This Lesson is EVERYWHERE!

Ok, all my "short" blog posts so far have been surprisingly long. Perhaps this one could be short!

A couple of days ago, I noticed A little lever underneath the steering wheel -- one I may have been oblivious to for the last several years -- or maybe I initially knew about it but just forgot about it? -- that does something very simple: it allows me to push the steering wheel in, or pull it out, and to tilt it up or down, and then lock it into place. This may be a simple feature, but it enables each driver of our car to get the steering wheel "just right" for each of us. In another vehicle, it came in very handy when my wife was pregnant!

This is a result of an Air Force discovery: when they were losing pilots to crashes in the 1950s, they noted that their planes were designed for the "average" pilot of the 1920s, and figured that they needed to recalibrate what it meant to be "average". But when they tried to find "average" people, they found almost no one! Hence, the Myth of the Average User, and the realization that the only way to accommodate pilots was to make as many things as adjustable as possible!

This is one lesson that bureaucrats in particular, and pretty much everyone else as well, needs to learn: there is no such thing as "average", and to pretend otherwise will only lead to tortured souls.

This is the single biggest problem I see in education today -- assuming that everyone progresses the same rate, and should learn the same thing, year after year, with no interruption -- and if one particular child doesn't do that, it's a flaw in the child's abilities, and not a problem of the system - and we try to "fix" this for autistics, ADHDers, dyslexics, the highly intelligent, the mildly stupid, and other misfits, with bandaids called "Individual Education Programs" that can be just as rigid as the system it is trying to patch (except for the highly intelligent ones -- even when they are dealing with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other issues, it's generally assumed that they are smart enough that they'll just "work it out by themselves").

With regards to technology, this is a major reason why I find Windows and Mac OS so irritating: they don't match the way I think, and if I try to get them to match, the result is buggy and weird. While Linux can also struggle with the customization I crave, it nonetheless has far more flexibility to try to do my own thing!