In which I pull together the ultimate meaning of the educational universe as explained in the media

Okay, it's the end of my experiment with NaNoBloMo, and I managed to write a post every single day. So yay me! Never thought I could actually do it. It helps if you only sleep three hours a night, though. I work HARD to be this mediocre, people!

And it's been a busy month to talk about education, at least in the news. But I think I can distill it all into a kernel of truthy revelation.

Apparently, the way to fix education is to get the kids to show up-- so let's give them a brand-new $30,000 iPod-equipped pickup for near-perfect attendance. I like this blatant appeal to consumerism over the value of knowledge for its own sake. And from the hippy-dippy side of the equation, we can guarantee that attendance would obviously go up if we just let the kids do whatever-the-heck their little hearts desire, too. You know, if I could get a reward for doing Sudokus and reading books and playing guitar and making iMixes all the time (and of course blogging), I would actually check to see if I still had a pulse, because I'd be afraid that I had died and gone to heaven. Although the "no sword fighting indoors" rule is a bit of a bummer, man.

And the homeschoolers can get in on the action, too, as they "unschool" their kids. I imagine these kids could get the new pickup for perfect attendance too, what with all the money one would save on unnecessary things like textbooks and curricula and so on. Although those PlayStation games can get pretty expensive and eat into the budget.

So that's what we need to do. Any questions? If so, please wait till I've finished my PlayStation game. I'm busy learning here, man!