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I'm definitely being influenced by the rally this weekend (restoring sanity/fear) - and this is sort of echoing what people said in class about teaching games/fun or love, but maybe the thing to teach kids is rationality.  If we can teach them how to understand life in a rational way and look at what is presented as "facts" and what may just be over-exaggeration or even untrue (at least in terms of local truths), they might become rational adults who can work within the boundaries of society, but also know when those boundaries can and should be broken down.  Of course, the issue of teaching kids rationality might be incredibly hard and we would first have to agree on what rationality is.  I think that if we learned how to be good thinkers, the ideas of (capital T) Truths (like love or kindness) and how to play the "game" well and have fun with life and education would come naturally. 

I liked Abby's example of the teacher who taught an implausible lesson and then pointed out that the "facts" he had taught the kids were obviously wrong.  Teaching children to really think about everything that is told to them and giving them the tools to decide whether it's plausible or not seems like a good strategy before we get to teaching them our local truths.  It seemed from that story that the kids in that teacher's class came out of the class with a more flexible and engaging view of education - the idea that they could still be in the system and succeed, but could have fun with it and really investigate what they were told.