new HORROR : Rip Van Winkle awakes and PASSES 2012 high school science exam with flying colours

Rip Van Winkle awakes from long sleep and wins big science scholarship to famous university

There is absolutely nothing in most 21st century high school physical science courses that the average smart lad or gal from the Victorian Era couldn't pass with flying colours.

And that curriculum is killing our planet.

One hundred and twenty five years of science - all the new science discoveries since the 1890s - the science we need to save this planet - has been deliberately ignored in the world of popular education.

 And need I add that most of the science done in the millions of years of human existence has been done very very recently, ie in those last 125 years ?

Unbelievably but true that most of humanity's body of science is not taught - by deliberate design - to most high school and even most university students.

Instead they learn the science of George Babbitt and the science known by the man who knew Coolidge, the science of mid-west Lions and Rotary Clubs, the science of small town boosters in loud checkered suits : the science of the Holy Anglo Saxon Trinity of Newton , Dalton and Darwin.

It is the self confident, arrogant,  science of Babbittry and it is killing this planet ; the science that fuels the certitudes and hubris of the climate deniers and of the vast majority of ordinary people wavering in the middle of that debate.

I - jokingly - argue sometimes we need to do an Admiral Byng every now and then : pick one or two high school science teachers, high school principals and school board curriculum directors at random and put them before a firing squad " pour encourager les autres".

It basically boils down to this ; how do you set and mark an exam question on determining the position and speed of a quantum particle ?

Public - compulsory - Education was birthed in the high Victorian Era and was deliberately designed to convince the doubting working class that Reality was an easily controlled and manipulative object for the greater profit of Man.

Education deliberately designed ideologically, from the ground up, to teach certitudes, not "Indeterminacy".

But un-certitude-ism is the real grain of reality - never more so than in the area of weather and climate.

The best that our best scientists can currently say is that  Airliner Earth has a 60% chance of crashing and burning fatally , if we don't quickly reduce the carbon pollution we pour into the skies.

That is not 19th century science's 100% certainty certitudes of the  libertarian bureaucrat think tank deniers - but it is real science, the science of today.

More to the point, would you not avoid flying a airline company that said its planes crash and burn 60% of the time, every time they take off?

Indeterminacy as the fundamental core of reality needs to be taught not just to bright-eyed 15 year olds : we senior citizens need to learn it too and apply it to our lives.

If only for the sake of the future lives of those bright-eyed 15 year olds.....