I've been thinking about the school loan fiasco.
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who proposed public schools for the poor (there were none in the US at the time), consisting only of three years -- just enough to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Back then, kids would study and go home to help with what it took to keep the family alive. They would usually apply what they learned immediately, which made what they learned meaningful.
Beyond that would be scholarship funding for the exceptional capable learners and apprenticeship for those interested in a trade. Education would continue basically at the interest and will of the individual and his or her family.
There is something to be said for making education available and egalitarian, as we have. But we have gone way too far. Education has lost a lot of meaning, and has become more of a (potentially useful) recreational activity in general, and in some ways just another market to compete in.
I am thinking we should go back, if possible, to making education something that happens at the interest and will of the family (when children are young) and the individual (from the beginning), and back to making it something we do concurrently with making a living.
Why at the interest and will of the family and individual? Because people learn best when they are not being force-fed or spoon-fed things they did not choose to learn.
OH! BUT THINK OF ALL THE LOST OPPORTUNITIES!!!!!!!!!!!
or whatever the argument. No. Just No. Wrong on every level and from every angle.
Educators have always had the ability and opportunity to influence their students to widen their horizons. On the converse, far more damage is done trying to force people to widen their horizons than any benefits gained -- other than benefits to those at the top of the social hierarchy who think they have a vested interest in keeping their position there.
(Not all at the top have such delusions, although forced education does seem
to bubble more such deluded people to the top.)
Why concurrently with making a living? Because then we wouldn't need to take loans out to take a mix of classes that are more than half not even relevant to the individual's interests, and more than 90% irrelevant to making a living -- and more than half of which are likely to induce false ideas and ideologies that actually interfere with making a living.
Making a living is not the ultimate goal of education, but opening possibilities to make life interesting while making a living is close to the ultimate goal of education.
The ultimate goal should be something like to help make whole human beings, but people who don't understand what I mean might argue with me instead of looking for a different way to word the goal. The words are not important, and argument may or not be useful, but it would be a distraction from today's rant.
So I'm going to leave the question of the ultimate goal open and focus on the
goal of making it possible to keep life interesting while making a living.
Suggesting something systematic is always going to result in promoting non-optimal ideologies, but I'll toss a few ideas out here for examination:
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Make day-care and pre-school optional again, both in terms of legal
enforcement and in terms of requirements for entering primary school
grades.
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Limit in-school time to half a day during the first three plus-or-minus
years while the students achieve, at their own pace, basic
proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
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Part of the reason for limiting in-class time is to allow the students time
to apply what they've learned outside of class, as much as possible in
natural situations.
In order to get this to work, we're going to have to find ways to promote appropriate places for very young children to play.
Constructing a market for Japanese-style 塾 (juku) and お稽古 (o-keiko), and similar activities seems to be a partial solution, and may not be out of the question, but it's just pushing the problem off to another version of the same thing.
Ultimately we need to have the parents involved. Presently, most of what we do "for the children" involves taking the very people who ought to have the most motivation to keep the children safe, happy, and constructively occupied out of the equation. (I know, this is partly because a small number of parents are not conscious of what will happen in the future if they abuse their kids. But it is far more because all too many parents seem not to know how, and seem to be afraid of learning how.)
But where are parents going to get the time to be involved?
Walk with me down a side-path for a ways. What if we got all the people who are on the welfare rolls and had them work two-to-four hours a day on something useful to society?
Competition for jobs would get stiffer, right?
What if we got rid of all the non-essential jobs?
Competition for real jobs would become brutal, correct?
Why?
Because seven out of eight working hours for most people are spent in things
that are not essential, and at least half of our working hours are spent in
things that have no benefit to society. (Not including emergency medical
workers and such here.)
What are we doing all day long? Fighting the modern equivalent of warfare -- market competition.
Parents should have the time.
That parents don't may be partly on the parents themselves, but it is at this point in our modern society mostly on the people who insist on, having made enough for their own retirement ten times over, or tens of thousands of times over, insist on keeping in the game.
Somebody donates a quarter or a half of his n-billions of dollars to charity, but doesn't take himself completely off the payroll, off the board, out of management? He is being duplicitous. He should be shamed and shunned.
If they want to stay in the game? Divest, divest, divest. Get their tanks off
the playing field, get out of their power-assisted robot shells and Kevlar
body armor and play friendly football like the rest of us.
We have to be willing to get our superstars out of the way -- if they won't move over voluntarily, move them out -- boycott and such.
