Education Through Aviation
by Bill Pritchett, Education Director
"I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose." —George Carlin
Learning is an amazing, complicated, and critical topic. At the same time, it's simple to recognize the threat of today's fast pace—thus, a conundrum! Today's youth are learning in a way that is unique to them.
I think it could be said that our current youth, sometimes called Generation Text, is learning in a way that no generation before has learned. This is something that could never be said before. Every previous generation has learned in a similar fashion—that is to say "traditional" school environments with kids sitting in chairs, placed neatly in rows, listening to verbal instruction, each other, reading, etc.
Now we have youth who have the ability at their fingertips to create something that in minutes 10 million people could see! The electronic devices and knowledge at their fingertips are as common to them as trees were to us as kids.
Watch Nickelodeon sometime and observe the time between edit cuts of a modern video—only two or three seconds. And yet, we ask these kids to learn in the same way as those before them and wonder why our current educational system struggles. Are we boring them out of learning?
What to do? Although I have many opinions for what to do, the one thing I'm sure of is that kids love to do things, not just read about them or listen to someone talk about them.
Model aviation! Make something, fly something, and learn something! It's really the perfect combination of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), video games, and action.
One of my favorite personalities was George Carlin, whom we lost in 2008. Many might think of some of the humor he shared as inappropriate and miss some of his best material. To that end, I would like share with you my favorite writing by George Carlin.
"The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
