> In a world where U.S. students are being left behind in important parts of > the global job market, is nostalgia really a good guiding principle for > education policy? Should we have kids walk two miles uphill both ways to > school?> > The world is moving fast. There’s not much use for cursive writing anymore. > Let’s let it go the way of instruction in the metric system.
Huh??? I don't know whether cursive should be taught or not (I write both ways), but I do know that a major reason why U.S. students are left behind is that the school system insists on teaching, and much of the government insists on using, units that we gave up over 35 years ago. I live in Charlotte, 200 m from I-85. I grew up in California and Ohio, where I built things with 8 mm Lego blocks. I made partitions in a cupboard of a house I lived in (East Aurora, I think) with nine dowels spaced 50 mm apart. I have 75 g of rice, millet, and quinoa soaking in just over 75 ml of water. Around midnight, I mixed 15 g of henna, 7.5 g of amla, 7.5 g of cloves, and 90 g of water and applied it to my hair and nails (yes, I'm writing this with my head wrapped in plastic, as I do every month or two). I am 1.5 m tall and my mass is about 80 kg. I go at 60, 70, 90, or 100 km/h on the road, depending on which road it is. Don't ask me how many feet I am from the interstate or how many ounces of water the rice is soaking in. I don't know. I do know that 90 km/h=25 m/s. The metric system is designed to be easy to calculate in. A cubic decimeter is a liter; a liter of water is pretty close to a kilogram (which comes in handy when calculating how moist the soil is). A joule per second is a watt; a volt- ampere is also a watt. There are no incoherent units, such as cubic feet and gallons, in SI. Except for time and angle, where some units used with SI (not actual SI units) are in ratios of 60, and atom-sized units that most people don't need to know, every unit is 10 or 1000 times the next-smaller one. That's why it's used all over the world. If we want to get ahead in the global job market, we need to think in metric. To do that, we need to metricate the publicly visible measurements, such as road signs and weather, and stop teaching feet and pounds and miles and teach only metric. Pierre -- gau do li'i co'e kei do
