The Problem With EducationRobert Lewis |
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"We don't need no education. "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then
He made school boards."
I've noticed a disturbing educational trend in the United States. Namely, that the trend is not to educate at all, but to indoctrinate. There are choices, of course. But the choices we have are mostly bad ones. It's a choice between different forms of indoctrination, and it isn't pretty. For this article, we'll take a brief stroll through the American educational system. We'll discuss public K-12 education, the colleges and universities, private schools, home schooling, and some other related topics as well. Why Education Matters Obviously, education in certain fields matters if you're going to seek a career in that field. If you want to be a doctor, you need to know certain things about medicine and anatomy that you otherwise would not need to know. This particular part of the education system is the one that works best. It has its own problems, but it requires the least work and will receive the least attention in this paper. There is something more important than learning facts. Rather than learning what to think, we should be focusing on leaning how to think. Yes, facts are important. Facts are very important, and we all need to learn them. But without that all important foundation of critical thinking, those facts mean nothing. To use science as just one example, we can see some serious problems. As just about every scientist in recent years has lamented, we have a situation in which our entire civilization is built upon science, yet almost no one understands even basic scientific fundamentals. But what's the point? Do I really expect everyone to understand all kinds of hard science? Of course not! I don't understand everything in science, myself (though I reckon I have a decent understanding of at least the basics). Of highest importance is an understanding of how science works. If you understand the scientific method, you're doing alright. Education is important not because it teaches you facts, but because it shapes the way you think about them. Case in point: bookstores are full of facts. They're a dime a dozen. It's impossible to walk into a bookstore and not see facts of some kind, and it's very difficult to spend any time in one and not learn anything if you really want to. Facts are easy. Yet every bookstore I've seen (specialty stores aside) has a very small science section and a very large metaphysics section. If facts were the issue, we wouldn't be seeing this phenomenon. But facts aren't the issue. It's how people organize and interpret those facts that causes problems. So essentially, education is important because it helps to shape the way you view the world and universe. It's failing because there's an overemphasis on facts (many of which are incorrect or outdated to begin with), and an under-emphasis on critical thinking. What's Wrong With Public Schools? As John Stossel pointed out in his 20/20 special, Stupid in America, and in his book, Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, the longer kids spend in American public schools, the worse they do on international tests. And don't try to say your child's school is any better. Odds are, it isn't. This isn't just a problem in the poor neighborhoods or big cities. Wealthy suburban schools are just as bad or worse. A big part of the problem is the way the schools' success is judged: standardized tests. These schools have no interest in educating children. Their only interest is in keeping the test scores just high enough to push the kids through and avoid public criticism. I've heard stories of teachers who, rather than actually teaching what they're suppose to, are teaching students how to cheat on tests, so their school will look better in comparison to other schools. By no means is this extreme example the norm, but why is it tolerated at all? That's the question of the day. Why is failure in the schools tolerated? The answer is as simple to state as it is difficult to fix: there's no competition. Public education in America is a government-run, union-dominated monopoly. How in hell could anyone expect such a nightmare to actually work for our children? I call it the three headed monster. Let's break it apart and see what we're dealing with. 1) Monopoly: Yes, it's true that there are some options available. There are private schools. Home schooling is an option for some. But the simple fact is that the public schools are, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly. Most people can't afford private schools. Many people can't afford to spend the time necessary for home schooling, particularly if both parents are working. Monopolies don't work for anyone except the monopoly. It's a matter of competition. If you have a monopoly, you have no reason to provide better services because no one else is ever going to take business away from you. You don't need to keep prices low because no one is out there to beat your prices no matter how high they are. If you run the monopoly, it's a great situation. You can slack off all you want and charge a small fortune. But if you're a customer, you're screwed. 