Every noun is alive

Every time one of my kids went through the jr high school science class where they defined life, I got rather animated myself.

The criteria to decide if something was alive or not always made sense. It included such things as: Living things exchange energy. Living things reproduce. They then go on to apply those criteria very narrowly. They forget that everything exchanges energy of some kind, heat energy, light, magnetic, gravitational, psychic. They overlook the mere fact that every class of object seems it found a way to reproduce, or there would be only one.

The practice of defining life as taught in jr high school teaches kids to think narrowly. They get stuck in human scale time frames. They think that reproducing like we biolife critters do is the only valid way. (It's the same line of thinking that white is the only valid skin color.)

Shouldn't we be trying to expand our kid's frames of reference? It would reduce prejudice and help clarity of thought. It would expand our innate appreciation for the infinite number of spirits all around us, in every living thing.