Polemicist Kurt Schlichter does a grand job today reaming out our government and elite education system. Says he: "The Admissions Scam is Another Reason to Destroy Academia as We Know It."
Well, yes, Kurt. But what do we do about it? You can't beat something with nothing, old chap.
Fortunately I have been thinking about this in my usual destructive free-spirit style. Because I certainly agree with Kurt that we should burn the whole thing down.
Now I think that the answer for K-12 is pretty simple. First, the little kiddies should all go to home school, run by the neighborhood mothers, and any neighborhood woman that doesn't kick in would be named and shamed in the usual way of the community of women down the ages, featuring the eternal complaint: "I can't believe she is so stuck up that she won't help out." We could have a government program -- or better a billionaire funded program -- to school the children of pre-literate parents. But every other mother should get with the program of educating their own kids, and get the hell out of their job in corporate HR.
Then, I think that we should re-introduce child labor. Really, what is worse: having a kid help around a business or sit still drugged to the nines, because ADHD, in a government child-custodial facility?
Oh and forget the minimum wage, which is Baldrick's cunning plan to make young people unemployable.
Anyway, after age 12, kids should be allowed to work full time. Period. Maybe they start with unpaid internships. But hey, if a kid doesn't have the sense to learn to be useful and to get paid for his labor after a few months, well...
Now, in my view, schooling for a lot of teenagers is a waste of time. For them we should have a comprehensive and mandatory apprenticeship scheme. Call it Apprenticeships For All. This should appeal to our liberal friends because it would be a way to force employers to provide free services to their employees, and it could be a wonderful source of investigative reporting on employers that scam their young employees by short-changing their education obligations.
For, back in the day, the indentures for an apprenticeship usually included an obligation for the employer to pay for education for the young apprentice. I dare say that this could be done by outsourcing to community colleges or even private apprenticeship schools -- modern day mechanics institutes -- or it could be just a computer in the back room at which a kid could take on-line courses, the way they do it at Wal-mart.
Personally, I think that the government should be forbidden to run schools, except for the armed services, because no government that I know of refuses the temptation of teaching the little kiddies ruling-class ideology.
But what about universities? Really, the technical subjects: science, engineering, medicine, law, ought to be free of the university system. Abraham Lincoln learned his law by clerking in a law office. And many employers seem to be eager to help their employees increase their knowledge and skills.
But, down the ages, the university has been a device for ruling classes to teach ruling-class ideology. and to teach the scions of the ruling class how to run the government and continue the blessed rule of the enlightened and the better sort. I think this is a bad idea in the long term because it creates a deep state that knows nothing except ruling-class ideology and so sets itself up for rebellion by the disaffected plebs. When you get rulers that have half a brain -- chaps like the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, Bismark, Lincoln, Thatcher, Reagan -- they rose to greatness by rising above the mundane and the ordinary ruling-class ideology.
So I would argue that no university should be allowed to teach ruling-class ideology, on pain of admitting 20,000 deplorables a year and paying them to attend. The only politics and philosophy that a university should be allowed to teach should be critiques of the current system.
This means, dear liberals, that no university should be allowed to teach "activism." Activism, we know, is a conceit that the obedient scions of the ruling class are in fact root-em toot-em revolutionaries. No, chum, they ain't. Just about every activist marchin' and protestin' today is a good little boy or good little girl doing exactly what they have been carefully taught by government-paid teachers in school. Real activists get put in jail for disturbing the peace, and when did you last see that happen to a lefty protester?
Can we do without schools? I don't know.
Reading C.R. Hallpike, I realize that literate human society needs a different way of raising children from the old days of pre-literate society. Says he:
There is an interesting consideration here. On the one hand it is clear that modern raising of the young requires getting them out of the house so they can transcend the limitations of their parents. But on the other hand children away from their parents are vulnerable to the power agenda of teachers that may have nothing to do with the welfare and the interests of the child.
So how much of a child's education should be supervised by family and neighborhood, and how much by "a separate world" of e.g. teachers and classrooms?
I don't know, but I think we need to find out.
Well, yes, Kurt. But what do we do about it? You can't beat something with nothing, old chap.
Fortunately I have been thinking about this in my usual destructive free-spirit style. Because I certainly agree with Kurt that we should burn the whole thing down.
