"Plastics"

One of the things we can look forward to once Peak Oil is inarguably (rather than, as now, arguably) in the past is the end of the belief that we can maintain any kind of decent living by educating children to do nothing more useful than chase pixels around on video screens and manufacture arguments to suit the desired outcome of the employer-du-jour: knowledge work, in other words.

The schools in Salem seem to have caught the "college for all" fever pretty hard, but we're still in the middle of farm country down here --- which means we're well-positioned for a return to educating kids in the most basic, most useful, and most important skill of all: that of feeding yourself with food you know to be good in such a way that you can continue to do so indefinitely (nice, saying all that without using the "S" word that is so trendy, eh?).

NYTimes Magazine has a great extended piece on someone who has managed to put aside his BS "educated" jobs for a real one, doing something useful, fixing motorcycles.

If I had one piece of advice to whisper to grads today --- and for the next umpteen years --- like the guy in "The Graduate," advising "Plastics," I would say this:

"Learn how to grow/raise your own food or how to be useful/indispensible to people who do."

I don't think there's a more important field of study than that in any pre-college curriculum.