Tryon Daily Bulletin, Thurs., Apr. 9,1992
Communication ? Uated J a ^ S J°S^ New-
Isaac Newton. Alter an, new
ton's SccondLaw, force = mass
x acceleration, is an equation,
and it's common knowledge
To the editor:
Your article about high school
courses had two statements that
started one thinking. The first
is: "By the time a 9th grader
faces... college, 50% of what he
has learned is obsolete."
The second was a reference to
"out-dated facts." What I am
pondering is this: Which partic
ular bits of my own high school
education are in the "obsolete"
category, and which of the facts
that I learned should be classi
fied as "outdated."
Take trigonometry, for
example. Do I discard the Pyth
agorean Theorem or the law of
cosines? Or maybe I can keep
both of these and throw out the
law of sines and the definition
of the tangent function.
In literature, should I not read
any more Longfellow because
poetry is too abstract for this
modern age? Maybe we should
forget Melville because it's just
too much work to understand
what he is saying. On the other
hand, perhaps we should
expunge some of those foreign
ers like Shakespeare and Dick
ens.
Which part of history is no
longer necessary? Should
ancient history be discarded
because we (perhaps) have
nothing to learn from the
Greeks, the Romans, and the
Hebrews? Maybe we should
ignore world history entirely.
But what about U.S. history?
Isn't there room for cutting here
also?
Perhaps it is of little value
these days to try to understand
those musty documents like the
Declaration of Independence,
the Mayflower Compact, and
the Federalist Papers. After all,
guys like Jefferson, Madison,
and Hamilton lived before
VCRs were invented, so what
could they possibly teach us
today? Maybe Henry Ford was
right, that all history is bunk.
Which half of a high school
physics course can we elimi
nate?? Let's see, matter still
exists in three different states
and light still travels at 186,000
miles per second. Guess we
should keep those facts. Perhaps
we no longer need those anti-
these days that all the important
equations are conveniently
stored in computers, so we don't
need to understand the equa
tions, just how to push buttons.
This is getting to be a long
letter; maybe I'm making this
out to be more complicated than
it really is. I forgot about all
those smart people on TV, like
Dan Rather, who can explain
everything to us, and tell us
how we should think and what
we should do. Maybe we don't
need school at all!
Sincerely,
Doug Brinson
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