2) Government: You're at my website, so you probably know my feelings about government (namely, the less of it, the better). But government itself isn't the issue here. It's the blending of government and monopoly. Why is that so dangerous? There are many reasons. One danger that really bothers me is that government is put in a place to dictate what our children learn. Quite frankly, I don't trust the government enough to want to give them that power. But there's another problem: taxation. Let's say you decide to pay the cost and send your child to a private school. Great. Unfortunately, the public schools still have their hand in your pocket. See, public schools aren't free. They're paid for out of property taxes which we're all forced to pay whether we use the schools or not. That means you're paying your share of those hundreds of thousands of dollars per student for the public schools, even if your own child is in private school. How is it possible to beat a monopoly that has that kind of power? We'll answer that in a minute. 3) Union-dominated: The unions I'm talking about are the powerful teachers unions. Let me make my position perfectly clear. The individual teachers in those unions may be great people. I count some of them as very good friends. But the unions themselves are evil incarnate. Here's what the teachers' unions do. They make it nearly impossible to fire incompetent teachers. That's what unions do best after all. In the interest of equalizing everyone and everything, they promote mediocrity--or worse. Some teachers' unions are so powerful, they've been able to keep school districts from firing teachers caught writing sexually explicit letters to their students! If that doesn't make you sick enough, remember item number two: we're all paying for it. John Stossel's 20/20 program mentioned a case just like the one I described above. Because of the teachers' union, the district couldn't fire the teacher, even after he admitted to having written the letters in question. What did they do? In the interest of protecting the kids, they put him in what they call a "rubber room" with the other incompetent teachers. They're away from the kids, thankfully, but they're getting hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars to sit around and do nothing, all because a union keeps the district from firing not only incompetent, but dangerous teachers. See why I call the public school system a three headed monster? And we haven't even begun to talk about the actual textbook content yet. Let's just say it ain't all it's cracked up to be. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conducted an evaluation of high school biology textbooks several years ago. None of the textbooks they examined were given high ratings. Though glaring factual errors weren't the most common problems, they found that the textbooks don't have high educational merit. Concepts are inadequately explained, presented in unnecessarily complicated terms, important concepts are ignored (replaced instead by technical jargon and trivial details), and students are given insufficient help in interpreting the results of activities and experiments in terms of the concepts they're supposed to be learning. This just supports my hypothesis that schools are teaching science facts, not science itself. And don't think I'm just putting undue emphasis on science. The way I see it, the scientific method, if learned properly, can only aid in other, "non-scientific" areas as well. The scientific method is a process based in skepticism and critical thinking. Who can possibly claim that this wouldn't help in all sorts of decisions in everyday life, or in, say, politics? What it comes down to is this: our children aren't learning. We have children graduating from high school barely able to read for god's sake! Don't try to tell me the public schools are fine, because they aren't. They're about as bad as they can be. What's Wrong With Private Schools? After reading that last section, you'll probably expect that I'm a major proponent of private education. Yes I am. But private schools are not without their own problems. On some of these issues, I must confess that my personal views are somewhat at odds with my political philosophy, so we're going to tread softly and have a look at some of the positive and negative points. First, the biggest positive point about private schools: they aren't public schools. All those problems we discussed about government-run, union-dominated monopolies go right out the window. Private schools are separated from the government (yay!), they're based on free-market competition rather than monopoly (double-yay!), and there are no teachers' unions (triple yay, yahoo, and hooray!). They're already looking pretty damned good, aren't they? Choice is another big plus. Yet here is where I must go slowly and make sure I explain myself clearly, because this is where my personal views and political philosophy begin to clash. One of the really good things about choice in private schools is that you don't need to worry about religious issues. The separation between church and state isn't an issue, because the schools are no longer state-sponsored entities. This is great, because you can choose to send your children to a Catholic or Christian school, a Muslim school, a Jewish school, a Hindu school, or a secular school (which would be similar to our current public schools as far as religious issues are concerned). If you don't like the values they're teaching, you can choose another school. It's a great idea, and I support it fully. The reason I must be careful here, is that my political philosophy is just as I've described above. Yet my personal feelings slip in from time to time and make me wonder. Creationism, for instance, is like a plague in this country. The last thing we need is more schools teaching that nonsense. That may be a serious problem with private education. However, I think I'm justified in saying that the potential negative effects of such problems will be far outweighed by the overall positive effects of private rather than public education. As an example, I might point to the secular private schools. They certainly won't be teaching creationism. Only the religious schools