The educational system offers flat poor role models. Many of the people glorified snugly fit into the depths of the dustbin of relevance. Though the system ditches the human side of things, it bizarrely glorifies scientists and mathematicians. These fleeting references to humans in a human system are a joke to human values and the selections are oftentimes inadequate in relation to the field itself.
It’s great time that Pythagoras and Euclid are booted hard out of textbooks and buried deep in the graveyard of embarrassment. Who was Euclid? We simply don’t know[1]. Was Elements written by Euclid? On Part 1 Definition 1, you can read “This definition may or may not have been in Euclid’s original Elements. Many parts of the Elements have been added since the original version. Indeed, all of the formatter including the definitions, common notions, and postulates may have been added after Euclid.” [2]. A literal shame to be in a textbook. Unless it’s for showing the superiority of a culture rather than objective, efficient study.
Pythagoras is another pitiful disaster. “It is difficult to distinguish Pythagoras’s teachings from those of his disciples. Pythagoras himself likely wrote no books, and Pythagoreans invariably supported their doctrines by indiscriminately citing their master’s authority. …, and the Pythagorean theorem for right triangles) were probably developed only later by the Pythagorean school. More probably, the bulk of the intellectual tradition originating with Pythagoras himself belongs to mystical wisdom rather than to scientific scholarship.” [3]. No comments are needed.
A great, relevant embodiment of this whole circus should have been Von Neumann. Students should have been taught his life as the personification of this whole saga. He was a beautiful avatar of the system: a dazzling employee, excelling in studies, inventing lots of stuff, and accomplishing the goals of the state brilliantly. He was a mega master of disciplines. But, he is surprisingly missing in high school textbooks.
Von Neumann knew disciplines as we do now, not some primitive field figure. He was into extensive maths, quantum physics, computer science, and even chemistry. If there were Nobel prizes in his time for maths, computers, and economics, he would have won those. The last genius put his knowledge to modern butchery, being the leading mathematician in shaped charges, contributing significantly to the atomic bomb, and overseeing calculations as to death tolls, detonation distance, and blast radius of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was also a founding father of the hydrogen bomb. He won the Presidential Medal of Freedom for these works. In his last days, worried about the afterlife, he accepted Christianity.
This is your life story. Excelling in studies with no life aim, being a brilliant employee, furthering the immoral aims of nations, winning freedom medals, and then pondering reality as death looms. Don’t be the next Von Neumann.