Ten to fifteen year old basketball shoes are nearly all a forgotten item, rotting away in landfills while computers the same age are still available for studying Shakespeare more efficiently than any paper copy can ever provide and less expensively. Those computers are more than fast enough for the kind of studying most kids do in school, and they cost no more on today's market than a pair of basketball shoes. Why is the centuries old blackboard still the default for classrooms around the world, when they cost much more and do much less than computers one tenth their age? Why do we have physical Olympics and no mental Olympics? Why do trivia games shows thrive on the market, and shows featuring our brightest students die on the vine and then get relegated to local programming on Sunday morning? Outfitting a kid with a decade old computer costs no more than outfitting that kid with basketball shows, much less a basketball and a hoop, and the kid doesn't outgrow that computer every year or wear it out, and regulation height of the monitor doesn't change and make all the older ones obsolete just due to some rule change. Throwing billions of Etexts out there into cyberspace can not guarantee anyone will actually learn to read any more than throwing a billion basketballs out there should be a guarantee that there will be another Michael Jordan: nor will it guarantee a new Einstein, Edison, Shakespeare, or any other great person. . . . . .BUT. . .it will increase the odds. Someone still has to pick up the books, just as there has to be someone to pick up the basketballs, for both remain dead until someone brings them to life. Television, on the other hand, natters on into the night, long after you have fallen asleep. Education has all the advantages in competition with ball games and video games, not only those listed above, but a whole world insists on education, forces edcuation, which just might have caused some of the problem. Perhaps education has too many advantages. . .so many, in fact, that education has never realized it is competition bound with other messages. A hundred years ago there were no industries vying for an audience of kids, life outside the schoolhouse was boring and there was very little to bring to class to compete in some manner with the teacher, other than a bullfrog. The massive variety of things kids have competing for them is something educational systems have not taken into account and they still rely on the threat of truant officers, not on earning the attention of the students. The competition is not nearly so sound asleep. . . . TV shows spend billions of their dollars figuring out how to get you to stay tuned in for that last few seconds and billions more watching overnight ratings results to check their performances and those of their competitors.