Edutheria

What is the point of all this formal learning we expect schoolchildren to do: the endless assignments and tests?

One stock answer to this question is that it teaches them how to get things done. That would obviously be learned better in the real world than in school.

The somewhat more plausible answer generally given is that schools are “teaching students how to learn and how to think.” Those skills are also better learned in the real world.

The only thing that formal schooling is good for is learning an academic topic itself. But why must every student learn Algebra through Calculus? Why must every student learn how to deconstruct Catcher in the Rye? If a student finds in learning basic math that he would be interested in pursuing it further, then it would make sense for that student to learn higher math in order to possibly use it in his career. The same goes for literary studies. But this would not be the case for everybody.

Intellectuals who consider educational goals are too enamored with their own interests. And those interests generally do not include producing something the market, when left to itself, highly values. (That’s why they’re always lobbying for policies which create artificial markets for their services.) So educationalists are none too interested in business savvy. But business skill and knowledge are the most productive sets of skills and knowledge in the world. The most important information are (as Friedrich Hayek showed) profit-loss facts on the ground that inform the billions of price decisions that make an economy maximally prosperous. So real-world outside-of-school education is not only much better for a young person’s character; it makes the young person smarter in ways that are actually beneficial to the student (and to others in society).

Rich, rewarding, prosperous lives need not (and should not) start in one’s mid-20s. Education and productivity should be intertwined and mutually reinforcing strands that run throughout a person’s entire life. They should not be compartmentalized the way they are now.

We as a society have abdicated parenthood. We have handed parenthood over to the state. The prime responsibility of raising children to become decent, humane, and successful adults has been given over to state schools.

Kids’ lives are dominated by school. They spend about 6 hours a day at school, and then about 1 hour on homework. The parent’s daily role has been relegated to hectoring their child into meeting the demands of the school: to “wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, and brush your teeth so you can get to school on time“; and to “get all your homework done, and study for that test, so you can get good grades at school.” The only daily meaningful interaction between parent and child is relegated to dinner: a tiny sliver of time in the day in which parents are enjoined to ask their kids, “How was your day at school.”

This grip that the state has over the lives of kids not only strangles the parent-child relationship, it heavily proscribes nearly any other non-school-related fruitful relationship the child can have. The state, through laws and the overwhelming demands of the school, does not allow the child to work or to freely pursue extra-curricular passions.

And what is the effect on our children of the state’s utter domination over their lives? In short, in makes our children improvident, shallow, incurious, and often immoral.

And it’s no wonder. Instead of the vibrant, multi-layered, rich and loving relationships that a child would have if he were enmeshed in the world of his parents, relatives, friends-of-family, and business-parters-of-family, the child is stuck in the pernicious modern-day relationship of schoolteacher-and-student. This relationship is characterized by indolence, apathy, and impotence. The indolence and apathy comes from the fact that teachers tend to have the mentality of the bureaucratic sinecure-holder. They don’t have the overwhelming Darwinian drive to improve the lot of their students that family members naturally have. And, in their padded and privileged role, neither do they have any entrepreneurial or competitive drive to maximally satisfy their customers. The impotence comes from the very format of the formal school. For the bulk of every day, each child gets 1/20th - 1/30th of the attention of one adult. No matter how “innovatively” you reform it, such a format is pure pedagogical poverty. And the rest of the day (recess, after-school hanging out, etc) is a “Lord of the Flies”-type scene of unguided, poorly-raised children reinforcing the worst aspects of each other’s character.

Life in such a dysfunctional camp is an unnatural life of no meaningful consequences. The real-world realm of helping out parents, friends of parents, and other employers with work and home affairs gives a child a true sense of accomplishment (”look at how awesome this room looks now”; “alright, son, business is booming!”) and a true sense of consequences (”Sorry, kid, if you don’t do the work, I can’t keep you on”). The artificial, unnatural realm of the school only has faux-accomplishments and faux-consequences. And kids (especially as they get older) see right through them. That is why they become apathetic about accomplishment and responsibilities, and completely shallow regarding the real world, caring only for friends and play.

In his highly important monograph Education: Free and Compulsory, Murray Rothbard tells the history of how (and why) the state progressively weaned us off parenthood: through compulsory schooling laws and an intra-school movement toward “educating the whole child”. As should be entirely manifest to anyone with a shred of skepticism regarding pro-state-schooling propaganda and an open eye to local and world news, the state has made for a wretched parent. It is time we take our children back.

Formal schooling, especially as dominated by the state, has served to cripple the intellectual lives of every generation since its inception.

In schools, children are herded and harrangued into completing academic chores.  These chores are usually utterly mindless, pointless, forgettable, boring, harrowing, or some combination of the above.  Some students never get the hang of it.  Some put their heads down and plow through it, because they know how important it is to their future.  Some have been conditioned so well by their Pavlov-like teachers that they come to enjoy the work for the sake of the expected reward.  And a few of them manage to find interest in the world of thoughtfulness despite all the schools do.  The kids in the last group (and a few in the second-to-last) end up as thoughtful adults.  A smaller subset of them become true philosophers, in the broadest sense of the term, with an insatiable curiosity and a lust for the truth.  But the majority of people end up as one in the burgeoning mass of the shallow and the frivolous.  Even those who manage to succeed in school, college, and even graduate school generally end up never reading a book from cover-to-cover again: let alone explore a school of thought, question long-held beliefes, or debate another person intelligently about politics, religion, or ethics.

That is why on the television show “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?”, the answer to the show’s fundamental, eponymous question is so often, “No.”  Many people peak intellectually in the fifth grade, or soon thereafter.  They cram their brain with as many facts and algorithms as they need to in order to succeed while in school, but then intellectually check out for the rest of their lives.