Intervention
Humans, and their institutions, measure success and failure in many different ways, for many different activities.
Let's say, for a moment, that you're having a social occasion - a dinner party, for example.
There are ways to measure success and failure for things like this. Success might be measured in terms of, say, "great conversation was had by all, and everyone had a wonderful time". Complete, stupendous success might be all that plus "Jay and Emily fixed Eric up with Jennifer, and they hit it off wonderfully, and Alan ran into Stephanie, whose company is looking for exactly what Alan does, and fixed him up with an interview on Monday, and we all wound up singing old Rolling Stones songs on the karaoke until 3AM...".
You get the picture.
Failure, of course, is obvious, too - "Everyone kept to themselves and Nicole and Ted got into a fight to boot, and everyone left by 10".
A party that ends with people calling the police, of course, is really bad.
So what if you need the police to force people to come to your party in the first place? Along with the full weight of the county attorney's office?
If your party needed that kind of official coercion to get started, it'd be fair to call the party "vastly worse than an abject failure."
Right?
So what does it say about the public school system when it needs to have an arm of the county attorney's office to force kids to attend school, under penalty of draconian legal sanction?
What does it say about a school system that greets visitors in the school lobbies with a poster: "Be here on time, every day! IT'S THE LAW!"
Welcome to North Korea?
No. Welcome to Saint Paul.
This piece, of course, is the flip side of the piece I wrote two weeks ago, advocating the abolition of elementary school. The question is, just how bad for students is elementary school?
A health hazard?
What can you say about an institution that needs to
- drug nearly six million of its
inmates students so that they can get along in class? Seriously - what would society say about a company that required a quarter of its workers to go on mood-altering drugs to make it to work every day? That's what the school system does! And it's doing more every year; Ritalin production has increased seven-fold in the past decade. - Requires an expensive, highly-empowered arm of government law-enforcement, employing people to hold the legal sword of Damocles over those who can't, or won't, adapt to the system and can't afford to get out, in order to enforce the government's "compulsory education" laws?
I'm not saying I have a whole lot of answers. I
am saying that I'm looking for any rational, objective evidence that sending kids below the age of 12 to the schools we send them to - places that regard "education" like an intellectual assembly line, where
assembly line workers teachers bolt on new pieces of knowledge at various, pre-determined (by the government!) points on the line - is any better for them in the long (or even short!) run than not doing it.
And I'm starting to seriously regret having had to have done it with my own kids in the first place.
Posted by Mitch at
May 4, 2005 05:44 AM
| TrackBack
Bless you, Mitch! There's a whole lot of people out here who agree with you. One theory I have is that things started going all to hell with the proliferation of the middle school concept. Throwing 5th graders in with 8th graders has been disastrous. That's just one problem....
Posted by: Colleen at May 4, 2005 06:57 AMI've been saying that for years, Colleen. And I know this will stir up you guys, but I also think it started when you could no longer have prayer. The kids had a whole minute to think about something else except who was "going: with whom, perhaps. They probably didn't, but the idea of a God made for common values, which doesn't seem to be anywhere anymore. I know, I know, whose values, but what part of the Ten Commandments is bad?
Posted by: Silver at May 4, 2005 07:33 AMThe public education system in this country is on par (absent the overt state-sponsored violence) with Leninist, Stalinist, and Maoist sytems, in terms of moronic central planning regimes which actively destroy human creativity and ingenuity.
Posted by: Will Allen at May 4, 2005 09:14 AMThe school administrators don't realize what a failure it is for the kids - or don't care - because they are confident that school is GOOD.
We have a student worker in my office. He skipped school Monday. So as a consequence, the school - what, made him stay after all week? Come in on Saturday to make up the time?
No, they suspended him on Tuesday, on the theory that if you don't come on Monday, then you won't get to come on Tuesday, either, so there.
How's that for an attendance incentive?
Posted by: nathan bissonette at May 4, 2005 10:11 AM.
I, personally, believe in public education. If treated as a way to provide a minimal baseline education in primary school, and basic tools for higher education come high school, I think it is a very worthwhile endeavor. I believe that societies that fail to provide such will fall behind those societies that do.
This is not an endorsement of the current system of political and chemical indoctrination. In my primary school years I had two major gripes, there was insufficient security on the playground and outside of class, and the curriculum was rated for retards.
Prior to the need to instill a month's education each year on specifically environmental, black and women's issues as compared to a week on national history, I think the system worked okay.
That was before schools needed ethnic, feminist, drug, peer, and gender-identity counselors. Before it was considered necessary to add day care to high schools. Before 'educators' could make a career running education without ever seeing the inside of a classroom.
I think that the basic platform for public education is relatively sound, but too much crud has been added, draining attention and resources away from actual teaching.
Further, because I hated being taught at the pace of the slowest common denominator, I fully support private and charter schools. My wife and I are considering Catholic school ( despite my very secular philosophies ) as a way to ensure our children get an education.
Posted by: Aodhan at May 4, 2005 11:27 AM