When will we learn?

This came from a blog on Boing Boing written by Cory Doctorow. It is a quote about arguably the world's leading security expert, Bruce Schneier. 


To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”


We are overdue for reform of the education system, specifically with introduction of curriculum to teach skills that people need in today's world. The above quote screams out for people to better, or even dare i say rationally, access risk. This would apply to everyday things like driving dangerously, lying to your parents, taking a new job, and even when see the government is making bad decisions based on an unreasonable social fear.