I'm Getting an Edumacation...

Greetings and welcome back to The Un-Zone, the only known site on the Internet devoted to all things related to Un. Basically, for those who don't get it, this stuff is all about me and the things that I find interesting. If this is not your cup of tea, try Google and find another site.

I've been through many years of school. At last count, I've spent twenty years in school. Elementary school, middle school, and high school. Four years of college. Three years in law school. That's close to 80% of my life spent in school of some sort.
Thankfully, I've managed to learn something. English grammar, fine literature, more math than I can handle (calculus, linear algebra, number theory), science of all sorts, and many other subjects. And yes, despite all of these years of filling my head with facts that may or may not be useful later in life, I've had education in other more useful subjects. Things like washing clothes, cooking food without burning it, and balancing a checkbook. Without such skills, I would be starving and broke. Possibly homeless due to an unfortunate cooking accident.
I still have many years of life ahead of me. I hope so, or this is going to be quite disappointing. Life is the best teacher there is, though life can be very tough. Life demands you pay a heavy price. Everyone ends up dead.
I find it sad that despite being one of the most "well-educated" countries in the world, the educational system is sorely lacking. To paraphrase what President G.W. Bush said about the educational system, our childrens is not learning. And yes, he was using faulty grammar. And yes, "our childrens is not learning" is meant to be a joke.

Consider the following. WWII was a bloody and costly war, both in money as in the number of lives lost. And yet, when juniors at a San Francisco area high school were asked questions about the war, most were clueless. Absolutely clueless. Mussolini was the leader of the USSR (Dictator of Italy by the way). The war ended with the bombing of Iwo Jima and Hitler's suicide (wrong again). They did, however, identify Hitler as the leader of Germany and a really bad dude.
Or this...Stanford University is one of the premier universities in the United States. It's recognized as a great school around the world. Secretary of State Rice attended there. Many other rich and famous people graduated from the institution. And students can learn all about Facebook by taking a class. It's about "gaining insight into the realm of online interaction" and other practical areas. Whatever the hell that really means.
For all I know, it could be about goofing off online, which Facebook does very well.

Finally, for all of those Star Wars fanatics out there. There's a class being taught at the University of Alabama about Star Wars and its links to religion, philosophy, and other areas of knowledge:

Finding the essence of religion, sociology, history and mass communication through the Force may seem a bit odd, but a particular Blount Undergraduate Initiative thematic seminar attempts to prove that the concept works.Taught by David DeWitt, a four-time graduate of the University, BUI 301: The Gospel of
Star Wars: Mass Entertainment as Postmodern Religion pulls many courses of study together to present a new wide-ranged look at mass media, religion and society.

There is some academic stuff involved. Like reading essays, writing papers, and watching film. Who knows, you might write a paper about Han Solo and the implications of him shooting first in the Cantina scene? That sounds a bit too geeky to me.

That's all for now.