As I writer I envy the brevity possible with good film making. Wall*E, an entertaining movie layered with deep themes, was able to accomplish with two short scenes what I dedicated almost 200 laborious pages doing with my master’s thesis on education.

Putting aside my resentment for a moment, a little background is necessary to understand the scenes. In the world of Wall*E, human being have long abandoned a horrifically polluted Earth to live in a technological utopia on a massive spaceship built and run by a massive corporation, Buy n Large, whose wastefulness and materialism poisoned earth to begin with.

In the first scene, young children in cradles are being taught corporate propaganda via television. In stark contrast is one of the final scenes where the children are being taught how to farm by planting and watering a sapling.

Here’s a critique on theoretical, institutionalized learning versus the natural approach based on apprenticeships and a hands-on, learning by doing approach. And all this was in scenes that are entertaining, funny and run a combined total of 25 seconds.

In all likelihood, if you have made it this far into this post it’s been far longer than 25 seconds. It’s hard not to be envious.

I am not proud of this but I’m not ashamed either. Way back when I used to work at a private school with a rather unenlightened administration. Just to take an isolated example of asinine administrative logic, I once pointed out, convincingly, that the use of random, out of context lists of vocabulary words is a pedagogically unsound teaching method. The answer that I got was, “then what do you suggest we do with all of these books? We paid so much for them.” Needless to say there is no arguing with that. I wanted to answer, “You can shove them up any orifice you wish” but you see then I would have sounded crazy.

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This dude agrees with me so much that it really hurts. Pay especial attention to what he says about children being born creative but are educated out of their creativity. He also criticizes public education for trying to produce university professors rather than educating people to be able to fulfill their full and complete potential in any number of diverse fields.

I read an entry on MrEspy’s blog where he asked “How does one introduce oneself [to] or acclimate oneself with poetry? Also, how does one teach their children this lost art form?” to which one of his blogo-riffic buddies posted the response of his poetry professor. Her wisdom was thus expressed: “I think the first step to acclimating yourself to poetry is to become familiar with the poetic devices employed, which can seem boring, but when understood can make poetry much more intriguing.”

For your reading pleasure I will now proceed to (savagely) critique said opinion with my characteristic tact (or rather irreverence for institutional credentials like PhDs and those who hold them).

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