Harry P.

Back to Common Core... I do see where some people (or states or school boards) may chafe at the idea of the Feds dictating to them what they will or won't teach. I get that whole "get the hell out of our lives and leave us do what we do best" argument, I really do. And in fact, I believe that the feds actually have no business, Constitutionally speaking, being in the education arena in the first place. Where does the Constitution call for a "Department of Education?" You could make a valid argument regarding the fact that the feds don't belong in the education business, period. But the fact is, the Dept. of Ed. does exist, and like all huge federal bureaucracies, it ain't going away any time soon. Soooooo, as long as the feds have created this "right" of theirs to dictate educational standards, we're going to either have to abolish the Dept. of Ed., or go along with what it dictates. Maybe "Common Core" ought to limit itself to defining a national minimal curriculum... in other words, defining the least that kids have to be taught, i.e., they must be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, history, science, etc., at appropriate levels in appropriate grades. Your local curriculum has to meet that minimum level of educating, but is free to teach other things above and beyond CC... things that the locals believe benefits them specifically. So maybe those kids in Idaho would get classes in Home Ec and Auto Shop, while the kids in Iowa would get classes in Agribusiness and farming tech. Localized curriculums for localized needs and wants, but a nationwide minimum requirement covering the basics. I agree 100% with Bill's comment... we need to study the methods used in those countries where the kids are doing better than ours are, and try to figure out what those countries are doing right, and why we aren't doing the same things.

Am I missing something? Isn't the point of Common Core to "standardize" curriculum across the country so that the kids in Idaho are learning the same stuff as the kids in Iowa? Why is that a bad thing? Seems to me that it makes sense to teach all kids the same stuff in the same way... rather than a crazy-quilt of hundreds of different state and/or local curiculums (curricula?)? I guess you could object to the actual curriculum, but what's objectionable about the concept?

Sorry, Al. I didn't know.

It's too bad that the builder/customer has to do any of that work in the first place. Just sayin'...

Pretty slick. Too bad it looks like a model because it doesn't have any mirrors, inside or out.

You're better off posting here anyway...

You might be surprised at how widespread the swastika was before the German military ever used it...

I thought this was the Fifth Dimension... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjxSCAalsBE

Pretty hard to write coherently when you're wasted...

But without accumulated knowledge, critical thinking is impossible.

Without accumulated knowledge, how would we know not to put our hand into a flame or not to step out in front of an oncoming car? Isn't accumulated knowledge the very thing that allows us to function?

BTW... we have a big feature article coming in the December issue all about building the Duel truck.

Your new avatar was sort of a clue...

Something like that...

The whole point of an online forum is for the members to interact online. Or to "jibber jabber," as you put it. What's the point of having an online forum if you think spending time there is stupid? In fact, why are you spending time here instead of building something?

Are you a fan of Ayn Rand's work?

Very nicely done, but there seems to be way too much space between the top of the Pete's chassis and the front part of the trailer.

Is that the episode where he breaks his glasses and then can't read anymore? That's a classic episode.

Actually he was Austrian... And Austria was the first country he took once he had the power to do so. But I see your point where how the massive amount of stupidity now easily available to all of us may indeed be hastening the dumbing-down of society. You may be right on that. But to look at the flip side of the coin, that same technology that has given the idiots a voice has also helped with many positive advancements that might have taken much longer without that technology, or never would have been possible at all. For example, a set of encyclopedias used to be a luxury, costing several hundred, even thousands, of dollars. Today anyone with an internet connection, no matter how little they may earn, has access to a world of information that otherwise would never have been possible. As far as the internet, you gotta take the bad with the good, I guess.

Yeah, like I said. Ignorant boobs were always with us. Today's technology just makes them so much more visible to us than they were, say, 50-100 years ago. The amount of ignorance hasn't grown, but the ability of the ignorant to make their views public has. I think that's the real difference. It just seems like there are a lot more idiots around today, but the reality is we're just hearing from them more than we did in the past.

But today you can have an infinite number of copies of that pic. And easily, too.

Told by who? If a person is the type that doesn't think for themselves or takes the word of others as gospel without doing their own critical thinking, then I don't think the internet is at fault. People like that always existed... the difference is, today they are much more visible because they have "social media" to express themselves on and perpetuate their own simplistic (or incorrect) opinions and beliefs. Today we have the technology available to the masses that allows the masses to make themselves much more public. Back when these technologies didn't exist, the lemmings were still among us. We just didn't hear from them nearly as much... and never from outside of our immediate circle of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Today we hear from the lemmings no matter where they live.

You should have used this in Real or Model...

I don't think literacy and intellectual curiosity are necessarily dying. What's dying...or changing.. is the way in which we get our information. In fact, for me at least, my "intellectual curiosity" has grown. When I was a kid we had a paper encyclopedia in the house. And I used it for school work, but rarely otherwise. Today, I search google and Wikipedia on average several times a day. And not because I have a school assignment to do, but because I want to. The ease with which I can now access information has made me much more active as far as searching out that information, not less so. And I doubt I'm alone in that. It's like when the automobile replaced the horse-drawn wagon. It's not that our need for transportation died, it's just that the way we moved around changed.

In the past 10-15 years, as one national bookstore chain after another went out of business, guess which book seller actually grew over that period? Answer: the book seller with no book stores. Amazon.