who, as I recall, was missing a hand And that’s why you don’t hack computers.

It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job … In fact, none of this is obvious at all, it’s just always assumed. In reality, high school literature, mathematics, and any of the other subjects are next to irrelevant for most people. The canonical education curriculum was created almost unchanged over a century ago, and even then it never had a demonstrable benefit beyond basic education. For a great critique of school mathematics in particular, read Lockhart’s Lament: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html (long, but time worth invested). Arguing from need won’t bring you far. The arguments brought forth by Lockhard apply, 1:1, to teaching programming. Not everybody needs to learn programming, just like most people don’t benefit from mathematics beyond basic arithmetic. But teaching them something interesting, fascinating, wonderful can never be a loss. tl;dr Don’t fall in the canonical education trap. Our current school system operates without a good plan and almost everything learned in high school as irrelevant for most people as is programming.

You’re confusing a model with reality: Google isn’t gravity, they’re trying to *model* it using their ranking algorithm. And as your experience clearly shows, it is currently modelling gravity (i.e. the “reality” of which sites are relevant and which aren’t) badly. To stay in your metaphor, it’s clearly time for a paradigm shift, a kind of Einstein of web ranking algorithms. Sounds like a very interesting thesis topic. cstheory.SE, anyone?