Daniel Greenfield, from the Sultan Knish blog
Please click on the link above to read the entire article. It is worth your time, and it is crucial for our society for all of us to understand that the pursuit of universal education is making us less productive and less innovative.
My friends know that I don't think much of our public education system (government schools, as Neal Boortz likes to call them). The thing is, I don't hate public school teachers or parents who send their kids to public schools. I think there are many wonderful people involved in our public schools as teachers, as support staff, as volunteers, and as students. My problem is with the idea that education should be provided and controlled by the government, who tries to provide an "equal" education for everyone. I also don't think that home schooling is the only alternative to our public education system, instead, I think we need a free market in education so that people will have the freedom to try a lot of different things to find what works for them. The same system for everyone doesn't work, and we are depriving many, many of our young people of the opportunity to discover their gifts and find something they can love and be productive doing.
Here are the "money quotes" from Daniel Greenfield's article:
"Universal education was the panacea of every socialist state. By NEA rankings the Soviet Union had a better education system than we do. Its system routed as much of the population as possible through higher education and degree mills making it better educated, on paper, than the Yankee running dogs of the decadent West. And yet the USSR was behind the United States in every possible area of life.
The more you universalize education, the lower the value of that education becomes. When the goal of education is not to teach, but to graduate, then the educational system becomes a cattle run which exists only to move students through the system and then out the door through classroom promotion. The High School education of today is inferior to the Elementary School education of yesterday and the four year college graduate of today couldn't even begin to match wits with a high school graduate from 1946. College has become the new High School. Graduate school is the new college. If we keep following the European model, then two decades from now, everyone will be encouraged to get a Master's Degree which will be the prerequisite for most jobs and also be completely worthless.
"But there is another model. Not universal education, but universal competence. The Jewish text, Pirkei Avot or Sayings of Our Fathers, circa 220, contains the following sage advice from Rabbi Chanina the son of Dosa, 'Whoever has more deeds than learning, his learning will endure. But whoever has more learning than deeds, his learning will not endure.'"
"Empowerment comes not from mere education, but from competence. Competence is skill-based, it indicates a level of practical ability in any field that goes beyond regurgitating the approved program of standardized education. Competence covers everything from being able to fix a car to being able to put together a sentence."
"We can still send a probe to Mars and stream live video of it to the world from servers to handheld devices not because of our wonderful standard collectivist education, but because we have still retained enough of a legacy of competence from previous generations. It's the same reason that the Soviet Union still had classical ballet. Even so about the only things we make anymore are programs from companies created by college dropouts in fields that boomed before they were standardized. Our innovation doesn't come, as Obama claims, from education. It comes from men escaping education."
"A society with universal competence is an achievement society. It is a place where things get done because the people have the skill to do them. They do not have the same skills, and they don't need to have them. Standardized education leads to standardized drones, not competent individuals. Ability is personal and skill is learned. Who you are informs what you do and what you do informs who you are. Education is information, but competence is identity."
"A society with universal competence is an achievement society."
"Above all else, a society of competent men and women is self-ruled."
"An America with even more universal education will not be any more competitive, it will be less so. There is only so much money available for 24.4 billion dollar education budgets, or the 500 billion dollar equivalent of it when applying the same per-child spending ratio nationwide. And when that pyramid of debt sinks into the sand, we will have a great many people with a passel of degrees and less useful skills than most Stone Age aborigines."
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For me, my concerns about public schooling go way beyond whether what we chose to do for our children is better than what someone else chooses to do with their children. We all have to do what works for our family right now. I would have loved for there to have been other opportunities for our kids to learn in community with other students with similar interests and goals. As it was, we found groups and individuals to work with and we all shared our gifts and interests and got our kids educated well enough to be competent in their chosen fields. My concern with public education as it exists right now is that we are trying to educate everyone in the same way. It is not working and it does not make sense. There is no real way to give everyone an "equal" education. It is time to stop trying to fit everyone in the same box and expecting everyone to follow the college prep track and to go to college and get a degree that does not give them any marketable skills. We need to find a way to let the free market operate in education and let the parents who care find the best fit for their kids. For the parents who don't care, there are many, many caring teachers, churches, and organizations who would be willing to help fund and run schools and programs to help those students find their competencies.
I don't have all the answers as to how something like this would work, but I think it is time for a discussion.
----Katie
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