Sweden Runs Out of Garbage With Waste-to-Energy

Furthermore, the kinds of things we recycle from day to day do not consist of more than 6 categories. Two colors of glass, metal (cans mostly), cartons, paper, plastic. Everyone I know collects this in their own home in paper bags, and then leaves them at a collection point close to their house when they get full. And of course, we don't normally take an extra trip to do this. I leave it on my way to the subway, other people might leave them when they take the car to work. It's really not much of an extra workload. I'm guessing I spend 15 minutes a month on my recycling.

Then we have more rare trash. Electronics, batteries, light bulbs, wood, paint etc. For the suburbs and small towns they have larger recycling plants in each municipality which you can drive to. They have shipping containers where you dump your old bikes, tv's, your large pine tree that you cut down to get some more sun in your yard, etc. A typical family might visit this place one to three times a year to dump some more hazardous or clunky trash.

If you live in an apartment complex (and possibly don't have access to a car) there's usually a room in the complex for all of these things. They have the plastic, glass, metal, batteries and electronics containers close to your own apartment.

For me who live in the city and don't have access to a car, there is actually a truck that comes around a few times a year for me to deposit these things. It has a few collection points close to me (within walking distance) and sends out a text message to my phone a few weeks before they're coming, besides having a schedule online.

Having been raised in this type of a recycling system, I'm always amazed by people, even in Sweden, who think it's too cumbersome. Sure, it happens that I forget to empty my recycling bins at the collection points some times, and then I do throw cartons and cans in my regular garbage (which from what I know is not illegal, btw). But in general there really isn't any noticeable overhead.

I don't think this is terrible, but it has costs associated with it that will become apparent further down the road -- similar to how the existing education system born from the industrial revolution's needs has proven to. The system you have suggested has a prominent lack of means to introduce people to advanced theoretical physics, economics research, astronomy, abstract mathematics, etc, you get the picture. A generation without a hint of knowledge in the non-practical fields will function fine in the short-term, but it will lead to a stagnation of advancement until an external trigger brings it back about.

Essentially, as I'm guessing you're a hacker-hustler-type, you see the primary course of education to promote passion in "doing," and that's my first instinctual priority for education as well. But classically, education has had a role to do much more than just that (albeit extremely inefficiently) for many generations, and it could be detrimental to focus on only one educational priority of "learn to do things well", with a potential to lose being able to gain exposure to other kinds of intellectual commitments. Maybe it won't happen, but it's a real risk. Who knows what we may have lost already from generations past?

Of course, everyone in the world agrees that the "sitting behind desks competing on test scores forgetting all the knowledge and then stumbling through relearning the real world from scratch" model of today's education is broken and pretty stupid, but it's not that straightforward to fix, unfortunately. Your suggestion is definitely something a single school could adopt (and broad institutionalized educational requirements should be abolished), and I would love to send my future kids there over anything that exists today.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

That's overly pessimistic.

Compared to most of the world, the fact that the size of your wallet doesn't directly determine which schools we can go to is remarkable.