I’ve always felt that I made a mistake, that there were opportunities I missed because I didn’t finish my education, and for years I’ve been meaning to do something about it. So I recently picked up some books on the math courses I didn’t take and started tinkering with electronics. I went online to find courses on electronics at at www.opencircuits.com found a link to the MIT OpenCourseWare electrical engineering curriculum. I watched the first video for the course 6.002 Circuits and Electronics. It left me intrigued, as a good lecture should, and I’m now slowly working my way through the course materials.

So far, the course is excellent. I figured most of it would be review, but I’m learning all kinds of interesting things, and, best of all, it’s helping pull together a lot of tidbits of knowledge I had, showing me how they are related to one another.

MIT has done the whole world a huge solid by posting this material. Anyone who understands English and has access to the Internet, who’s willing to put in the time and effort, can take advantage of this material and educate themselves using the resources of one of the greatest engineering schools in the world. Teachers can use this material to help them structure their own courses.

The material consists of a syllabus, calendar, video lectures, lecture notes, readings, homework, assignments, labs, and exams. Tools available for this course include WebSim, http://euryale.csail.mit.edu/, a site where you can experiment with the circuits discussed in the course.

If you’re interested in learning more about engineering MIT’s OpenCourseWare is a great place to start.

I don’t understand exactly what has happened to collapse our economy, but there are some things that have been going on for a long time that I believe played a role. If they aren’t fixed, I think we’ll either fail to recover, or we’ll go on to have another enormous collapse at some future date that dwarfs this one. I’ll just list them here. See if any make sense to you.

• Oil – This is one where most people agree. When you import half the raw material you need to burn to generate the energy you need, you are draining your country dry. That’s especially true when you are giving the money to people who fund criminals who attack our citizens. That oil wealth itself has created the terrorism problem by propping up bad governments that deny their citizens the basic freedoms we enjoy. Without money for weapons, most of those regimes would have fallen, to be replaced – one can hope – by more representational governments. If the money had been going into a democratic country, it would have created jobs and increased the size of the middle class, which would have generated demand for products we produce. Instead, most of that money has gone into the hands of individuals who are already wealthy where it does very little for anyone.
• Playing Favorites – If you want capitalism and free markets to work, everyone has to have an equal chance. All businesses need to have equal access to markets, to financing, and to government services. But that’s not how it works in the U.S. Here, we favor the largest businesses over all others. This is foolish, because large businesses do NOT create lots of new jobs. They aren’t particularly innovative. What they do best, is sue other businesses, try to form monopolies, jack up prices, and worry more about quarterly profits than if the consumer actually likes their product.On the other hand, small and medium-sized businesses employ half the people in this country and are always the fastest to enter new markets, generate new technologies, and create innovations.Hewlett-Packard laughed off Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack, when they presented their idea for a personal computer to the company. It wasn’t IBM, or Digital, or any of the other giant computer companies that invented one of the most important new industries on the planet.

  One of the worst problems with huge companies like Ford, GM, Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac, is that they are ‘too large to fail.’ The economic consequences of allowing any of these huge companies to fail are dire. Millions of people get laid off in a short period, causing a shockwave that travels through the economy like a wrecking ball.

  The CEOs and Presidents of these huge companies demand enormous power and extravagant salaries way beyond the actual worth of the individual to the business. As these companies get larger and gobble up other companies, the number of people making critical decisions in that industry gets smaller and smaller.

  The common argument for huge companies is that there is no other way. That some jobs are too big to be done by smaller companies. That’s a load of caca. There is no reason you can’t have a group of companies work together on big jobs. There will be inefficiencies, but those same inefficiencies might also make it harder for a single person to bankrupt the entire enterprise.

  If we really want to have a healthy capitalistic free-market economy, we need to stop giving any assistance to companies once they reach a certain size. Our government policies need to be focused on improving the health of the small and medium-sized businesses. Big companies should give way to hosts of smaller competitors all out to do a better job than the other guy. When one of them fails, a much smaller number of people will be out-of-work, and they should be able to find employment among their former competitors, or even start up their own business.

  Like gigantic stars warp space, huge companies warp the economy around themselves.

