentally challenged I could have accepted and dealt with it. Ignorance, on the other hand, I find to be intolerable. What seems to be the importance of this conversation I had with her is not that there are in fact 5 states of matter (known) and not 3, but that taking for granted everything you read in a textbook or everything you hear from a teacher to be the truth is just ignorant. It is also important to point out...

       ...that while I want my children to trust that their teachers are doing the best to educate them with the tools they've been given, they are after all, only human. Most every system seems perfect until you add humanity. So if teachers and textbooks can be wrong, and often are, why listen to them at all? It would be very hard to actually prove a history teacher wrong or right, or for that matter the textbook from which many of them regurgitate their 'facts', so is there any point at all in giving them the time to sit through their classes and listen?

       I'm going to be honest here, and most sane adults reading this will think I am not in their group of conventional sanity, but I could give a steaming pile of dung whether or not my children actually graduated high school as opposed to being educated. I want them to learn, and to want to learn. I want them to know how to learn. I do believe that schools in great capacity give them the tools they need to do this, but where is the line? Is it solely up to me to tell my children that their teachers are just sometimes full of the same garbage that has been circulating for years? That bureaucracy is an ugly hindrance to the learning process, and that politics and religion plays a part in everything they do every time they walk through those doors into that building?

       I am searching DESPERATELY for some help on this one. I have nothing to offer you in the line of money or awards, only in that your opinion will be read by a bunch of people who will not remember it in a day or two. What I want is this:

1,000 words or less describing the best way to get the most out of school. How to get a true education while keeping in mind that not everything read or learned in school is in the purest academic interests of the people learning it.

I will post the top 10 essays for a poll so that other readers can vote on them. I will choose the top 10. You will choose the top 1. You can submit them to this site via this link if you are a member or you can email them to me – entropy at nospinmedia dot com. If you are not interested in this but know someone who may be, please, for the love of knowledge forward this article to everyone possible.

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