Cut back on the things we do for senseless competition, and no one, I repeat, no one would need to work for hire more than four hours a day five days a week. Max.
And with the extra time, there would quickly be plenty of people training to
do emergency medical work and such, so even the emergency medical workers,
firefighters, and so forth would be able to get their daily working hours way
down.
Back to the topic of education.
So what do children do outside of school? That has to be between them and
their parents, really.
When does the first year start? That's another thing that parents and children have to work out between them, on an individual basis.
Oh, and how do you decide when to end the first three plus-or-minus? Again, on an individual basis.
ALL THESE DECISIONS!!! CAN WE TRUST PARENTS TO MAKE THEM RIGHT?
First, there is no single right decision that can be specified in general. It's going to be case-by-case, and the people in the best position to make these decisions are the parents and the children themselves. No one else has close to enough information. Not government. Not the schools. Nobody else.
(Think about this. What's the first thing that happens when government and/or
schools take these decisions over? Tests. Tests. Evaluations. And more tests.
Because they don't have the information. Unless they take over the DNA along
with the evening meals and bedtime, they can't have enough information, and
not really even if they do that. Institutions bigger than family are too big
to be able to work with at the necessary level of detail.)
Second,
if we can't trust the parents' decisions in most families, we've already lost
our society. Same thing as innocent until proven guilty; we have to trust them
until and unless they prove irreparably that they will deliberately make too
many wrong decisions that result in repeated serious abuse.
I'm getting off-the topic.
But I'll note that, if the primary language is not English, more than three
years may be necessary. Japanese, for instance, will need another year because
they will start with the 仮名 (kana) writing system first, but then
they also have to get the basics down for the 漢字 (kanji) writing
system, as well. And to make it work in just another year, a new, more regular
approach to the kanji is going to have to be developed. Other languages
exist in which grammar and character forms interact, and I have to assume
those will take extra time.
There's a lot more to think about here, but I need to talk about what happens after the first three (plus or minus) years.
This is where we have to get really creative.
Before we do, no, we don't have to require children who can read, write, and handle numbers to continue institutional education or equivalent. Once they have the foundation, they can continue on their own. The whole reason we have been requiring children to stay in school is that too many haven't been getting the foundation.
That said, institutional education can be done in a meaningful way. And if we
do it in a meaningful way, the reason some kids won't want to continue will be
that they have some better option more appropriate to the educational path
they want to take. And that's not a bad thing.
How do you make school meaningful?
What has more meaning to children than the real world?
- Bring the real world into the school.
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Half of the day can be retained for guided instruction -- lecture, practice,
labwork and etc.
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But the guided instruction part should be entirely elective.
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Students need meaningful problems to solve anyway because humans are
problem-solving animals.
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But students who have meaningful problems to solve will generally choose
naturally what topics they need to solve them. That's why students can be
allowed to choose their own course.
How do you give them meaningful problems to solve?
- The school should operate as a microcosm of the students' real world. Give them opportunities to experience things they will experience in the real world as adults.
Sure, cleaning and helping in the cafeteria if there is one. But manufacturing, setting up and operating stores, working with money, operating in-school postal systems, making and enforcing rules, the whole thing.
Under adult supervision, of course. Parental involvement, of course. Probably using an in-school currency to reduce temptation to the supervising adults. But, to the extent that it can be relatively safely done, letting the students apply the things they are learning in real-world ways.
In middle school, a similar approach would continue, but the currency of the real world would replace the in-school currency, the internal postal system would integrate with the external system and so-forth.
In high school, most students would begin to learn trades and/or begin to work on actual research projects coordinated with local colleges and research institutions.
College/university would become integrated with industry, such that most students would actually be working their way through school.
Yes, this would require that the current totalitarian intellectual property regimen would have to be significantly weakened, but that is a given. Published works that remain under copyright for the life of the author plus seventy years is insanely beyond the control for a limited time that the Constitution granted, and basically gives the artists' associations powers that the government is restricted from, powers that the government should not be capable of giving.
And the patent mess, where the threat of suit is of more consequence than actually going to trial and getting a decision allows invalid and expired patents to be wielded with as much effect as valid, original, new patents also must be resolved.
Just as important, the existing databases have to be fixed. You can't attribute when you can't trace where your ideas came from.
You can't teach and you can't learn if every day becomes a trip through an IP minefield. This is no small part of the current cost of education.
Loans and their repayment are the tip of the iceberg here.
