Education: Burn It Down

A friend sent me the link to the liberal academic chaps describing how they scammed the "grievance studies" journals by getting a bunch of fake grievance studies research published in the grievance studies academic journals.

There is, I admit, an element of Animal House in this effort: rowdy guys getting a little too rowdy for the Miss Prisms of the world.

But it inspires me to say that the time has come to burn down our entire government education system from stem to stern and start over.

First, the Bill of Indictment.

1. Government schools tend to be tools of the ruling class. In Germany, the government school system was created during the Wars of German Liberation from Napoleonic France. The idea was to build a Germany that was powerful enough and united enough to keep the French on their side of the Rhine. That's where the German Realschule and Gymnasium came from. The Germans invented the research university, again, as a way to make Germany strong enough to beat the French. In the US the "common school" system was developed by chaps like Horace Mann. For chaps like Mann the idea was to defeat the Puritans; for Protestants the idea was to cure the Irish of their Catholicism.
   
   Obviously, this is worked only too well in the US where universities are now secular seminaries that churn out good little boys and good little girls that have been educated to a fare-thee-well to spout the ruling class Narrative and to sneer at deplorables as subhumans.
2. Government schools are almost impossible to reform. The K-12 system was set up a century ago, the university system has operated almost unchanged since the building boom of the 1960s. But what should education be like in the 21st century? What should university education be like? Should we all go to university? Or some of us? Or almost none of us? None of these questions are likely to get a good answer because the government education system is a $1.1 trillion a year monster. You try reforming or updating or improving it. It is impossible to reform because 1) parents of school children are getting it for "free" and nobody ever gives up on free stuff, and 2) the current incumbents, teachers, administrators, unions, and suppliers, are damned if their are going to give up a dime in their benefits.
3. Government-sponsored "research" is welfare for the educated class, and just like welfare for the poor, welfare for the educated is morally and ethically demoralizing. People should have to beg borrow and steal to get a chance to do original research. They shouldn't be on a gray train. Here is my argument, stemming from my reductive Three Peoples theory. The top dogs in my Three Peoples are the People of the Creative Self, people for whom just being responsible citizens is not enough. They long to create, to imagine and construct something original and pathbreaking. Very well. But the would-be creative folks should not be coddled and primped with government dollars and given life-time sinecures. Many all called to a creative life, but few are chosen; for most of us our creative dreams end in failure, or an acceptance of our ordinariness. Thus real creative people will be living on the border between order and chaos: the sacrificial hero. Such a person cannot be an employee of a government university.

My point is that the government education system is incapable of reform.  Indeed, the whole point of a government program is to set up something for the ages.

The only solutions is burn it down. But what will replace it?

Let us begin with education for children. In my imagination it will consist of:

1. Tony private schools for the professional classes. We have this already, only attenuated because many professional people can bend the public school system to provide them with what they want for their children at government expense, e.g., the selective high schools in New York City that are presently under attack from the left.
2. Home-schooling for the middle class. The original idea for government schools was to make the poor literate and numerate. But most moms are already literate and numerate so their children will naturally become literate and numerate because that is what kids are programmed to do: grow up to become their parents. And there is a whole universe of materials and support out there to back up the home-schooling mom, not to mention the Internet. But I do not see home-schooling as being a private thing but a neighborhood thing, with all the neighborhood moms getting together to home-school each other's children and band together for specialty items and field trips.
3. KIPP academies for the poor. What the poor need above all is to learn the cadences of middle-class life, to be responsible cooperative city people, and to "get with the program, Jenkins." That is what highly structured program like KIPP academy do. So who will pay for this? Billionaires, that's who. And I demand that they get medals and awards for their public service.
4. A whole new world of apprenticeships and internships, starting in the early teens. Yes, I believe it is time to kill the evil child-labor laws. After all, right now children are forced to attend government schools and work all day and then go home and do homework, and for this they are paid:__ Nothing! Can you spell INJUSTICE? Look, most people should not go to university. Tertiary education is the biggest scam in world history. Good little girls go to college and major in sociology and English. And then go work for Starbucks as a barista. For that they need to get $50,000 and more in debt? No. I say get kids into the workforce early and let employers pay for specialized and technical education, especially for youngsters with promise. Let there be a ton of easily obtained credentials, like the current certifications and competencies available in the tech world.

Really, how hard can this be? Burn the whole education system down and let a hundred flowers bloom.

And everybody will live happily ever after.