This is old news, but I felt I should comment on it anyway. Pluto, our ninth planet, has been relegated to the status of “dwarf planet.” Does anyone else feel sad about this?
I learned the nine planets as a four year old on my Grandfather’s knee: Mother Very Thoughtfully Made A Jelly Sandwich 
Under No Protest. (Mercury, Venus, Terra, Mars, Asteroids, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.) I suppose we need a new way of remembering the planets. Disney may have to rename the faithful companion of Mickey Mouse. The Roman god of the underworld is probably seething right now in the depths.
I understand the scientific compulsion to make sure that definitions and taxonomy are applied consistently and logically when describing objects, but the emotional impact to our culture as a whole weighs heavily in favor of waiving the new definition in order to include Pluto in our definition of a planet.
But then again, who am I kidding? I asked a high school student today in the grocery store (who had his nose buried in a Chemistry text book while his mother tossed things into a shopping cart) if he enjoyed science. His reply astounded me. “I just need to get a good enough grade to get into college.” Unspoken was that the grade would probably be obtained by a combination of cajoling, cramming, and cheating. He certainly wouldn’t care that Pluto had been demoted, since his interest in science extended only to receiving a good enough mark to go to college.
Probably no one cares but a select few journalists and academics, as well as a few of us in the blogsphere.
Vaya con Dios, Pluto.
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This is the first article that brought Pluto’s probable fate to my attention. For those short on time, here is the meat of the article. When Pluto was discovered it was thought to be larger than Earth. Later the scientific community realised it was 400 times smaller than they originally believed. The international community has been asking for this demotion for decades. American scientist mostly oppose it, probably because Pluto was the first planet discovered by an American. I for one welcome the demotion. I see it as progress. Precise language turns me on.
I pray the young fella in the grocery store just doesn’t have a taste for science. I’m not much different regarding math. Chances are, he treats most subjects as you described. He is a product of tests that focus on regurgitation rather than critical thinking. The lesson has become a means to a test. Learning is no longer the ends, and the test a mere tool to measure its effectiveness. How many times did you hear “will the be on the test” in college? What happened to curiosity and passion for a subject? Can we return to tests that sample a subject? Can we get back to tests that ask a few unreasonably difficult questions to reward those that have drive and capacity?
Working in the industry that I do puts me in contact with a great deal of Asian-Americans. I can tell you that they treat education and their work ethic vastly different than Americans do. It can be hard to live up to sometimes, and I understand the inadquacies in our system.
Unfortunately, you bring up a valid point about our test-taking culture. Unreasonably difficult questions are skipped in the interest of time to achieve maximum possible points. Pursuit of education for enjoyment or intellectual curiousity will remain a novelty in a society such as ours when the focus is on the four year degree, the SUV, and the house in the suburbs.
We should all pick something valuable that we’re interested in and become experts at it. The world might be a better place.