• Regulations – Regulations aren’t bad. If an industry is not constantly whining and bitching about how the regulations are keeping it from achieving maximum profitability, then you need more regulations. Regulations keep an industry healthy. Regulators try to make sure that the players in their industry follow the rules. As we have seen, you can not depend on businesses to act in their own best interest when it looks like there’s a quick profit to be made. Some of the brightest business people in our country were involved in these sub-prime mortgages. They weren’t stupid people, and most of them weren’t evil, but they fell victim to peer pressure and greed, just like all of us can.To me, the idea that people will act in their own rational self-interest is one of the biggest pipe-dreams anyone has ever come up with, and it is central to Adam Smith’s economic ideas and the principles of conservative thinking. If people were able to be rational, why do people smoke cigarettes? Why do so many people gamble? It’s because we are not rational. We need rules, and we need people to make sure we actually follow the rules.
• Education – It was World War II that pulled us out of the Great Depression. We can’t afford to wage another war like that in order to pull out of this one, so we need to understand why WWII helped and find ways to replicate that effect. It seems obvious to me that it was the incredible ramping up in industrial production capability that was needed to provide logistics for the war that saved us. But it was something else that helped keep things going afterward, and that was the GI Bill and an unprecedented number of young men going to college after the war. That’s what helped give us the prosperity of the fifties.The U.S. has been falling behind in education. We all moan and groan about it, but we never actually do anything. When proposals come up in our towns to raise taxes in order to improve public schools, the proposals are voted down. The rich in the communities don’t care, since they send their kids to private schools. The government’s moronic endorsement of charter schools, which is basically a poorly disguised way to fund religious schools with public money, drains more resources away from public schools.

  Public schools are one of the few places where all members of our society can meet and get to know each other. If all our children go to the same schools, than we really would be saying, this is a country in which we strive to give everyone an equal chance. Instead we have been racing away from that idea ever more quickly.

  We need to re-embrace the commitment to public education. Voucher programs primarily help the wealthy, who are doing just fine already, which is why we call them wealthy. We need to be doing whatever is needed to make sure that our schools are second to none.

  Improving our schools does NOT mean teaching by rote or “going back to basics” or any other such rubbish. It does not mean putting every kid in the country through batteries of meaningless standardized tests. We need to develop teaching methods using science. We need to harness the power of our new computing and presentation technologies to make it possible to tailor the education of every student in America to his or her needs

  Our children are the ones who the economy will depend on in the future, when we are all retired. It will be the energy, creativity, and willingness to work of our children that determines what our own final years will be like. So call it rational self-interest to make sure that our kids are given the best possible education.

  It used to be that your educational progress was measured primarily by your grades. The assumption was that your teachers had the most comprehensive knowledge of you as an individual and that they could see both problems and talents that tests would miss. We need to put the evaluation of the students back on the teachers, where it belongs, and try to give the teachers better tools for evaluating the student.

• Population - Here’s one no one will talk about. There are too many people. The conservatives won’t talk about it because then they might have to talk about birth control, which gives them hives. I don’t know why the rest of us avoid it. Maybe because it’s felt like open season on liberals in the U.S. for the past eight years. Still, that’s a big part of the problem. We need to be teaching effective birth control here in the U.S. and everywhere else in the world. Someone has got to convince the Catholic Church and the Mormons that encouraging poor people to have as many children as possible is no longer a good idea and is mostly good at keeping poor people poor.

  One of the big upticks in the world economy happened back in the middle-ages about the time of the plague. Over about a hundred years, half the population was killed. Farms and whole towns were left empty, and wound up being reclaimed by the forest. All of a sudden, there were a lot fewer people, but most of the industrial capacity, in the form of tools and buildings was still intact. Around the same time, the horse collar came into widespread use, allowing an individual to farm more land than he needed for his family. That meant extra crops that could be sold in town. And that’s how we got the middle-class.

  I’m not advocating a plague. But I am pointing out that our world might be a lot better if we all had fewer children. Not only would it mean there were more resources per capita, it would also mean that we’d have less of an impact on our environment.

  Water and oil are going to become very scarce in the future, and if we don’t take any measures to control population growth, it will be wars that do it for us.

