Amerika

As we come out of the years when the solution to everything was more taxes, government, and bureaucracy, it makes sense to question some of our most cherished assumptions. For example, we should look at public schooling and assess whether it is actually a good thing.

When it was first introduced, public schooling seemed like a good idea because it used economies of scale in its favor. Instead of having a few people scrounge some money, hire a tutor, and rent a room to be a schoolhouse, government could go in and build facilities providing standardized education.

It worked adequately when education was new and therefore precious because the schools could turn away discipline problems or paddle them. This kept kids in line. Then the teachers’ unions and courts got involved, and made the schools defenseless.

By law, now, schools must take the retarded, criminal, and illegal aliens and attempt to “educate” them. In the name of educating everyone, we have dumbed the curriculum down to the point where intelligent kids are bored and only the cynical stick it out to succeed.

This has flooded our workforce with people who look good on paper but are functionally useless, causing employers to rely on college and then graduate degrees to separate the wolves from the sheep. Even this has failed since every level of education is prone to grade inflation in order to be inclusive.

Even more, we have created generations of people who are indoctrinated in the idea of obeying external authority, whether published sources or teachers, who cannot think beyond these confines. They believe that a scientific study is absolute proof if it supports what they have been taught is real. They seem to need someone to guide them all times, whether a voice on the television or a bureaucrat in charge. Bureaucratic education produces people who conform to bureaucracy.

Finally, education itself represents a blank cheque because to the voters, education is the key to letting people rise out of poverty. In reality, IQ is what mostly determines wealth, and all we are doing is devaluing education by incorporating people who cannot benefit from it. In the meantime, however, lots of people are getting wealthy in the educational establishment, whether Leftist professors, bureaucratic administrators, consultants, speech therapists, unions, or simply mediocre people who can now work as teachers preaching neurosis to clueless and impressionable youth.

Over the past century, education has expanded from modern schoolhouses teaching the basics of how to think and how we got here in history to a propaganda network that bleats Leftist ideology as fact. Consider who is drawn to education: people who desire power and believe they are unfairly deprived it. Such people want to weaponize youth and use them to overthrow those who are naturally talented so that those who think they should have power win the day.

We possess no method of making education good except to stop sponsoring it. When people hire teachers for their children, have to educate their kids in morality and sex education, and have to find some way to organize a family other than discovering ways to farm out their spouses and offspring to time-consuming activities that someone else manages like education, jobs, hobbies, and television, then people take responsibility for our future.

Naturally, not everyone will have good results. Natural selection always applies. Idiots will hire other idiots and their idiot children — intelligence is mostly genetic — will then be able to bleat idiocy but be useless and will be confined to low-skilled jobs. Intelligent people will hire the best and convey the most social capital to their children, with most in the middle. People deserve only the education that their intelligence merits.

As usual, under the guise of saving everyone from themselves, bureaucrats want to “educate” everyone and in doing so, adjust education downward so that all can participate. This savages our best while falsely promoting our worst, and explains why so much of everything in Clown World is incompetent and flashy on the surface but without substance.

Tags: academia, education, public education, public schooling