A Quantum Field Theory of Education

Since science education is no longer considered enlightened unless informed by SCholarly Research On Teaching And Learning, a modern theory of education is needed in order to take full advantage of the clarifying terminology developed to make relativistic quantum mechanics more transparent. This essay constitutes the hermeneutics of a new quantum field theory of education (QFTE), in which the usual roles of integer spin intermediaries and interacting fermions are interchanged.

In QTFE, second quantization is applied to the following fields:

• Morons: a type of bozo that likes to condense into a moronic BEC which exhibits stupidfoolidity.

• Lessons: in QFTE all interactions between morons are mediated by the exchange of lessons, a type of fermion. This makes the interactions very weak, since no lessons are ever absorbed — just back-propagated on exams.

The moronic BEC has this interesting property: once it reaches its stupidfoolish ground state, unless excited by very high energy lessons, the bozos will continue to display stupidfoolidity indefinitely without any sign of dissipation; best measurements suggest a decay time of at least the age of the universe.

It has been recently discovered that morons come in two types, spin 0 (little morons) and spin 1 (big morons). Big morons interact only through gravity, thus proving the validity of the old joke. (“…Why did the little moron stay on the horse? …”)

When a little moron finally absorbs two lessons it can’t forget, it becomes a big moron, graduates, and never interacts with anything again, except to add to the dead weight of “society“, a denser moronic BEC of big morons.

A very small fraction of the morons absorb enough lessons to be promoted into excited states called Professors, which decay gradually back to their ground state by lesson emission, contributing thereby to the production of a new generation of morons. Unlike in the case of leptons, however, successive generations of morons are indistinguishable. Perhaps this is because morons, having zero or integer spin, also lack a lepton number.

A lesson must have half-integer spin, or it would be just another bozo. Most lessons are spin 1/2 and have almost no substance; these are called light lessons or drek particles. Occasionally we find lessons with spin 3/2, the so-called strange lessons or boreyons, and very rarely we see a doubly strange superheavy lesson known as the Omygod boreyon.

Lessons have a rich spectroscopy. Even drek lessons come in many flavors. (Morons claim that the variety is endless, but what do morons know?) It has been speculated that lessons are composed by quacks, but this has never been confirmed, because quack Professors always invoke a physician’s principle known as “‘Ask on topic!’ freedom” when asked if they were involved.

The lightest lessons of all are called “new” lessons, which are closely related to “improved” lessons, neither of which have any substance at all. Only the charged lessons carry any weight, since even morons will absorb some lessons if they have paid good money for them.

Some speculative work has been done on the theory of stupidsymmetry, in which each moron has a fermionic partner called a “morino” and each lesson has a stupidsymmetric “slesson”. No one has the faintest idea how anyone could tell if this were true.

_________________________________________________________

This theory was formulated over many years, but was first consigned to paper on November 26, 2006.