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A big question about public school, or any schooling for that matter, is what should be accomplished?

We tend to know what we want students to learn, how to read and write, how to do math, some science and social studies.

I’m wondering if we know why, and if the “why” changed, would the “what” change also.

Let me see if I can be a little clearer…

John Taylor Gatto was an award winning educator with the New York City school system.

He taught for several years and then had an epiphany of sorts. You can read all about it on his website.

He wrote a few books about American education, which do not look on the system in a favorable light.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of the details, but I find a lot in common with his main message, which is public school crushes children.

Gatto claims that the American educational system was not designed with the best of motives.

One would assume that the proper goal of an educational system should be to create the best human being possible out of the student.

Now, I realize that there is a definition problem here. What constitutes “best human being”?

Setting that aside for the moment, Gatto claims that creating excellence in our children was never the aim of our educational system. Rather the goal was the complete opposite.

Gatto’s claim is that the American educational system was designed to dumb down students, and to make them more malleable.

You see, according to Gatto, the American school system was basically designed by the captains of late nineteenth century industry. What they wanted was not a free-thinking, independent populace, but a people who could do certain menial tasks well and, most importantly, follow direction.

Hence, the emphasis in school on getting places on time, doing the same thing at the same time every day. Basically, the American school system was based on a factory model, and its purpose was to instill values and skills necessary to factory life.

Furthermore, according to Gatto, the American school system was based on the Prussian school system. One of the stated objectives of the Prussian model was to replace the family with the state.

Now, I’m not one hundred percent in agreement with Gatto. In all fairness, I haven’t done the research he has. Working in the public school system for the past decade, I just don’t see it as that insidious–incompetent, maybe.

Gatto’s main points, however, do throw a lot of light on what’s wrong with American education. The main problems I see are substituting the school system for proper parenting and taking children out of a healthy mix of society and lumping them all together in grades. I mean, nothing good can happen when you put one hundred or so fifteen-year-olds together for most of the year, all taking their cues from each other, all thinking they have any idea how the world actually works, and especially in our world, all subject to tremendous peer pressure and marketing forces.

What’s to be done? Personally, I think the system is so broken you can’t fix it. The whole thing needs to be scraped. As a society, we need to return children to their parents. And what if they don’t have decent parents to return them to?

We have vast sections of our population who habitually have children out of wedlock. (Something like 70% for Blacks and even higher for Hispanics.) What should we do about that problem?

Well, if we’re going to have a strong democracy, we need strong families. If we’re going to have strong families, we need to let people live with the results of their decisions, both good and bad.

In other words, we need to let individuals solve their own problems.

There seem to be two opposing currents of thought on these issues in our country. One current tends toward making government more responsible for individuals’ lives, whereas the other current tends toward making government less responsible.

You might label the first “liberal”, and the second “conservative.”

I tend to believe government needs to only supply me with the basics–roads, defense, that sort of thing. The rest I’ll do for myself, thank you very much.

I believe this sort of thought is what builds strong individuals, who form strong families, who build strong communities, who forge a strong nation–which brings freedom, representative government, and most importantly capitalism to the rest of the world.

So, it should come as no surprise that I wonder why we don’t teach entrepreneurship (not only the skills, but the values) to our children.

We don’t need to prepare our children to work in factories. Heck, we don’t even need to prepare them to work for major corporations.

Factory labor is being farmed out to other less developed countries. Major corporations are not exactly a thing of the past, but that idea of solid corporate structure, championed by loyal forty year veterans certainly is a relic.

Today, tomorrow, is the time of the individual!

The internet, virtual businesses, the freelance nation, all of these trends point to the need to train our children in entrepreneurship.

Of course, I don’t believe our school systems are going to do this. Our school system can’t even teach 100% of our children what 2 x 3 is. (I’m not joking!)

And why should teaching the skills and values of entrepreneurship be the school systems’ job? These very skills and values fly in the face of collective organization, the type of organization that school represents.

No, it’s going to be up to you and me to teach our kids to be entrepreneurs. We’re going to have to teach our kids the science of getting rich. And, taking a cue from my last post, we’re going to have to start with re-tooling how our kids look at wealth and the wealthy.

Have a great weekend!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 8:38 am and is filed under education, Science Of Getting Rich. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.