Thinking.

Believe it or not, I have been thinking on some things lately. (I try to only do it rarely!) I was thinking about this CLEP test in American History and it's got me wondering about the definition of education. What do we want our kids to know? What do they need to know? Is being able to state the circumstances and the date of Bacon's Rebellion an essential life skill? Can you do it? Odds are you may have memorized it for a test and then promptly forgot it again. What is the point of that? I think that knowing general trends and large events in history is good but I wonder how much detail one needs to know. I heard once that Albert Einstein did not memorize anything he could look up, trying to free brain space for important things. I'd like my kids to know a trade/way to make money, how to manage that money, how to manage a home and how to manage their own health. However, in order to get a degree and have a better chance at getting good employment, they have to jump through the educational hoops and that means learning some useless facts and then promptly forgetting them. What exactly is the point of that? Is that education?