What is the importance of academic subjects in everyday life?

What is the importance of academic subjects in everyday life? This is a question often asked, but seldom answered to satisfaction. 
What benefit is to be gained from studying philosophy? How many professional philosophers do you know, making a lucrative living seeking the meaning of life, or challenging the eternal verities? Most people would claim even such a core subject as mathematics is inflicted upon our educational curriculum to an unnecessary level. Throw history, sociology, politics, economics, and a host of other arcane academia into the mix, and the opening question becomes ever more pertinent – just what is the importance of academic subjects in everyday life? The answer is our very humanity: it is education that raises us up above the other animals, the other creatures that crawl the earth; and it is the very breadth of education that empowers us. If we merely regard learning, studying, as the means to secure a certain institution accredited accolade, then we may have acquired some knowledge, but little humanity. When we consider Euclid’s elements as a tool to pay the gas bill, or Mendeleev’s periodic table as a ticket to a new car ever few years, we make erudition itself weep. By these heartless methods we merely become myna birds made up to look otherwise.

We learn in order to better ourselves – to become all we can, to realize our potential. Have you ever felt like an outsider in a conversation, because you didn’t have a clue about Pushkin’s influence on Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy? Have you ever hidden your ignorance about history, agreeing without knowing when conversation turned to Henry VIII and the reformation, or James II’s complex relation with parliament? Have you cursed under your breath when talk turned to the arts, knowing you could never differentiate a Monet from a Manet? A good, broad education is an asset for a lifetime: it is not just a key to open the doors of various professions, but a social resource, enabling you to mix with many people. The world itself is a more interesting place to the educated person. Where the uninitiated will just see the rocks and the sea, the learned will notice the wave cut platform, and the variegated influence of erosion on different stone formations. To some the green atop certain roofs seems an unhealthy algae; and to others it is evidence of a chemical reaction – the once golden copper having reacted with the oxygen in the air to form a dark copper oxide, which in turn reacts with rainwater to form a green copper hydroxide. Education changes our eyes, lets us see things differently. A narrow education, merely serving ones chosen profession, narrows the very world. We should strive to be polymaths, studying a whole range of subjects! It is so easy these days to learn whatever we would like.

Learning should not be a scary word! Teaching should not be an unpleasant school day memory, and you should not be restricted by what subjects others chose for you in the past. Education is not just important in everyday life – it is a vital part of life itself, and our enjoyment of it.

What is science?

So what exactly is science? Science is a way of poking the universe to make her give up her secrets.

For thousands of years people like you and me never knew the secret method of how to find out how the cosmos works, and so we couldn`t grow enough food, we couldn`t heal diseases, we couldn`t fly. We simply didn`t have the key to unlock the hidden treasure chest where the secrets of knowledge are found. We were ignorant and powerless.

And so we made up stories, lots of myths - and we believed in magic and spells and things like that. But of course these didn`t work and so we starved, we died of diseases - and we never flew.

We wanted to understand Nature and we wanted to control Nature - that was our dream, and that was why we believed in magic. But then, over the past few hundred years, we ever so gradually started to realize that there was a key to open the treasure chest of knowledge. We began to realize there was a way of poking Mother Nature so that she revealed her secrets to us - and we could, gradually, bit by bit, begin to control her. We now call that key, that way of poking Nature, the Scientific Method.

Science unlocks the secrets of the universe it reveals the mysteries of life.

.. It gives understanding it gives power.



Revolution

Basically, what this means is that we actually came to realize that knowledge is out there in the physical world. And rather than just guessing about it, making up stories about it and thinking things inside our heads about it, we could actually do something to uncover that knowledge.

We realized that if we carefully push and pull things, then by vigilantly noticing what happens we can begin to understand why it happens. And then, once we have made our guess at this we can test the idea somewhere else, so that we gradually piece the bits of the jigsaw of knowledge together. These activities we call experiments.

Over the years we have got better and better at doing this. We realized that we must only change one thing at a time and keep everything else the same. Our poking became more and more precise our key became a better and better fit. Nature`s treasure chest of secrets was opening.

