“Harmless” or “Mostly Harmless”?

Now I have to unlearn my science? Crap. I'm not done forgetting everything I've learned in my years of schooling. Now I have to forget that Pluto is not a planet. Because I just learned that Pluto (or is it now pluto, sans the capital "P"?) is no longer a planet it will take me years to forget that.

You see, it's fresh on the learning stack. The learning stack is like a stack of books. It's easier to pull something off the top of the stack. The further down you go, the harder it is to remove something. The good news is if you have to go pretty far down to pull something off the stack, chances are you will put it back on top and it will be easy to remember until some room full of people wearing pocket protectors and lab coats saying "We have determined that Pluto is no longer a planet. Or a Disney dog. Snort! Snort! Snort!" (pushes glasses back up nose)

My theory on this conspiracy, and it is a conspiracy, is that all these guys have textbooks in publication and they want them changed from saying "Pluto is a planet" to "Pluto is a dwarf planet." Then they make more money as schools all over the world buy the "revised" editions. Leave it to astronomers and self involved teachers in the publish or perish world of academia to pull crap like that.

I'd hate to be a second grader coming home from school right after this announcement was made. I think the conversation would go something like this:
Mommy: "What did you learn in school today"?
Second grader: "We learned about the solar system. The solar system has nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (he he he) and Pluto."
Mommy: "Well actually Pluto is no longer a planet."
Second Grader: "WTF?"
Mommy: "You see, scientists are smarter than everybody and else..."
From there the explanation drones on about how scientists and teachers don't make much money and they need extra income from the sale of textbooks because you can't get anywhere in the world of higher education unless you publish something. It's purely self serving.