The Sins of Public Education

I was reading Why Geography Matters by de Blij, and in the first chapter (page 15) he says

But, as so often happens when social engineers get hold of a system that’s working well, the wheels came off. Professional educators thought they had a better idea about how to teach geography: rather than educating students in disciplines such as history, government, and geography, they would teach these subjects in combination. That combination was called social studies. The grand design envisioned a mixture that would give students a well-rounded schooling, a kind of civics for the masses, which implied that school teachers would no longer be educated in the disciplines either. They, too, would study social studies.
…
But when the social studies agenda took effect, the student teachers stopped coming. They now had other requirements that precluded their registration in geography.
We geographers knew what this would mean and what it would eventually cost the country. The use of, and knowledge of maps would dwindle. Environmental awareness would decline. Our international outlook would erode. Our businesspeople, politicians, and others would find themselves at a disadvantage in a rapidly shrinking, ever more interconnected — and competitive — world.

This reminds me of what John Taylor Gatto observed in the governmental hijacking of education. Before the Prussian mentality of schooling, many rural educational facilities wouldn’t even accept a student that didn’t already know basics, like addition and the alphabet. By monopolizing the education system the government has ensured that all people get the same small amount of knowledge, that which the social engineers deem appropriate. This stunts the growth, not only of individual minds, but of the whole country, as the system feeds back on itself.

I remember a distinctive distaste for social studies as I was growing up. In fact, I hated it. I really much more enjoyed the ‘harder’ subjects like math and science. Social studies was simply too flaccid to warrant any attention. Now, I think that might have been a subjective rejection of a ‘study’ which had been rendered impotent by social engineering.

(I do tend to repress memories of unappealing subjects, so I have gaping holes in this analysis.) I remember that we studied some details of various things; but those details were isolated, and non-contextual. We studied wars without motivation, events without causality, and cultures without context/connection. Never once did I get the impression that more work needed to be done in these fields, (I mean history, it already happened, so what’s the argument?) nor was I enlightened to the fact that each had a process of hypothesis, analyzing data, and forming new hypotheses. Separating History, Geography, and Anthropology into their respective fields would have at least given me individual context and appreciation of what each field was striving to accomplish. But social studies had no direction at all.

Now, to get back to government involvement in public education. It shouldn’t be. Some of the industrial giants that Gatto mentioned in his Underground History of American Education had the brilliant idea that they could engineer a school that would train people like mindless robots to properly fill their roles within the industrial complex, specifically that business of which they happen to own. Opening a school is most definitely a good recruiting/training tactic. It might have a very high upfront cost, but overall you get specifically trained personnel, giving you a leg up on the competition.

I fully support this idea, with some caveats.
1. It is all well and good to train your personnel, but you must be careful about premature specialization, and narrow focus. Best practice would have your business school its students on full scholarship, with high barriers to entry. But we’d also like to train as early as possible (starting at 4 or 5 yrs old), in which case, any test is most certainly misleading (perhaps you can screen the parents.)
2. A business sponsored school has a tendency to have an overly business-centric curriculum. Knowing how to make a PowerWaste presentation is not a full semester course. Typing Skills is not a course. Those have no ideas behind them. This is to be an Educational Institute, not a lifetime Training Session. It needs to remain focused on ideas. I have, as yet, no system in mind that might enforce this, other than higher good educators and trust their judgment.

The benefits of business sponsored educational institutions are wide-reaching. If a company can succeed in sponsoring a school, and then derive the benefit of better educated employees, it will outstrip its competitors. Upon seeing this success competitors will try to copy the program, with varying success (some might improve on the first). This will lead to an educational market with increased competition, creating a more effective means of distributing the value rankings of different subject areas. No longer will a single entity decide what all must learn, so the sins perpetrated by social engineers will be marginalized. Education, as a market, will work much better than education as an engineered social structure. If parents don’t like what their children are taught, they are free to place the child in a different school, with a different curricular emphasis. More and varied schools will coexist, competitively.

Without a monopoly control over a single educational system, each business is more dependent of the abilities of HR to make decent hiring decisions, and each parent has a heightened responsibility for the welfare of their offspring. This really works to the benefit of all.