Sorry, I don’t drink your koolaide, I don’t buy your dogma and I don’t believe a word of what you say.”

Pick up an anthropology text sometime. What you describe is practically the word for word definition of indoctrination or socialization. Granted it is indoctrination as ‘critical thinkers’ but indoctrination nontheless. A history text may help as well as if you actually look at that period in history it was also the age of McCarthyism and the red scare. A finer example of indoctrination there has seldom been in American history. I say as an American that it’s rather odd that we imagine ourselves to be somehow ‘independant thinkers’ and above cultural influence and propaganda. We are the same flawed hairless apes as the rest of our kin across the big pond, rockets or not. Our culture and society provides the environment for the intelligence we posess, but it is as much a liability as it is a benefit.

James Silver may be drinking the orange koolaid, but all you’re advocating is that we switch to strawberry.

Aremis

PS “New Math”, just like “Whole Word English”, has been widely discredited as an utter failure and a waste of our educational resources. It’s probably best you not bring that up as an example of educational success.

Funny thing about that statement is that both India and China were ‘once great countries’ that fell. China rose and fell from prominence and influence several times and is likely to do it again. That is the habit of empires and the cycle of history. And yet China is once again a world power after 5,000 years of history. Seems a touch counter to your argument, no? As for riding their rockets, China would be an option, but India’s planned capsule is far from a high-tech cutting edge replacement. The new Indian manned capsule is little more than a sardine can. While I’m no huge Orion fan, it far outclasses the Indian option even with it’s problems and delays.

Why would you advocate ‘indoctrination’? The problem we have right now is that for the last thirty years or so our children have been indoctinated with religious, corporate media and military and violence glorification CRAP from a very early age, and what you see is what you get. It’s not a pretty sight.

What we want are ‘critical thinkers’, and that involves the exact opposite, the antithesis of ‘indoctrination’. That last time we had that is in the post sputnik educational era of the early sixties, and it started with the new math and simple machines and a lot of history of science in the first and second grades, continuing all through elementary school, producing critical thinkers at a very early age. That gave us Apollo, the space shuttle and the modern computer and internet age of instantly available knowledge.

Sorry, I don’t drink your koolaide, I don’t buy your dogma and I don’t believe a word of what you say.

The best time to get the kids indoctrinated is age 10-14. Within 4-8 years they become voters. But NASA’s education efforts are schizophrenic. Except for some small localized efforts, they mistake public affairs for education.

NASA needs to focus the effort on developing some curriculum content that it makes sense for mainstream teachers to use in particular subjects, in particular grades, and then develop the reinforcement for these subjects over the next couple of years.

It does not require a lot of money. It requires a strategy and a coordination of the implementation with a few carefully selected partners to make sure the content is useful and gets into the schools.

The rumour is that a US astronaut would fly on Shenzhou..

if that is it, then “it” is not very inventive…

Robert G. Oler

Robert G. Oler

When NASA turned over ‘operation’ of the Shuttle to former NASA managers in STSOC, in 86, they were turning over the operation to what was supposed to be a commercial, cost cutting,efficiency effort, and instead, STSOC and its successors milked the government for everything they could and the NASA management helped them do it.

Space Station has cost $100 billion and so far 25 years, to build a system that operates in a relatively benign environment and is actually pretty simple by comparison with a Shuttle or Apollo. Virtually all of the complicated pieces were built by the internationals supposedly at no expense to the US taxpayer. The management sucked everything they could from the program, promoting their cronies along the way.

International cooperation is great as long as we use it to maintain US skills and technology base. The management of ISS used it as a crutch; by shuffling all hardware development off the the internationals they killed US capabilities in the name of saving money. But they kept taking the money and killed the US technology base at the same time.

Most of those same managers who came out of Shuttle, ISS and mission operations are now in charge of Constellation, and they seemed to be under the impression that another multi-hundred billion dollar, multi-decadal operation is the way to go.

Suck as much of the taxpayer’s dollars, for as long as you can; that seems to be NASA’s modus operandi.

The space program is in real need of serious change.

I am not and was never a big Obama supporter, but I am hoping that he and Gen Bolden can bring some change we can believe in, in the space program. We need it. The program needs it.