From: Mike McNally <m5@vail.tivoli.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 05:49:10 +0800
To: David Kline <dkline@well.com>
Subject: Re: Dry Under the Waterfall
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.960730085319.25477C-100000@well>
Message-ID: <31FE3BD8.5445@vail.tivoli.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


David Kline wrote:

> Well, change means pain, and we'll get to the millennium one way or
> another. But we can do it the hard way or the easy way. The hard way
> means severe social dislocation, possibly even threats to democracy. The
> easy way seems the smarter approach 

But there's absolutely no reason to believe it'll work.  I mean, heck;
people successful enough to become *legislators* are unlikely to use
on-line media.  

> no serious effort at reforming education and at skills retraining has 
> ever been undertaken

Have a nice life trying to reform American education.  We're stuck with
the dream system of 1840 right now, and people still seem to look back
to "the good old days".  There's no political capital in "let's make 
our educational system more sophisticated", but there's plenty of it
in "let's get back to the basics in our education system".

People generally learn to read because they want to, education system
or no.  A child or adult ready & willing (& without some physical
disability) can get going in a couple of weeks.  The drudgery of
early elementary school has little to do with it.

> and it seems a better use of our tax dollars  than most of the crap 
> it's spent on now.

Here's a novel idea: why not just refund our tax dollars instead of
spending them on a wacko boondogle like dropping a network appliance
into every home?

(What's the actual---like, *real*---penetration of Minitel?  I don't
care about how many French households have a terminal; how many French
people are real active users?  Can you be a content provider with
Minitel?)

______c_____________________________________________________________________
Mike M Nally * Tiv^H^H^H IBM * Austin TX    * For the time being,
       m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com          *    
      <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101>         *    three heads and eight arms.