• Environment - Global warming isn’t some made-up thing to scare rich folks, it’s real. We’re already seeing the effects in longer growing seasons, stronger storms, and rising seas. While the effects might seem gradual to you and I, they are terrifyingly fast to those who study the climate. The world has had high CO2 levels before, as high as 1000 parts per million (ppm). So what’s the big deal about 400ppm or 500ppm? The big deal is that while levels have risen in the past, right now they are rising at a rate a thousand times greater than anything in the historical record. During past times of rapid growth in CO2 there were massive extinctions, which is the same thing we are seeing now. In fact, almost a quarter of all mammal species are now threatened in some way by climate change, poaching, environment destruction or some other problem we’ve caused.

  Why should you care if some animals go extinct? Because we don’t know how our ecology works. One of the animals that is suddenly having serious problems is the honey bee. Without the honey bee, it will be difficult to raise many crops like citrus, nuts, and dozens of others. A substantial fraction of our food supply might go away. No one had even though about that kind of possibility until recently, when bee colonies all over the U.S. started disappearing.

  Heard any good frogs lately? I hope so, because all amphibians seem to be in danger, too. That’s a whole class of animals. It’s possible that your grand kids children might not be able to go out and catch frogs and toads on those warm summer nights, like you used to.

  At some point, a key species will be eliminated and it will cause a chain reaction that will kill off entire ecological communities. Since we have no idea how to recover a lost species, that could lead to scenarios where most of the life on Earth perishes.

  Climate change isn’t just about things getting warmer. When the climate changes the way it has been, there are incredibly complex interactions, which will produce unpredictable consequences.

  We need to reinvigorate our basic sciences and encourage the study of the climate and the changes that are happening. During the last eight years, most of the researchers at the EPA have reported some kind of censorship. That has to stop. Without good information, we cannot possibly make the right decisions in dealing with the environmental problems that we’ve caused.

  It might seem like we have to put the environment on the back burner in order to deal with the economic issues, but if we do so, will there be an environment to save later?

  On the other hand, if we develop the technologies needed by the entire world to deal with these issues, we’ll have a new industry that will generate new jobs and new wealth.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. These days, it’s a lot more lucrative to do just about anything than to teach. Our high-schools have terrible problems with discipline. They have shortages of everything but trouble. And with families getting smaller and there being more childless families, no one wants to pay to fix the problems.

How do you fix it? The answer to that, if I had it, would probably fill several book shelves. But there is a good idea that’s been passed around more than once: pay off the student loans of graduates who teach for three or four years. It’s been done before, too.

This idea is being proposed by Senator Max Barcus (D-Montana). He is proposing it just for science, math, and engineering, but I think it could be used to help improve the education we give our children in all areas.

When I was in high school, in Kentucky. One of my best teachers was teaching trigonometry at my high school, in Louisville Kentucky. Kentucky had a program that paid off student loans for people who taught in high school for three years. He was an excellent teacher, one that my school probably would never have had, if not for that program. In the three years he was at that school, he helped hundreds of students.

A program like this gives us the chance to borrow smart driven individuals for a few years, before they start their careers. Hopefully, it will convince a few of them to stay on and teach for a living, but even if none of them do, the effects of their work will be felt throughout the community.

You should be able to do the following things (in no particular order):

• buy a car
• purchase a home
• read and interpret a contract
• open a bank account
• balance a bank statement
• fill out your taxes
• read and understand a credit card agreement
• read and understand a loan application and agreement
• understand how to communicate with their elected officials
• understand the role of each elected official they have to vote for and what qualifications a candidate for that post should have
• understand their obligations to our society – like why voting and jury duty matter
• How to avoid getting pregnant
• The basics of child rearing

How many of our schools are actually preparing our kids for these critically important tasks, and what excuse can they offer for not doing so?

It is also important, critically important, to prepare students to go on to college, but not everyone will go to college. Most high-school students will enter the work-force and try their best to make a decent life with the education they have when they leave high-school.

I know that some of the items on the above list are covered by various courses, and some are available as electives. I don’t know how many may have been added since I was in high-school, but I suspect most are still absent from most school curriculum, especially with the advent of so much standardized testing and a “teach to the test” attitude.

I’m also sure that some will question several of my line items. I’ll explain a few.

