Edutheria

From Psychology Today (emphases mine):

In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring “children” well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isnt an adult until age 26. The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways. Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives. The factory system doesnt work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.

From News from the Front:

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? Were talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record thats largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

This is only the most extreme kind of example of the pernicious effects of indoctrination in education:

SAIMA KHAN wants to die a martyr. Life is transient, she told her father in a telephone call last week, and the real glory is to sacrifice it for Allah. Her statement would be alarming at any age, but Saima is only 10.

Schools these days are designed to make obedient, task-oriented company men who do what they’re supposed to. The quick-changing economy demands entrepreneurs: people who follow their dreams and start new things. More along these lines from Gary North:

Higher education serves the business world as a screening system. They can hire people knowing that these people have displayed these valuable traits: (1) an unwillingness to assess the long-term alternative economic returns from their use of time; (2) their psychological ability to spend many hours a week listening to economically useless lectures; (3) their willingness to leap through a series of bureaucratic hoops that have no justification other than maintaining the existing bureaucracy’s authority. These are the traits desired by businesses in a world where the government regulates the marketplace. They are the traits of bureaucrats. This is the world aimed at by government regulators. It is a world remade in their image.

Wacked Econ asks the intriguing question:

Given most families cannot afford to send their children first to a $30,000 a year high school and then to a $30,000 a year college… which one should they choose?

Most people lucky enough to have the choice choose the latter. But when even public schools in posh areas underperform so egregiously, might it not be better to make a scholar of your son or daughter at an early age with prep school? Such students, it would seem, would be more likely to qualify for scholarships. More importantly, they would have a lifelong love of learning which provides innumerable internal benefits to the soul of a person.

More evidence that state schooling and official national standards eventually lead to lower standards: A physics teacher begs for his subject back.

The effects of too-easy curriculum on bright kids, from Scientific Americans:

The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.