Yes, What Should We Do About Public Education?

The problem with government, all government, is that it comes down to loot and plunder. What supporters of government want is free stuff, whether they are Viking raiders or today's "oppressed peoples and allies." The oppressed peoples just want handouts, the allies want government grants to support their activism -- to help the oppressed peoples, dontcha know.

And the same goes for public education. What may have seemed like a good idea 150 years ago, Horace Mann, is now just another special interest group. And since gubmint employees are allowed to form labor unions, politicians are scared stiff of the women teachers.

Notice, that when Florida Gov. DeSantis called for schools to reopen he didn't criticize "teachers" or "teachers unions," but "education unions and special interests." I wonder what he meant by that?

But the question is: do we need gubmint schools at all? Read this, from the MIT Technology Review by Nicholos Negroponte about an experiment in Ethiopia with computer tablets in villages where the children "had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them[.]"

OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Do you see the point here? If you can hack Android to re-enable the camera, you are literate. And you did it, all on your own, with the other kids in the village.

Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

Remember, these are kids that were completely illiterate. Although, I suppose, if they opened the boxes, powered up the tablets, they musta heard some weird rumors about tablets and computers and stuff.

So, just what exactly is it that "our teachers" are doing for us these days?

Now I'll bet that there are some drawbacks to the tablet thingy. I'll bet that the village bullies and the kids of the village Big Man get first dibs at the tablets, and the poor kids in the village get to suck. Oh yeah. All kinds of possibilities. But the point is that it didn't take teachers, didn't take gubmint, didn't take experts. The kids took those tablets and made themselves literate.

So what do we do about education?

First of all three doses of reality:

1. All kids want to do social media, texting. You need basic literacy for that, even if you are a gangbanger. So every kid is going to get literate enough for that.
2. Most kids learn by doing.
3. Most kids want to get out in the world.

But the education system is designed by the educated Gentry for the kind of education that the educated Gentry wants for itself. And that is directed towards the credentialed, literate, top-down world that the educated Gentry lives.

Most people learn by doing. They get a job and figure: hey, if I learned this skill I could get a better job. Do they really benefit from an academic education? Remember colleges were originally designed to train state-church priests and future rulers. Today they have been adapted to train deep-state functionaries and ruling-class activists.

Certainly, gubmint schools permit parents to drop kids off at school while they do other stuff during the day. But, for that we spend a trillion dollars a year in the US?

I gotta say, I really don't know what happens next in education. I just know that the current system is rotten to the core.