Thanks, Ben.

Read the John Gatto piece (other server down just now).

I'll print and send a copy to my HS Chem/Physics teacher - who refuses to do the computer / I-net thing - and.. more power to him.

Fortunately for me, while the appurtenances of the Six Things were universal - I see that we escaped the utter punctiliuosness which is the thread connecting the Six (and maybe the unmentioned Two more?)

That is: we indeed finished things, though classes did have time slots. And there were opportunities to pick interests, assign selves projects etc.

But none so 'optional' as:

For having the run of a chem / phys lab on some weekends or other times other students were away (boarding school) - I recall such things as - a whole storeroom full of such cute toys as a Wimshurst electrostatic machine! Leyden jars, HV transformers, motors, gold-leaf electrometer, replica for the Millikan oil-drop experiment, prisms (no lasers though) -

Plus most of the chemical elements from Argon (glass tube - excite with an E-field) through Zirconium. Some Rubidium metal in sealed ampoule (the alkali metals group), Uranium (my own geiger counter), Thorium, Carnotite ore + glassware: real condensers and ground-glass stoppered apparatus for distillations. Decent analytical balance.

Yada yada. Somehow all rendered more interesting because: I could *choose* which to investigate, get help for a project - or drop one for good or bad reasons.

Comparing.. that fortuitous environment with - Mr Gatto's version (now also familiar by lots of first-person hearsay since) - I just took a bit of an inventory of My history:

*Yes* - that period was the time when I was learning at the greatest rate and enjoying it the *most* .. certainly much more than at the er Institute. And only later (with a small and 'almost Mine'!) electron accelerator - did that spirit return. I bloody *verify* what Gatto measures by its

veritable absence in Murican regimented, compartmentalized "education".

Sad to read it so aptly thus unarguably-well put.. sad for us all - except for, maybe *some* home schoolers (??)

(No, I could not say, "imagine away" those opportunities and guess -?- the loss of catalyst? the innumerable later threads I never would have begun IF mine had been the Gatto-described norm. But I'd be lots duller for certain) Spooky trying to imagine that..


Ashton