So Arthur, in thinking more about your well-founded suspicion of the profit motive, when it comes to curriculum writing and standard setting (test making), I'm thinking we should go over in what ways the public schools, pre college, are already subject to commercial moneymaking. You may suppose I'm about to launch on another anti-TI tirade (but you'd be wrong; plus I just bought one for my daughter, the same kind "Mr. Bright uses" (an excellent teacher)). More, I'm drawing from personal experience with McGraw-Hill, Avenue of the Americas (28th floor, desk jockey under Nola Hague, peer-to-peer with Ray Simon, who got me the post). It was all about Texas and California, the states with the biggest school-aged populations. Mass publishers had to jump through their hoops, our kiss good bye any real chance for profit for hungry investors. Just pandering to the baby states (like New Hampshire) made *no* economic sense. So what's happened is Californians and Texans have realized their economic clout with New York publishing and have decided to politicize around that fact. I know less about the situation in Texas (let others tell that story), but California is pretty obviously laid out on the table over on Math-Teach. It'll be really easy to do the postmortems. The story Californians now tell themselves is: we were going down the sewer, mathematically, but now scores are on the rise and all because of a new State Standard championed by our Education Pope, one Wayne Bishop over at CalState (a competent teacher I'm sure -- I use some of his linear algebra thinking in Gnu Math as a matter of fact). Now that Wayne is Pope, we're hearing a lot more about Saxon and Singapore, as the two flagship tree-killer textbook series that Our Nation must embrace. And yes, their ambitions are National, what with the Department of Education obligated by law to pass judgement on textbook offerings, thereby giving Our Friends the Big Publishers in New York, access to the levers of power at the federal level (a known quantity high ground). Get the Ed Department to sign off on Everyday Math, and you've got your gravy train for the next fifteen years minimum (but good doobie bureaucrats need job security too, so stamp it with "more study needed"). What has all this to do with Python? Precious little, which is of course my point. Textbook publishing is profitable because at the K-12 level, it's all about rehashing. Colleges pioneer and explore (or used to), but K-12 never changes, or, if it does, hardly moves at all in Mathematics. The pictures get more ethnically diverse, the sidebars more loquacious, the binders stronger, the books heavier and more expensive. These are the only dimensions we care about. Math Content, meantime, remains Plain Vanilla Pablum, i.e. nothing serious, until we weed 'em and feed 'em (Calculus Mountain to weed 'em). So has our Python Nation any hope at all of propagating to more than homeschoolers and forlorn little one roomers on Shoshone Rez in someplace godforsaken? We beed to recruit too, after all, if our ethnicity is to survive. Not according to conventional radar (which the math-teach subscribers all deem me to be "under"). With New York holding Congress in hammerlock, and pesky politicos yammering "fuzzy" and "new new", screaming to high heaven to legislate Math from On High (the only way religious fanatics know to get anything), Python, open source, GNU, Linux, Ruby, tupuloid, Sims, Alan Kay, $100 laptop, are all doomed from ever impacting any mainstream child in one of our mainstream all-American public school K-12 classrooms, ad infinitum and ad nauseum (a little Kay goes a long way, I agree, but he's still powerful good medicine). Obviously there's something wrong with this overly pessimistic model, as we already know from personal experience, if dealing with teenagers personally (as I do, daily), that the above memepool is hardly esoteric. A lot of kids already know about this stuff, because they're *all* homeschoolers when they come home, and keep learning through the balance of their day (even sleep can be educational). They're out of school and smack dab in the middle of that Commercial Sector you're always so suspicious about (having worked in it for many years, our first meeting being in your home town's Financial District). And smack dab in the middle of the out-of-school Commercial Sector, is the breakfast cereal industry. Cheerios, Cheerios, Cornflakes & Grape Nuts, one of the most feared Capitol Hill lobbies in the history of our planet. They own Saturday Morning, a cartoon festival and clown show, puppets galore, and long the Fortune 100 focus for discovering Emerging Trends. Cartoons have snakes. Cartoons have pirates. So what candle do the print media Publishers hold, when it comes to comparing old dead language lead, flat-on-a-page XY somnambulisms, next to the EyeCandyLand of XYZ television? Nada, right? So I guess this is the truce I'm seeing emerging between us. You're wanting to marshal the troops to defend the Sanctity and Purity of Ivory Tower Virginity, to keep it free from that down and dirty Profit Motive (at least in any tainted sense -- high grades still sought after). All along, you've been supposing my Fuller School credential meant I was duty-bound to try to get passed you and your forces, as I tried for the End Zone of Academic Respectability. You wanted me to check my funny-looking pyrate hat at the door, be a good compromiser, give a little, in the interests of mutual respectability. Then we could join forces and champion Python together, on the same side of high walls (with Microsoft at bay outside). But how it turns out is more like this: I'm happy to leave you to that battle, and hope you keep winning it (need troops? just ask). But I'm content to leave Academia to its textbook fixations and focus on Saturday Morning, where my market researchers have "lazy fare" to just experiment and play with little kids' minds, beyond any oppressive scrutiny and control of those "too old for cartoons" fuddydud college professors (except maybe the semioticians -- they watch us agog (or "agrog" as the case may be)). You keep Academics respectable (I support you in that), and meanwhile I'll do like me Pyrate Captain taught me: engage in all out psychological warfare on the fringe, where few dare venture, and even fewer make it back. Python Nation is lucky to have recruited someone like me. Kids really love it when I "Talk Like a Pyrate" [sm].[1] Yar! [sm] [2] Kirby 4D Studios Portland "Open Source Capital" Oregon [1] http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2005/09/talk-like-pirate-day.html [2] http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/09/yar.html