Insert Miracle?

There's a classic cartoon that appeared (if memory serves) in the New Yorker. A pair of mathematicians stand in front of a chalkboard; on the left third of the chalkboard, a dense mass of equations and calculations; on the right third, another close-packed mass of math. In the center, a big cloud; "Insert Miracle Here". "I can see one problem", says one mathematician to the other.

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Absolutes - rigid, black and white definitions - have a place in philosophy, ethics, and morals. Usually.

At least in theory.

Because while most people willingly go along with certain absolutes - murder, theft, lying and adultery are absolutely wrong, to give one's life to save another is absolutely good (provided one is not dying to enable, say, a suicide bomber at a kindergarten), misapplication of absolutes - and especially assuming absolute right for what is at the end of the day one's own opinion - leaves on on squishier ground. In such cases, the absolute is either a hothouse creation of one who lives purely in the abstract, or the plaything of the deluded.

The other day, the NARN's old friend Vox Day wrote:

However, these despicable actions should come as a surprise only to the ignorant - who are clearly the great majority - since only an ignoramus or a fool would voluntarily pass his children through the pagan fires of the public schools.

Well, that's absolutely right. Except for all the ways it's not.

Bear with me here.

First, let me pre-empt the inevitable snorting from the right (coming, inevitably, from people who've never had their assumptions in this area tested); I'm to the right of all of you; I'm probably to the right of Vox, in an ideal world (and it's the ideal world, indeed, that we're speaking about here). The court decisions that spawned Vox's article need to be not just fought in court, but resisted tooth and nail by parents.

But at the end of the day, the problems are deeper than any number of court decisions, and by no means limited to public schools. Don't come yapping to me about your Catholic Schools or your private academies; the best way to "save" education is to abolish it. In a perfect world, we'd be rid of all compulsory education, through at least sixth grade, and probably through age 16. There is no empirical, peer-reviewed evidence that a child who is allowed to run rampant and learn whatever his or her motivations drive him or her toward for six or ten or twelve years will arrive at age 12 or 16 or 18 any worse off than a (obviously hypothetical) child who starts out with the same intelligence, home support and motivations who's been run through a factory school system - Public, Catholic or any other - for the same period. The factory school system - public, catholic, parochial or otherwise - is never any better than a form of institutional hazing. The greatest achievement of the advocates of compulsory education is convincing the whole world that sitting in a room and being led by the nose through a pre-approved curriculum was the only way a child could be educated - or for that matter, that "Schooling" equals "Education" in the firs tplace.

Think about it; the most complex task a child ever learns - learning their native language - is something that all but a vanishingly-tiny percentage of children learn, and learn fluently, by age five. After learning a language from, literally, nothing, everything else - calculus, painting, physics, comparitive literature, investments, chemistry, music, bookkeeping - are all child's play. And yet the relatively simple task of reading - assigning sounds and meanings to symbols on a page, a task that most children can accomplish on their own or with minimal help from relatives, friends, or whomever is handy - stymies more and more children every year. Simple fact; for all the money our society has poured into compulsory education (and the parallel private education system) in the roughly 100 years (give or take, depending on region and so on), the level of functional literacy has stayed about the same. In other words, for all the trillions of dollars (after inflation) we've spent on compulsory (and private) education, we've really gotten nothing in terms of spreading literacy, math fluency or ability to write that people weren't getting for themselves, one way or another, before the system was imposed.

Simple observation: Nearly every child would be better served by spending their days at home, or in their yards, at the church, in the community center or the library, in the garage tearing apart engines or in the basement studying how bugs do their thing, than sitting in a school for six or seven hours a day, being told what to learn, where to go, what do do and when to do it. While proponents of the system claim that such an approach is needed to teach kids "responsibility", it in fact does the opposite; breaks children like horses or new inmates to the notion of supreme, unquestionable authority (above and beyond, indeed, that of their parents; Mom and Dad can merely spank you, while the school can send cops with cruisers and guns!), which in effect teaches them to abdicate personal responsibility - that virtue among virtues in the conservative world - in favor of meek subservience in the face of almighty power (even more so outside the public system). The notion of "School Choice" - God bless its proponents - against such a fact is merely a band-aid on a suppurating infection (to say nothing of such feel-good bromides as "school accountability", which is closely related to holding a financial audit on the iceberg that sank the Titanic).

So there are the bona fides: I'm more opposed to the current system than the average bear.

That is, of course, in my world of absolutes. In the world I actually live in, my kids attend the public school system. I have all the usual misgivings any conservative parent should have in sending their kids off to the factory school system (and I don't care if that system is public, Catholic, parochial or what-have-you, it almost universally uses the techniques of the factory to process its little product;s the public school system offers some further challenges, of course); there are, however, no real options. Seceding from the school system requires resources that I don't have, in terms of time (I'm a single parent; home schooling is not an option, barring an unforeseen Powerball win) or money (none of your business, but suffice to say that biting off an extra $3-10K per kid isn't an option right now).

So, like most parents in my situation, I make the best of a bad situation. I tricked the kids into enjoying reading for its own sake, unplugging the TV for a couple of summers to help them see it as something other than yet another f*****g class assignment (it worked), teaching them trying to teach them the values and morals that they don't get (or worse, are actively squelched) during the school day (hey, my daughter's a Young Republican!), and even trying to let 'em know that it's OK to look at some of the absurdities of school - like those of any bureaucracy - with a sense of humor, hopefully enough to enable the some of the slights and injuries of the factory schools to slide off without doing too much damage, hopefully not so much that they become too cynical to play "the game" well enough for their own good. God knows I've gotten cynical about the whole thing. Just to let them know someone else sees the absurdity, I pay them a buck a pop for any piece of lefty indoctrination they bring home from school (Soucheray's got nothing on me); the kids chip eagerly into the task of digging into and criticizing the bias, which at the end of the day is a good start.

Think we don't know public schools are (let's round off the edges on Vox's hyperbole) in serious trouble? Think again. Think the alternatives are as simple as the hyperbole? Think yet again.

If I had my druthers, I'd yank both my kids out of school - any school - tomorrow, and let 'em spend the next 4-6 years just learning for its own sake.

But the Ramsey County Attorney's office maintains an entire office full of pawns in Susan Gaertner's little empire lawyers to make sure none of us parents get uppity, and to make sure that we stifle kids' natural, commonsense urge to stay the hell out of those stinking prisons, waving threats of legal action and God Gaertner knows what else, over those who don't have their kids' asses parked in their desks at 8AM, day in, day out. (If a system were worth anything, you wouldn't think you'd need the full force of government to make people realize it...)

Now, Vox Day has a right to his opinion. Goodness knows I agree with most of 'em. But things like the above are worse than useless for the huge number of parents - the majority, I suspect - who have neither the time to secede from the public school system on their own, nor the resources to buy their way into an alternate system.

The ultimatum Vox gives isn't a whole lot more useful than the equation at the beginning of this post; there's some interesting food for thought, but at the end of the day it all depends on someone, somehow, "inserting a miracle" into the equation. The miracle - whether it involves an improbable abolition of compulsory education or an equally-unlikely financial windfall simultaneously springing tens of millions of families, whose heads were suddenly overcome with the good sense to give a rat's ass about the rot in the public schools, is one of those things that lives in the realm of most theatrical, theoretical absolutes when they are let loose in the real world; the province of the impractical, the self-absorbed, the self-satisfied, and the deluded.

Posted by Mitch at November 16, 2005 05:24 AM | TrackBack