would do that. But one thing the secular schools would likely do far better at is teaching how to think critically. This would counter the negative effects of the creation mythology. Of course, I would never advocate forcing anyone to believe or not believe in anything. I would never advocate forcing any private school to teach or not teach what they want (public schools are different precisely because they are public). Nor do I want anyone to misunderstand what I'm saying. I don't bring up creationism as a defense of public education over private education. No, I bring it up in the interest of full disclosure. We need open discussion and debate about the positive and negative points of all these various education systems. One very excellent thing about private schools is that they are indeed more free to experiment. Public schools shun new methods. This is an understandable (possibly even justifiable) position. But it's also not the way to make progress. In the case of private schools, we see variety like no public school district could ever dream of. Many private schools (religious or secular) are structured in very much the same way that public schools are (except they actually teach something in the private ones). And then there are alternative methods, such as those employed at the so-called "Montessori schools." We don't have time to go into detail. I'll just say that the Montessori method has its merits and its downsides just as any other system does. My personal opinion is that it's very interesting and worth looking into, and there's some evidence that it seems to work fairly well. But until I've done more research into the matter, I'll maintain a healthy degree of skepticism. In any case, the biggest complaint I can level against private education is that it's an environment more conductive to religion and pseudoscience, because there are no Constitutional limitations on what they can or cannot teach. However, I still think private education is a valid--and better--alternative to public education, for many other reasons. Besides, public education doesn't seem to have stopped religion or pesudoscience, so what's the difference? What's Wrong With Home Schooling? After a few years in public school, I was home schooled myself (though not in the way most people are--but we'll come back to that). We'll just touch on the matter of home schooling briefly, because many of the positives and negatives are the same as those of private schools. I would say home schooling is a good choice for you if you meet a few conditions. 1) Your child is more of a solitary learner than a group learner. 2) You have the time to invest in the home schooling process (the actual amount of time required will vary from family to family). 3) You feel qualified to help your child through the classes. Let's discuss them each in turn, and then we'll discuss some other issues. First, it is important that your child should be a solitary learner if you want to home school. This doesn't mean a sacrifice of social interaction--after all, I was home schooled and got my social interaction elsewhere just fine--but it does mean that the actual learning process is more solitary. In the home, there is no classroom setting, so the learning process is different. Children learn in many different ways. Some learn best in groups or classrooms. There are benefits to this. They can play off each other's strengths and weaknesses to accelerate the learning process. On the other hand, if your child is more like me, that may not always be the best way to learn. I learned most everything I know on my own, by reading books and watching documentaries and listening to lectures. You need to figure out what's best for your child. Time is another important issue. Again, in my case, I learn a lot just by reading books. If your child is like me, you may not need to spend many hours every day teaching. Other children require more attention or observation. This is again a personal matter, and something you need to sort out for yourself. If both parents work full time, there's no reason that must necessarily keep you from home schooling, but it's a definite consideration. And then there's the matter of qualification. You don't need to know everything to teach your children. There are many books that can help you. Take biology for instance. You don't need to be a professor of biology to teach your child as long as you have some good books to help you along the way. But if you're a creationist, then you're fundamentally lacking in qualifications and expertise necessary for such education. These are all important considerations. One way of putting it is that you don't need to know the answer to every question, but you need to know how to find the answer to every question. So what are the downsides? I've already alluded to a couple of the major ones, which I'll tackle in greater detail now. Social interaction is important for everyone, but especially for children. Building social relationships during the developmental years is of critical importance. Many have used this as an argument against home schooling. I don't think that's valid, though there is a major concern here. First, the reason I don't think it's valid. Put bluntly, I'm not convinced that a classroom setting is the proper place to build social relationships in the first place. The only reason schools help facilitate this social interaction is because you've got a group of kids in the same place. Some of them will build friendships, others won't, just like real life. But the thing is, the classroom doesn't matter. The same effect could be achieved at a theatre group, a chess club, or a bowling league. There are many groups that provide social interaction for home schooling families. This