Now I think that the answer for K-12 is pretty simple. First, the little kiddies should all go to home school, run by the neighborhood mothers, and any neighborhood woman that doesn't kick in would be named and shamed in the usual way of the community of women down the ages, featuring the eternal complaint: "I can't believe she is so stuck up that she won't help out." We could have a government program -- or better a billionaire funded program -- to school the children of pre-literate parents. But every other mother should get with the program of educating their own kids, and get the hell out of their job in corporate HR.
Then, I think that we should re-introduce child labor. Really, what is worse: having a kid help around a business or sit still drugged to the nines, because ADHD, in a government child-custodial facility?
Oh and forget the minimum wage, which is Baldrick's cunning plan to make young people unemployable.
Anyway, after age 12, kids should be allowed to work full time. Period. Maybe they start with unpaid internships. But hey, if a kid doesn't have the sense to learn to be useful and to get paid for his labor after a few months, well...
Now, in my view, schooling for a lot of teenagers is a waste of time. For them we should have a comprehensive and mandatory apprenticeship scheme. Call it Apprenticeships For All. This should appeal to our liberal friends because it would be a way to force employers to provide free services to their employees, and it could be a wonderful source of investigative reporting on employers that scam their young employees by short-changing their education obligations.
For, back in the day, the indentures for an apprenticeship usually included an obligation for the employer to pay for education for the young apprentice. I dare say that this could be done by outsourcing to community colleges or even private apprenticeship schools -- modern day mechanics institutes -- or it could be just a computer in the back room at which a kid could take on-line courses, the way they do it at Wal-mart.
Personally, I think that the government should be forbidden to run schools, except for the armed services, because no government that I know of refuses the temptation of teaching the little kiddies ruling-class ideology.
But what about universities? Really, the technical subjects: science, engineering, medicine, law, ought to be free of the university system. Abraham Lincoln learned his law by clerking in a law office. And many employers seem to be eager to help their employees increase their knowledge and skills.
But, down the ages, the university has been a device for ruling classes to teach ruling-class ideology. and to teach the scions of the ruling class how to run the government and continue the blessed rule of the enlightened and the better sort. I think this is a bad idea in the long term because it creates a deep state that knows nothing except ruling-class ideology and so sets itself up for rebellion by the disaffected plebs. When you get rulers that have half a brain -- chaps like the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, Bismark, Lincoln, Thatcher, Reagan -- they rose to greatness by rising above the mundane and the ordinary ruling-class ideology.
So I would argue that no university should be allowed to teach ruling-class ideology, on pain of admitting 20,000 deplorables a year and paying them to attend. The only politics and philosophy that a university should be allowed to teach should be critiques of the current system.
This means, dear liberals, that no university should be allowed to teach "activism." Activism, we know, is a conceit that the obedient scions of the ruling class are in fact root-em toot-em revolutionaries. No, chum, they ain't. Just about every activist marchin' and protestin' today is a good little boy or good little girl doing exactly what they have been carefully taught by government-paid teachers in school. Real activists get put in jail for disturbing the peace, and when did you last see that happen to a lefty protester?
Can we do without schools? I don't know.
Reading C.R. Hallpike, I realize that literate human society needs a different way of raising children from the old days of pre-literate society. Says he:
Bruning suggests that the factors in childhood experience making for difference in cognitive development are, apart form literacy itself, the extent to which children are surrounded, as in a modern urban environment, by the works of man; the degree to which they are reared apart from the rest of the community and from which their schooling is in subject matter a separate world; the degree to which children have imparted to them the rules of their society verbally and explicitly by their parents instead of learning them by participating in social life[.]He reports that young children in primitive society rarely ask "why" of their parents. That is because "much of their learning occurs in real situations" in a "normal environment" whereas our way of "instructing the young [is] based heavily on telling out of context rather than showing in context."
There is an interesting consideration here. On the one hand it is clear that modern raising of the young requires getting them out of the house so they can transcend the limitations of their parents. But on the other hand children away from their parents are vulnerable to the power agenda of teachers that may have nothing to do with the welfare and the interests of the child.
So how much of a child's education should be supervised by family and neighborhood, and how much by "a separate world" of e.g. teachers and classrooms?
I don't know, but I think we need to find out.
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