Edumacation
I was looking for something interesting to watch on TV last night when I stumbled across a program on PBS about the Jamestown settlement that was founded in the 1600s in what later became Virginia. According to the program, when the north won the civil war, they wrote the significance of this settlement out of the history books. I found that to be a curious statement since it certainly wasn't missing from my education. But after some thought, I realized that most of what I knew from Jamestown came from books I had read as a child and not from history lessons in school. In fact, most of my childhood education came from books rather than teachers. I was an avid reader and devoured hundreds of books a year, mostly non-fiction. My favorite magazines were National Geographic and Popular Mechanics and in my early teens I added Byte and Scientific America (along with a subscription to Teen Magazine in an failed attempt to be less of a nerd.) And then I started working full time in the summer and part time during school and I no longer had the excess spare time to spend reading. I still crammed in a book here and there, but the amount dwindled bit by bit and these days I don't read books at all. There's a variety of reasons for this which range from needing glasses that I can't afford to a lack of time, but I suspect the biggest reason is that I just don't seem to have that intense craving for knowledge anymore. That troubles me, but maybe I've absorbed all I can for now and enough is enough. Still, if I happen to stumble across a program on TV about Quantum Physics or Polypeptides, you can bet I'll stop and watch it.