Sometimes all this poking and prodding was very cruel. Mother Nature needed to be tortured to give up some of her secrets. Early on, those who wanted to understand the body would often dissect an animal while it was alive (without anesthetic!) so that they could see various organs like the heart actually work. At other times human bodies were stolen from graveyards to extract information from them by cutting them open and trying to work out how they worked. There were even grave robbers who made a living by stealing fresh corpses the night after the funeral and then selling them to scientists.

Many of the adventures into uncovering Nature`s hidden information were held up because of a lack of equipment like telescopes and microscopes. But gradually, like a snowball rolling down hill, the explorers got more and more information from the world around us.

And so the revolution happened. We unearthed undiscovered laws and hidden principles - and worked out how to use them. We learnt to make carriages that move by themselves, planes that fly in the air, drugs that heal diseases, ships that could explore the bottom of the ocean, ways of talking to people on the other side of the world. We even went to the moon - and we have sent robot spaceships far, far beyond that. Perhaps most exciting, we have learnt how to actually look back in time and see events with our own eyes that happened thousands and thousands of years ago.

Remember the old fairy tales and myths with flying carpets, and wizards that could make explosions and magic potions to heal the sick. Our science is far better than that old magic and myth. To people only a few generations ago our science would be magic! And our "magic" is deeper, darker, brighter and more powerful than they could ever possibly imagine: we now know how to destroy our whole planet. And we now know how to save it too.

More than all this, our getting and using such knowledge are happening faster and faster. The snowball is accelerating. At the moment our total scientific knowledge is doubling every few years - and even more incredibly, the rate at which this is happening is doubling within a decade.

When we look back we see a revolution - and as we look forward . . . well, it is beyond anyone`s guess what we will uncover and what we will be able to do. The sky is nowhere near the limit. Nowhere near!

This is utterly incredible.

But it raises a very personal question for you.

That`s right, a question for you.


Do you want to be part of this revolution?

Or, are you happy to be left behind? 

Getting back to the blog...

Realistically I am not a fourteen year old girl anymore.
... Although I wish I was !
So I've decided to try to keep this blog updated about the things I'm more interested about now.

Hope you enjoy ;)

When THIS happens on Facebook...

Facebook is a hotbed of stupidity. It's where humanity goes to die a long, slow, painful death. Just looking at my news feed on a regular basis makes me want to openly weep bitter tears of faithlessness for society.

There are occasional status updates that don't make me want to rip out my own eyeballs, but then, inevitably, there are these little gems:

'A gurl waz walkin in tha park wiv her bf and she sayd to him 'do yhu like me?' and he was all like 'lol, no.' And she blew up and died and he whispered to her 'I LUFF YHU BBZ 2K12' and then he blew up and died too.' 

No. Stop this. Stop it now. This is not right and it is not acceptable. Facebook, this is why I hate people. 

Everywhere, Anywhere

Before we get into details about what this Blog is about and before I am going to go on and on about myself I would like to say HI!!! Yeah, I do know this is typical, but hey give me a break I'm only 14, and this is like, my first BLOG...

So, I made a mistake and said Im gonna go into details about what this Blog is about... Well to be truthful I don't even know myself... You see i just wanted a BLOG coz my VERY cool cousin (he will be very happy when he reads this) and my even more AMAZING uncle (hopefully he will remember this when he is buying christmas presents) have a blog so i wanted to have one too...

Hopefully you guys will be nice and won't laugh at me, though I don't really care (I so do!!!)
Anyway I will just make a confession (I got this from my cousin's website) I ain't good at english ( I can speak all right, a lot, just ask my friends)  when I am  like writing something I ain't great at explaining or writing it in a way so you lovely people would understand (you can stop grinning now) so don't expect this to be one of the cool good BLOGs, like uncle's and cousin's I am truthful now (they'll love me more, wont they?) but just one of those blogs that I am going to post like poems or things that I like or that I made...

PS: If you are expecting something like a song that I sing or me singing any time I would recommend the volume to be on mute as you might want to keep your hearing ability -- Thank you x