WHAT AN EXCELLENT APPROACH TO EDUCATION

Remember how boring the subject of history was when we were in school ?
... and the eternal (meaningless to many) tangle of x's, y's, and z's that many of us encountered in algebra ? There must be a better way to perform this necessary process called "Education" , one would think !

Just consider an independent school program focused on transportation in general, and on electric railways, in particular .

Start with automobiles (yes, we know that they are decidedly NOT electric railways) . We would be hard put to find a more interesting --- think 'obsessive' --- topic for many youngsters. That gets them through the basics of internal combustion engines, lots of basic science ...

Then : electric railways --- electricity, magnetism, radio (communication, control), safety, geometry, geography (why railroads are sited -- situated -- where they are) and on and on and relevant on ! economics, supply chain and transportation, basic bookkeeping and accounting, metal trades, construction, engineering, and programming languages

The basics of English or other appropriate native language(s) for those written reports that they'll be composing for the rest of their lives, foreign languages to get through those travel books and manuals about the French Metro or the Deutsche Bundesbahn .

General history up through the history of transportation history : starting with nostalgia, reminiscences, through the history of electric railways --- horse cars, electric street railways, trolleys, public transit ...

... and then through the history of rail technology, through monorails and even magnetic levitation --- that never seems to fail to elicit amazement . Remember that it was the magic of magnetism that first stimulated Albert Einstein to think about the basic forces of the physical universe.

In relatively little time, and with rapt attention, students would be exposed painlessly to a very wide spectrum of the basic foundations of a good education. Let's not leave education to the dry expository curricula of the theorists. We've got a wonderful world of history, right here in our favorite subject matter.