Blog

After the brilliant landing of the Phoenix on Mars, how can we not open this series of discussion postings other than with thoughts about exploring the Red Planet?! First, some thoughts on exploration itself…

Exploration is expanding human experience, and human consciousness.

Most of the universe we can only explore passively, sensing with our most powerful instruments radiation emitted from different times and places around our universe. Astronomy is exploration!

In the tiny confines of our solar system, we can actually interact physically with the environment we are exploring via probes, mostly operating at distances too great to permit teleoperation. Being able to teleoperate robotic systems in near real time brings a new dimension to remote exploration, as does virtual reality.

         

On a recent trip to hunt up something for dinner, I popped into a food store that recently opened in my neighborhood. It's one of those new mega markets, about the size of an airplane hangar, that's designed to satiate every epicurean desire.

The essentials were there, of course, but just up the aisle from the eighteen variants of orange juice and rows of glistening rotisserie chickens, the store also offered a bustling deli, a bakery, two ATMs, a photo-processing center, a faux French café, and video commercials at the checkout. I quickly forgot what I was looking for - not that I had a clue how to find it anyway. Thank heavens a perky employee in a bright blue vest was handing out maps.

It's odd, really, that the average supermarket has changed more in the past five years than the average school has advanced in the past fifty. Though both are concerned with the allocation of shelf space (whether in warm bodies or warm doughnuts), the supermarket has leaped into the future, while most schools haven't changed much since the Eisenhower administration. Many urban districts haven't even built a school in decades, and the old rattletraps they use often cannot accommodate the activities and equipment that new programs and modern technology demand.

         

The current system of education in the U.S. and most of the industrialized countries revolves around a factory mentality that was designed to serve the industrial era. Just as the assembly line worked for producing goods, it was thought that a similar approach would produce the appropriate workforce to serve that economy. We are now two centuries and many economic transformations beyond early industrialization, and we have not re-imagined our educational system in all that time. We try quick fixes, but with tragic results.

For example, we know that our brains do most of their developing, and the most quickly, by the age of three. For much of last century, the most stimulation infants received was a few “Cootchy Cootchy Coos” in their cribs, and then lots of toys in their playpens. Today, from the time they are born, many children are being read to and provided with educational toys and games, toy cell phones, and computers. These youngsters have their brains challenged in many new and exciting ways, with multimedia and constantly interactive learning. Then, at the age of 5, we send them to the same schools our great grandparents went to, and when they are quickly bored, inattentive and hyperactive, instead of completely changing the system to fit the new brains, we drug the children to fit the antiquated system.

         

In the vast figurative plain of self-imposed reprehensibility, I am guilty of the inexcusable folly of being a practicing Albuquerque-ian prairie dog watcher.

How is it that I have in such short time managed to implicate myself in this incorrigible foolishness? And with such fanatical glee? For surely there is no sense in searching, road-weary after the trip back from the faraway sands of base camp, bleary eyed, but determined, for the fat rump of a New Mexican rodent native to the grasslands of North America? Surely there are activities of greater practicality, if not importance, such as listening to music, daydreaming, or instigating conversation with the man behind the wheel? Would it not be wise to Walt Whitman my way with the people of this foreign state, learning, appreciating, adapting? But, as Hamlet says,”Aye, there’s the rub,” for the driver himself is guilty of the same crime! We are both peevishly enamored with the chub of a beast that is no more than half a foot top to toe! We watch them sit, stand, scurry, and dig, activities of absolutely arbitrary nature to them, but of utmost interest to us. And what does this get my driver friend and me? Does the prairie-dog wave hello? Does he shout salutations, or perhaps, a casual good-day? Does he rather bite his thumb at us? None and absolutely NONE of the above! He notices us not.