"John Halliburton" wrote in message om...
Curious, how many here have made an attempt to go to a local school with a
rig, and do a demo?

This is a great idea - and relatively simple too. I may just give
this a try. Even with a snaggly little wire, 19m ought to yield some
good stuff midday...

BTW, geography is taught in our middle school. I'm thinking more of a
broadband issue is degradation of education in general. We need to try
harder.

I agree, there is room for improvement -

but based on what I have seen at my son's school, and based on what my
wife brings home in the way of horror stories (she is a
speech/communications specialist in a school) - the parents simply do
not prepare their kids to learn. They hardly read to them at all, TV
is the babysitter (my wife right now is trying to teach a former
10-hour-a-day TV watcher, age 6, to *talk* in 3-word sentences), and
many set very poor examples for their children anyway, in too many
ways to list (but a short list includes drug and alcohol addiction,
pawning kids off on abusive relatives, ignoring their kids' needs such
as glasses and hearing aids, and just vegging out when they should be
actively engaged with their children...).

There are so many parents out there who either 1. do not care, or 2.
don't know how to help, or 3. think that starting learning in
kindergarten is soon enough (it ain't, folks)...the number of children
who don't know *how* to absorb substantive information that first day
of kindergarten is staggering.

Unfortunately, there is no license that a prospective parent needs to
get before raising a child - any idiot is traditionally deemed
"qualified" - and so it goes.

Ultimately, it means that my own kid, with just a reasonable amount of
effort from his parents to get him interested in reading and science
and geography and history, is at the top of his class and among the
top 10% nationwide in every test he takes. Is he smart? Yeah, but
probably not head-and-shoulders above all of his classmates - just
better prepared. I guess there's always a silver lining...

73,
Bruce Jensen
************

Best regards,

John