School as PLAY, not prep for real life

[Arthur Hu <ArthurH@TANGIS.COM>]

You know, I was thinking that school is NOT relevant to real life.

What it is is PLAY life. Everybody gets to sample what literally
all different kids of people get to do when they grown up. How many
of us will get paid to do finger painting, sing in a school choir, solve
for quadratic inequalities, or do a book report? How many of us will
have to run a timed mile, research the civil war, or diagram a grammar
chart?

School is the place where we can do all sorts of stuff that will
have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with our future day jobs.

And that's the way it should be. How many people on this list, even
the technical ones actually have to solve algebra problems? I'm a
software engineer and I've never had to do an algebra or trig solution
since college. In fact, the IEEE journal had a chart which I'll have to
post sometime if I find the time showing  that there's a huge amount
of training software engineers get that they never ever use, such
as differential equations.

The reason you take algebra is because it's part of the sorting
mechanism, not because it's something that "every citizen and
worker must know and be able to do".

Does this help anybody? Am I on to something?

What possible use does ANYBODY have for nuclear physics or
evolutionary or planetary history??

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