An amusing new way to discourage the use of bottled water has sprouted. I can’t help but think it’s a waste to sell promotional bottles, though, even if they are reuseable. Wouldn’t it make more sense to promote finding existing bottles and reusing them? I guess that’s not the way advertising works.
I have a better understanding of why I and many others foolishly tried to dumb myself down to fit in with grade school peers. Most of my friends can agree that middle school was one of the worst periods of our lives.
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn’t get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
In a rush to write this, I can’t find the other quote I wanted to cite. It had to do with going back to school at our current age and avoiding all the drama because we know enough now to see through it. I wish I could go back to school and set an example for future generations. Being a mature student among younger peers would present the message that learning isn’t as worthless as it feels when it’s forced on us seemingly without purpose. If I went through the 11th grade with co-eds a decade older than me, not only would I feel confident that knowledge never loses worth, but I would gain a perspective of someone who has graduated the system and come back for more. It would set us at the top of the food chain; the youngest and freshest minds learning how to combine state-of-the-art technology, literature, history, math, social networking, and a myriad other disciplines with the real-world application set forward by adults who have weathered the currently decaying education system.
At this point, I’m forcing words to get my point across rather than structuring my thoughts, so I’ll stop there.
In conclusion, it’s difficult for me not to find everything but education and environmental conservation trivial when our tunnel-vision and lack of hindsight is killing us and everything that supports us at an increasing rate.