of-a-toast-and-tea: lies humanoidhistory: 40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Utopia…I remember what it felt…
That’s amazing. My dad was born in ‘59 and grew up at the height of the space age. When I was a kid, when he was tucking me into bed, he used to always tell me how when I was an adult everyone would be able to go up into space, and he would show me all these pictures and books of Viking and Voyager. That’s not why I love it, but it is definitely how I started.
That’s how it felt. Amazing things were happening. We were going.
In the late 60s/early 70s there was a program in the public schools (at least in California, where I grew up) called the mentally gifted minor (MGM) program. They identified the kids with high academic potential, pulled us out and bused us off every week to a special center where we had a frankly amazing educational experience. I mean, it was like a movie set, what with special materials and some of the best teachers I’d ever had in my life and teacher-student ratios in the low single digits.
I didn’t know better at the time; I just assumed this was how society would always nurture the next generation of scientists and engineers. It was only when my own kids were identified and routed into the modern equivalent of that program, the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program, that I realized how much things had changed. GATE differentiation has become an afterthought, a rounding error in the budget. And maybe on some level that makes sense; the schools face many other challenges, and just like manned missions to the moon came to be seen as an wasteful extravagance, the kind of no-expense-spared MGM experience I had turns out to have been politically sustainable only at the peak of the Cold War-driven space race.
But it was amazing while it lasted.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2cjYJSh.
