Democracy continues
===================

Friday 21 August 2009 01:08

This time the venue had a more rural character,
more a pitchfork and torches environment than AK,
and was easy to find on the corner of Bockhorst and
the Osdorfer Landstraße. It was damn hot though.

The thing was about Schulreformchaos. I didn't know
anything about that subject, and the only time I've
seen a german school from the inside was at the
last European elections, on a Sunday. But I already
had figured out that if the current system sucks
and you end up about last on the list of Länder in
performance, why not just copy the system the
number one on that list is using? That's just
methodology independent of the subject. You don't
go wasting resources on inventing and building your
own pet system from scratch if your goal is only to
keep up with others using known and available
systems, and you don't need to take any risk to
come up with something that has only a very slight
chance of outperforming all currently known
systems. And even if you fail with the copied
system you'll have enough material to quickly
evaluate the situation by comparing it to the
original and you'll have two parties learning from
that experience. To me that's just common sense,
and in the always not surprising way liberals seem
to agree with things like that. If you don't
believe in magic the optimal solution can be pretty
easy to find, but if you bring the possibility of
flying pigs into the equation you'll be building
another Elbphilharmonie before you know it.

Katja Suding and Sylvia Canel made clear how the
aerodynamics of the pigs in the proposed
Schulreform will prevent the pigs from ever
reaching the required escape velocity.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/dull/2009/08/21/democracy-continues/