Obama has appointed to the post of President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics Shakira. Yes... Shakira. It's like some Onion news story that went viral or something.

http://www.politico.com/politico44/perm ... ddc84.html

Does he just not know many hispanics and thus chose a random one he was familiar with? Perhaps he wants her because he's tired of people lying to him and, as we all know, her hips don't lie.

Mmmm Shakira. I could watch most of her vids til the end of time.

Didn't he appoint an actor to an important post in his cabinet before? Found it

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... Xnt_hqV._8

As long as these people's role is mostly symbolic, I can see the rationele behind it. Succesful role models never hurt.

Still, is Shakira even American? Oh and apparently Shakira is a member of Mensa and has a reported IQ of 140 (!). What!

Oh noes, stereotype fail!!11

She's not American, so it's a fail. It's also the freaking board of education! Not to say she's not intelligent... I didn't realize she was almost at my intelligence level ( ) but that doesn't change the fact she's not affiliated with education in any way.

Still...she's hot.

Don't get me started on people running the education department without ever having stood in front of a class! Or having any relevant experience whatsoever.

Prime example is our minister of education, who's really screwing up our education system, which was pretty fine. If i hear from others what children have to learn below the age of 12, i'm getting scared. I already feel the level of education is dropping, and it's not going to get any better.

Still i wouldn't mind having Shakira as our new principle (instead of some lawyer they took now).

On a totally unrelated note, i think satis is afraid of her smartness.

lol...honestly, intelligent women intrigue me.

It's a gradual change in the educational system where "everyone has to be able to do what they find valuable" or some sort of BS like that. It's the same at the university level, with the credit system...people can now pretty much cherrypick courses and complete them over years and years. Bad influence from the Anglosaxon school system. I still don't see why comprehensive general courses like Germaanse are now replaced by lame-ass general courses like 'Theater, Film en Literatuur' that can be composed by the students themselves.

Speaking from personal experience, almost all young people, regardless of their intelligence, just take the path of the least resistance...so it makes no fucking sense to let them chart out their own course almost entirely. You got to push them, make them do some stuff they perhaps never thought about doing. That's the only way to open up most of them to new insights and experiences and, who knows, they may find that they like some things a lot more than they thought.

P.S. As a phsyics major I can imagine you see Germaanse as just as abstract as the TFL course I mentioned, and you'd have a point, but at least in Germaanse you'd have to get through pretty nasty grammar, phonetics, general linguistics and other not-very-fluffy stuff. I hated it then, but I'm happy now that I had to.

Heh, the thought that nowadays they're saying "we shouldn't annoy our children with too much grammatical rules, and they shouldn't have to memorise whole lists of vocabulary" must make you sick. Good luck learning to speak a language like that.

Everything has to be 'fun' nowadays. Well, life isn't always fun, a job is (most of times) no funhouse either, it comes with responsabilies, tasks you'd rather not do, and so on and so on.

Btw i'm a chemistry major, but like germaanse and TFL, chemistry and physics is probably almost the same to you

Hahaha! Exactly!

And I agree completely...you can't make everything fun. If you do, you're giving kids the wrong impression of what life is going to be like, and perhaps a lacking toolset for making it in life.

You realize people have been saying that about education for... uhh.. ever? Spare the rod, spoil the child! If we don't teach them Latin, the world will end!

Regarding science...

Hmmh this reminds me of someone, hmm, let me think, oh i know..




Heh .

Maybe so. This is the first time in history students have so much to say about what they want to learn and how they want to do it though. Well, in Belgium anyway, dunno exactly how it has been in the past in the rest of the world. And I think a system that pretty much says "as you long as you bother to try you get to pass" (which is pretty much where education systems are headed, just ask J) is a failure. If you try and can't do it, you don't deserve to pass.

@ Peltz: haha, still, I think Jobs' cult prolly enshrined every sentence he ever said so it wouldn't be hard to find a similar quote for just about anything. But he's right, tho.