Friday, May 27, 2011

rotting


How do you like your machines?

There's a place I've been going to quite a bit in the past few months.

I have it programmed into my car's GPS.

I honestly would not know how to get there if I didn't turn on my GPS every time.

I kind of feel guilty about that.

I got a really nasty, threatening email yesterday from someone who swears that one day horrible things will happen to me.

I hope it doesn't mean my GPS will steer me off a cliff.

I read a report today about a school district in Massachusetts that wants to buy iPads for kindergartners.

Nice.

We are evolving and it's happening about two inches behind our eyes.

I've written dozens of times about the campaign to kill creative thought in our schools.

It starts with the obvious standardization and bubble-in measurements of kids' abilities and schools' effectiveness. It gets pushed along by slick gadgets like iPads.

When we get everyone totally on the same bubbled-in page, and everything is standardized, we won't even need human beings at all to teach our kids.

Steve Jobs will do it for us.

There's an app for that.

If you think that's not where all this is going, well... I think you're wrong.

And as long as the kids are okay with their deeply-inserted earbuds, glazed over expressions, number-2 pencils surgically affixed to their little hands, and every question they might ever encounter having only one correct answer among an alphabetized list of five choices, we'll be where we want to go.

Sometimes, though, when you get lost, you find cooler shit than what you set off to find.

I promise to turn off my GPS and find my secret place on my own next time.

If I get lost, don't look for me.