from the book:
Shadow Dancing on the
Grave of Hope:
There are three problems with education; the irrational reverence accorded it, how it is done so poorly in government and, alas, most private, schools, and how it can be done better.
"We tell them what to learn and test them, but we do not actually teach." B.F. Skinner (2004).
Edward Gibbon, of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, remembers the tutor from his days at Oxford. The tutor, “…well remembered he had a salary to receive, and only forgot he had a duty to perform. …fourteen months at Oxford were the most unprofitable and idle of my whole life.”
"So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’" Steve Jobs before he and Wozniak did the smart thing and started Apple. In the same vein, I must mention Winston Churchill, a great man of letters, no combination of which represented a college degree, who wrote many enduring books yet passed no examination at the university level and very few elsewhere.
One of the widest applications of technological advance in the modern age is the use of the personal computer. The vast majority of operators have taught themselves or been trained outside the public education system as necessity dictated.
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” Dresden James.
If public education is intended to educate, it is a failure. If it is intended to provide a long, very expensive test of IQ, persistence, dependability and ability to get along with people it is a very inefficient, partial success. One of the reasons it is a partial success is that IQ, persistence, dependability and ability to get along with others are quite specific to the educational environments in which they are measured. The popularity and belief in the necessity of as much education as possible shows that public relations surrounding larnin’ in government schools, hysterically proclaiming education’s importance, is very effective. If teaching is evaluated by the learning of the student so that subject mastery is a requirement of teaching, that method is real teaching and not just another device for sorting students by IQ, but the great majority of teaching is not even close to producing mastery.
" If you want to fire a hired man, send him to the back forty and tell him to throw that pile of stones over the fence. After he’s finished, tell him to throw them back. If he does it, fire him for being stupid. If he doesn’t, fire him for not doing what he’s told." The activities in education follow the stone-throwing model. Nobody knows if most of them are necessary and the students that cotton to the uselessness are punished for being intransigent. Those who don’t catch on are punished by doing the useless exercises.
"As long as a student (1) learns things easily from technically unsound teacher presentations, (2) readily retains what has been learned with technically unsound practice afterwards, and (3) has a strong familial support structure in place to keep the student on track and make sure the student’s learning is progressing, then the student stands a good chance of becoming educated in public schools. This is because this student can be educated in virtually any school. We don’t need a public sector monopoly to provide educational services to these students, any fool is up to the task.
Whether we need a public sector monopoly for providing educational services for the remaining kids is debatable. There certainly is no evidence that the public sector provides these services any better than the private sector. And, they’ve had an awfully long time trying to get their game together. Too long, maybe." K. DeRosa from D-Ed Reckoning Blog–July 14, 2008.
“A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and … the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government…” (John Stuart Mill, 1859).
"America’s decision to have its public schools funded by a government monopoly is stunningly stupid. Having a union-dominated monopoly run them is even stupider. Unionized monopolies create ossified, bloated bureaucracies that don’t serve people well." p. 107, John Stossel, Myths, Lies ands Downright Stupidity, NY: Hyperion, 2006.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