is great, but it's also a double edged sword. See, about 75% of home schooling families in the United States are evangelical Christians. The fundamentalists, in other words, are home schooling (namely, because they don't like evolution being taught in the public schools). This might seem a social nightmare for any non-Christians (or even moderate Christians). It is a concern, but again, it's not the end of the world. There are other ways to get that social interaction. But this also brings us to our other point. A major downside of home schooling is one I alluded to when I discussed qualifications above. There are some home schooling parents who fundamentally lack an understanding of the topics they're supposed to explain. As I said above, you don't need to know the details, but you need to have some basic knowledge--or at least an openness to the facts you discover in the books you should be reading with your children. You're reading my website, so I can assume that if you're considering home schooling, this is an active concern in your mind. That simple fact alone goes a long way to suggesting to be that you'd do alright. But many people aren't like that. It goes right back to the creationists, who home school to get away from that nasty evolution. It makes me sick. But again, I recognize the importance of Liberty, so I won't try to force them to do anything else. All we can do is educate as many people as possible. What's Wrong With College? Christ, it could take me years to explain all that's wrong with college. In the interest of brevity, we'll just have a quick look at a few problems and then move on. Perhaps the biggest problem of them all is that people think you need college. Not so. I won't argue that it can't help anybody. But really, a college degree means nothing. It's a piece of paper, get over it. What it's supposed to mean is that you've put in some years of work to attain a higher degree of understanding in a particular subject. What it's come to mean is that you managed to survive the system for a number of years (and that doesn't even count the people who cheat). In fact, many people don't have a college degree (these are people who either never went to college or dropped out). They're called autodidacts. Maybe you've heard of a few of them from my very short and far from complete list: Woody Allen, Jane Austen, Dan Aykroyd, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Walt Disney, Michael Faraday, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Frost, Bill Gates, Richard Gere, Arlo Guthrie, Ernest Hemmingway, Jimi Hendrix, Patrick Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Jobs, Stanley Kubrick, Louis L'Amour, Abraham Lincoln, H. P. Lovecraft, Malcolm X, Florence Nightingale, Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller), Edgar Allan Poe, James "The Amazing" Randi, George Bernard Shaw, Quentin Tarantino, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Leonardo da Vinci, the Wachowski brothers, George Washington, Chuck Yeager, and many, many, many more (including fine folks like myself). College degree is necessary, my aching ass! It's only necessary for certain fields of study (such as medicine), in which there are actual legal requirements in place. The rest of the time, you can teach yourself just as well as a university can teach you--and all those people are proof. Aside from being unnecessary, I can think of other reasons college isn't all it's cracked up to be. For one thing, it doesn't work nearly as well as many people would have you believe. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy is a study of adult literacy rates in America. The results are organized by several different demographics. Let's have a look at college graduates, shall we? They should be the best of all, right? And indeed, college graduates do seem to do somewhat better than most other people, on average. But being the best of the worst isn't something to aspire to. The NAAL was most recently given in 2003. When it was last given in 1992, 40% of college graduates got a "proficient" score (there are different levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient--proficient means they are able to read and interpret at an advanced level, and make complicated inferences from the works). In 2003, that number dropped to 31%. These numbers disturb me deeply. I tend to hold the world to too high a standard sometimes, and I would like most everyone to score "proficient." However, shall we say that we would expect "intermediate" to be a reasonable place for the average? Then shouldn't college graduates, who've spent years and thousands of dollars for a higher education, be expected to score "proficient" somewhere closer to 100% of the time? I should think so. And at the very least, the numbers shouldn't keep getting worse. Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institution within the Department of Education that helped oversee the test, blamed television and internet. He said that as fewer people are reading for pleasure, literacy rates are bound to drop. I agree with Mr. Whitehurst wholeheartedly…except that going to college is supposed to offset that. If everyone were reading for pleasure and educating themselves, college wouldn't be necessary in the first place! So it becomes clear to me that, though media such as television need to take their share of the blame (see below), so do the colleges. But the really scary problem isn't an academic one. It's a problem of indoctrination. Many of our colleges have been essentially taken over by liberals. Now, I'm not going to get into a political debate about whether liberals are right or wrong (incidentally, they're right sometimes and wrong sometimes, but that's another debate). But