Education

A software engineer who writes code
Does not know basic number theory.
A student of literature who reads a book
Does not know their book means something.
I was put in semi-retarded classes all through High and Middle School.
I was taught these things.
These are gifted students.
They don't know these things.

Perhaps quality over quantity should be our new rule.

Instead of teaching kids String Theory or Quantum physics
They should learn how to count blue blocks, and stack them on one another
And see how things work in multiple dimensions.
For, when you start big, you go home empty handed.
When you start small, with suffixes, prefixes, and context clues
And with number theory taught on blocks
And at some point, ratios and fractions represented
By marbles in a bin...
And a science teacher teaching you the constellations
And telling you about sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks
Rather than trying to teach you chemistry,
And that Io has volcanoes, Europa oceans, and Calypso is Jupiter's icy moon,
And Ganymede Jupiter's largest--
Though I forget, I know how to search for it, and what to type.
Titan has an atmosphere. Starry Night Pro showed me the scale of the cosmos,
And that fodder helped bring me to create masterpieces...
You can turn out to have the basic skills to teach yourself
The things that matter most to you.
When you're taught to view things in archetypes and categories
And groupings, and relate things to one another in complicated webs,
That's what education ought to do, is give you the building blocks
To teach you how to self teach like this.
Not bludgeon you with over complicated things that you can learn better on your own
With an instructor on YouTube.
There are things we can't teach ourselves. And that is why we have school.