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Education reformers have long called for U.S. kids to log more time in the classroom so they can catch up with their peers elsewhere in the world, but resistance from leisure-loving teenagers isn't the only reason there is no mass movement to keep schoolchildren in their seats. Such a change could cost cash-strapped state governments and local school districts billions of dollars, strip teachers of a time-honored perk of their profession, and irk officials in states that already bridle at federal intrusion into their traditional control over Education.

Texas already forbids school from starting before the fourth Monday of August, a provision designed to save money on utility bills and increase business for tourist destinations and other summer attractions. "Ultimately the states, not the federal government, should have the final word on this and other public school decisions," said Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry. In Kansas, sporadic efforts by local districts to extend the school year at even a few schools have been met by parental resistance, said state education commissioner Diane DeBacker.

both individuals and societies needed to learn how to adapt to and manage the sources of over-rapid change.

Possibly the best section in the book is that on education. Here he advanced a powerful critique: ‘what passes for education today, even in our ‘best’ schools and colleges, is a hopeless anachronism.’ He then added: for all this rhetoric about the future, our schools face backwards towards a dying system, rather than forwards to an emerging new society. Their vastenergies are applied to cranking out Industrial Men - people tooled for survival in a system that will be dead before they are. (2) The thesis was then advanced that the prime objective of education should be to ‘increase the individual’s ‘cope-ability’ - the speed and economy with which he can adapt to continual change.’ (3) Central to this was ‘the habit of anticipation’. Assumptions, projections, images of futures would need to become part and parcel of every individual’s school experience.

the federal government is not attached to Moore's Law

Here's an area for both some disruption and some lobbying. Let's build tools that allow members of Congress to aggregate messages being sent to them, and to associate those messages with congressional districts. Let's come up with a way for a member to see what their constituency is saying about any particular issue they'd like, and let's provide that as an open service so that anybody can see what a particular constituency is saying. That way, when a member has a track record of voting against the desires of a substantial portion of his or her district, we've got a record of it, and it can get brought up in the next election.

Right now, your voice online -- in the mediums you participate in, not only don't matter: legally they can't matter. Online identities don't count when it comes to the official record