• Birth Control – While many conservatives think that ‘Just Say No’ is the answer, it’s not. Statistics show that kids who are taught only about abstinence are far more likely to get pregnant. There’s no reason you can’t teach birth control and also teach about the problems associated with promiscuity, such as STDs. – While I understand most schools have some education in this area, it needs to be comprehensive, not tailored to appease everyone’s religious beliefs. Unwed teenage mothers frequently wind up living and raising their child in poverty. We all suffer when poverty increases, since it means fewer productive workers and puts demands on resources. The best way to prevent those problems is to prevent poverty wherever possible.
• Child Rearing – Most of our children are brought up in two child homes now. They don’t spend a lot of time around babies. A hundred years ago, families were much larger, and most children wound up watching how their parents reared the younger siblings. The older children often wound up learning child rearing by taking over some of the duties from their parents. That doesn’t happen nearly as much in our smaller families.
• Understanding Credit Card Agreements – Credit card agreements have turned into traps set for the poor and unwary. Almost all of them have clauses that stipulate that any late payment on ANY account (even those completely unrelated to the credit card) will cause the default rate to go into effect. That default rate is an unconscionable 25-30%, sometimes even higher. To make things worse, the banks often levy random charges that they’ll drop if challenged. But how many kids will challenge them? Finally, the banks never tell you how long it would take to pay off your credit card debt if you make the minimum payment. That time period is often 20 years or more.

Some of these items are covered in civics, but how many civics courses are tailored to the local government, the one that will have the greatest impact on these kids?

How many of you have thought about teaching your teen-age son or daughter how to change a diaper, take a baby’s temperature, or other basic child rearing skills?

Summary

Basics are just that, the fundamental building blocks which we use as the foundation of our knowledge. Learning how to take those basics – reading, writing, math, science – and apply them to our daily lives, is just as important. If you teach about consumer loans and credit cards, the students suddenly have a much greater understanding of why learning percentages is important. If you teach them about deceptive business practices, they might understand they are not alone when faced with such problems and demand more of their elected officials. If you teach them that they need to understand what is going on in their community in order to make decisions on how to vote, more of them might find the time to read the local paper.

It’s time our educational system went back to the most basic of missions: preparing our children for life in our world.

The One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, project is a good start, it puts a computer in the hands of children who might otherwise never have been able to afford one. But it’s not enough, not by itself, besides having access to the Internet, the children of the world need a place to go where they can learn. They need a way to learn without teachers, if necessary, and get documentation of their efforts, so they can get jobs. They need a free university on the Internet. For lack of a better name, I call it the University of the World.

Our world faces some difficult challenges. The best way to meet them successfully, is with the best educated generation in history. We need to utilize the incredible improvements in communication technology to spread knowledge as widely as possible.

It’s possible that something like this could be started as a small project, but I doubt it. To really work, it needs some serious backing, both in money and political willpower. Universities around the world should be encouraged to donate resources to the project. MIT posting it’s curriculum on the Internet is an example of what I’m talking about, even if it doesn’t go far enough. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Ford, Exxon/Mobile, and others should be encouraged to invest in the effort. They’ll benefit by later being able to hire better educated people.

It will be important that everyone be able to get access to the school. That means companies like Microsoft, Google, and Cisco will have to refrain from helping countries limit the access of their citizens to this educational resource. If you really want to spread Democracy and Freedom around the world, education is still the best and safest way around.

One of the best prophylactics known to sociologists is education. The higher the educational level of a young woman, the less likely she is to have an unwanted pregnancy. A better educated public is more likely to heed the advice of health service workers working to stop the spread of deadly diseases like HIV.

A well-educated public is also less likely to be fooled by devious politicians, companies, and political groups. If the U.S. had an educational system that was more up-to-date, not one designed to serve best the needs of an agricultural society, then perhaps we wouldn’t have the current atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and maybe we’d have made a better choice in 2000 and 2004. Think of how different the world would be without the terrible mistakes made by the current administration.

There are dangers in establishing such a school. There will be people who will want control of it, so they can decide what will be taught. Others will be determined to limit who can be taught, using national security as an excuse.

I’m hopeful that someone, somewhere, will find the resources to start this project and see it through to it’s completion. Until that happens, I hope individual schools and governments will work to build smaller versions of this idea in order to make education more accessible to the people in their communities.