[1] Source: "A Song About the Planets." Educational Resource. 1993.
[2] Submitted by: Daryll F. Lornegone. Found in a crumbling box labelled “memories don’t matter” during an estate sale.
[3] Uploaded to the archive: February 17, 2025. NotstalgiaArchive.org
Background
In 1993, the Department of Optimised Knowledge Efficiency (DOKE) launched an initiative to streamline education by merging unrelated subjects across different grade levels.
One such effort, A Song About The Planets, aimed to teach young children about the planets while simultaneously introducing older students to existential philosophy. The rationale was simple: why waste time on separate lessons when a single song could teach astronomy to preschoolers and the crushing weight of existence to teenagers?
Other discontinued DOKE experiments included:
Phonics & Tax Law, designed to teach letter sounds and financial regulations. Early readers were taught to sound out words such as "deductible" and "amortisation," with their final exams requiring them to correctly complete a self-assessment tax return.
Shapes & Romantic Regret, which combined geometry with the study of doomed relationships in 19th-century literature. Students would examine the tragic symmetry of love triangles while calculating the area of heartbreak within an equilateral betrayal.
The program was discontinued after concerns arose over inappropriate cross-pollination of subject matter. Younger students internalised the despair of life’s futility, while older students failed to retain basic planetary knowledge.
A follow-up study decades later found that while the initiative failed to enhance knowledge retention in older students, it had a lasting impact on younger participants. Many reported a deep-rooted existential anxiety, widely blamed for the prevailing sense of despair among that generation.
Meanwhile, those who were meant to absorb the philosophical aspects of the lesson recall nothing beyond the fact that there is a planet named Mars.
Further Resources
https://archive.org/details/our_solar_system
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