what is disturbing is the "thought police" mentality that has come along with this infiltration. If you thought my talk of indoctrination was just hyperbole, you were mistaken. Dissenting thoughts, comments, actions, etc., are frowned upon on these campuses. Silly me, I thought college was supposed to be about exposing yourself to new ideas. How'd I get that one wrong? I simply don't have the time, though, to explain all the things that are wrong with college in this paper. If you want a decent introduction to the problem, I recommend you watch the Penn & Teller "Bullshit" episode on the subject. It's quite enlightening. And very, very scary. What's Wrong With the Media? We can talk about what's wrong with various systems of education until we're blue in the face. I've done it before, and I'll probably do it again. But the school system isn't the only culprit. The media needs to take its share of the blame. Literacy rates are in the shitter, as I mentioned in the section on college. I also mentioned that television took some of the blame. That's true. I didn't fully agree with the assessment that television was the primary cause of those particular numbers (though it's almost certainly a factor) because the college environment is supposed to offset that. One thing is for certain. If people would rather watch some stupid reality TV show that read a book, we're in trouble. I know that such people are out there. What I don't know is how many there are. I've spent the last several hours trying to find a study drawing correlations between television viewing and literacy rates, but came up blank. If you know of such a study, please let me know. Otherwise I'll have to do my own research, and if I have to talk to a bunch of people who know more about Paris Hilton than Charles Dickens, there's going to be hell to pay! Solutions So what's the answer to all these problems? Is there even a good solution? The answer is yes, but it won't be easy to make it work. First, throwing more funding at public schools is the widely known and most popular answer. It's the answer suggested by the school districts and the teachers' unions. It's also wrong. They have more money than they know what to do with, but they're spending it in all the wrong ways. Why would you listen to those people anyway? They have a vested interest in trying to get as much money out of you as they can get away with. And after all the other crap they've pulled over the years, their credibility is blown if you ask me. So what do we do? Well, the ultimate goal is the complete privatization of education, so there can be free-market competition and choice. Though this system would, particularly at the beginning, have many problems, I think several years of time would iron them out fairly well. I mentioned creationism earlier. But ten years of very strong education (unlike what's currently being provided) could certainly have an impact. Perhaps it could even push creationism to such a fringe that it's not even worthy of note. But the important point is that private education works much better than public. The trouble is actually making it work. Yanking out public education overnight would be disastrous. Gradualism is the order of the day. A good gradual method for doing such a thing would involve school vouchers. The public schools would stay in place, but the voucher system would tie the tax money to the students, rather than the schools, forcing the public schools to compete with each other and with private schools. I think we'd see an almost immediate improvement. I also think over the course of several years, we'll see that the private schools are better equipped to handle it, and more people will shift their business to that sector. What this means is a gradual shift from public to private. I don't even think incentives will be necessary. I think it will occur naturally, given a few years of time. One of the complaints I often hear about privatization of education is that many people can't afford private schools. Well, I have two answers to that. First, during the gradual shifting process with the voucher system, it's still going to be tax funded. It just reorganizes how the tax money is allocated, tying it to the students rather than the schools. Second, once total privatization has taken place, we'll see something interesting. Yes, you'll have to pay for your own child's education out of your pocket. But you'll soon realize that tuition doesn't cost as much as the taxes you were paying before. And for those who are extremely poor and can't afford education at all, I feel confident that Americans (among the most generous people in the world) would have some sort of a charity organization to handle that situation. Plus, private schools aren't the only answer. While all this is happening, we may also see increases in home education. I didn't need a public school or a private school. I taught myself everything I needed to know, with just a little help from friends and family. Don't forget the autodidacts! The media also needs to shape up, but there's only one way for that to happen. People need to stop paying attention to the bullshit. Watch the Discovery Channel or the History Channel rather than reality game shows or entertainment "news." There's nothing wrong with television, if it's providing something with real intellectual value, rather than vacuous fluff. And I'm not saying to eliminate all mindless media. Hell, I can even appreciate vacuous media in small portions. Just trim it back so it isn't polluting the minds of our entire country, okay? Finally, remember that knowing how to think is more important
than knowing what to think. Learn critical thinking and the scientific
method, and all else will follow in due course. |