As society continues its accelerating slide into the abyss, people are starting to realize that locking kids in state daycare prisons for eight hours a day doesn’t make them smarter.
Since I’m being contrarian on main, universal literacy and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I spent a decade being a teacher in public and private schools. For the vast majority of students there is a hard limit to their educability.
What we know about IQ backs up that assertion. Aside from a small role played by childhood nutrition, a person’s intellectual horsepower is set from birth.
People living in saner ages used to understand that some folks were predestined to be peasants, and society ran much smoother when it accommodated that fact.
(Yes, there’s a hard limit to *everyone’s* educability but for the vast number of students, what can be taught to them falls off way before senior year. The % who can’t be educated past 6th grade is near 50% in public schools I taught at and 0% in private schools I taught at.)
What we have now is a vast system of semi-structured daycare for 2 types of people: those who will never do anything economically useful in any conceivable world (%age of school varies by location) & those who could but are forced to do an additional 6-10 years of school first.
The above is only a controversial statement because people have been conditioned to think of letting state functionaries raise their kids is normal.
I think it’s true that Jeffersonian Universal Literacy is a Good ThingTM for a certain value of ‘good’, which is that 200 years ago whatever untapped potential resident in the population of the time (and for some time thereafter) could be found out and integrated.
What we should be for is not Universal Literacy but *Pareto Optimized Literacy*. Ideally there would be a mechanism in schooling to identify the endpoint of a child’s extractive potential from school and gracefully sweep them into the workforce thereafter.
Again, your first impulse may be to reject that position out of hand. But browse social media for five minutes, and you’ll soon see that the hard limit on most people’s literacy is real.
For myriad reasons, this can’t happen. But not least of which is that the very people who militate for universal schooling (teachers) would take a huge hit in job status. Public school teachers are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to GPA and GRE scores.
They aren’t very bright. (I can say this because I’m a school teacher with an MA in Ed., right?). Anyway, teachers will tell you formal education works. If it didn’t work, there’d be no need for teachers, right?
Another reason it won’t happen is because the state needs unrestricted access to your kids eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year for 16 years. It’s the most direct way to indoctrinate them into the Death Cult.
Study after study, as if I were the type to cite studies, bear out that students who are not formally schooled have absolutely no disadvantage in life outcomes vs. formally schooled peers. Feel free to check.
I did check. The image of home schooled kids as socially awkward losers is a zombie meme that hasn’t survived contact with reality – not now that we have plenty of data on the first generation of adults produced by the initial home schooling boom. The vast majority of reports show that home schooled kids not only do better in school, but in the real world.
Which is only surprising if you think it’s weird for kids to be raised by their own parents.
To be frank, people who still send their kids to public school after learning about this deserve to be in prison.
Raise your own kids.
Support creators who inform and entertain you, not cults that hate you.
My first reaction was one of horror, for the thought “but this means that some people are inferior and worthless, or that they are little better than beasts!” occurred to me automatically. Then I sat back for a second and realised that this isn’t so, and that my automatic reaction is just an example of how deeply our egalitarian culture has diffused into the air, to the point where even I would recoil with horror at the notion that at some point people simply can’t meaningfully be educated further. It doesn’t follow that this means you have become some kind of meat robot or brute beast unworthy of respect, but that’s what our culture taught me to think about situations like this.
Aquinas taught that creation is a hierarchy, and no place in it is left unfilled. Some people are created to dig ditches. A society that recoils from that observation has severe anthropological problems.
The conditioning runs deep.
Years back, one of the very first red pills that I swallowed, after the double curse of Public School InDoc and being raised by card-carrying Marxists, was while attempting to help a co-worker study for his ASVAB* test.
I was a landscape and mason foreman in the summers during college. I worked with an 18 year old guy who barely graduated from HS InDoc and had done so poorly on his ASVAB initially that his recruiter told him to go study some- the recruiter gave him a book for preparing- then come back.
I tried to help this guy, who by the way, was a phenomenal worker, study for the test. When I say phenomenal worker, he was a very conscientious guy. You could give him basic instructions, send him out on the road with some equipment, and he would work reliably with little to no supervision. He was a business owner’s dream. And a decent man to boot. I really liked him. Still do. We’ve kept in contact over the years.
But the point of this story, the red pill I swallowed, is no amount of studying and tutoring really changed him that much. Only enough to get a better score on the ASVAB. His math skill was as basic as your could get. Addition, subtraction, and multiplication only. Division was always a problem. Reading was hit or miss. He had a hard time with the newspaper, which is generally written for a 6th grade level, or at least it was.
He wasn’t stupid. Far from it. He had a good deal of common sense and, as I said, he could be trusted to do his work well and not screw around on the business owner’s time. But education past middle school was a waste of time and expenses for him. He knew it too, but stayed in school because “That was what you’re supposed to do.”
He did eventually enter the military successfully. He served in the US Army Infantry and was decorated for action (Silver Star) in Iraq, promoted to sergeant and left after 8 years.
*For the few who might not know, ASVAB is the Armed Services Educational Aptitude Battery.
Your anecdote sums up the problem with “Everyone should go to college” thinking. It’s analogous to saying that everyone in the military should be an officer.
Brian,
Your post is timely. Fr Z answered a question on this issue
https://wdtprs.com/2022/07/ask-father-it-is-mortal-sin-for-parents-to-send-their-children-to-public-schools/#respond
I’m a former substitute teacher and taught in French language high schools. Many really don’t want to there and would be better off in the trades. Of which there’s an alarming shortage.
A lot of disciplinary and attitudinal problems stem from being forced to stay in school longer than they should.
xavier
Most people are familiar with attempts to get women into careers that require high strength (such as the military or fire fighting) despite the physical differences between men and women. The story is always the same:
-At the start it’s claimed that women could pass the same standards if they were just given a chance.
-Very few if any women pass. They are given “soft” breaks on the requirements (ex. given more time, given time off to prepare, given unlimited retries) but this barely changes the situation.
-It is then claimed that some of the requirements are unnecessary and only there as an excuse to keep women out. The requirements are lowered (and usually women are given even more benefits.)
-The cycle repeats, lowering standards each time, until a sufficient number of women get through.
What most people aren’t familiar with is the fact that the same thing happens in universities. There are always attempts to recruit more students who clearly cannot handle higher academics, especially if they come from the right races or other backgrounds to secure grant money. It usually starts with them being given extra classes for preparation which do little if anything at all. Eventually prerequisite requirements are dropped, which just shifts the problem up to the next level of classes. While this is happening dozens or hundreds of the “non-traditional” students involved will wash out, after paying several semesters of very expensive tuition. But no one involved in the process is allowed to say “it would be better not only for the university, but especially for the students involved, if they just didn’t go to college.”
This also reminds me of the King of the Hill episode “Peggy Makes the Big Leagues.” Quick summary: Peggy becomes a long-term high school substitute teacher, but runs into problems from having a star football player in her class who does no work whatsoever, but whom she is expected to pass anyway so that he doesn’t get kicked out of the game on academic requirements. It turns out that the football player just doesn’t care, and only does anything at all by the end of the episode because he learned that people thought he was literally retarded and wanted to show he could learn a few things.
But the scene that best relates is one in the middle where the player’s mother tells Peggy that he tries to learn all day every day but just can’t make any progress, even with basic ideas like “what shape is a rectangle?” It turns out that this is a lie because even his mother wants to game the system to have him play, but the Hills believe it and are in particular taken in by the plea “if my son fails your class, then he’ll never make it to college, and his life will be ruined.” Notably she doesn’t lean on the football angle in this speech, i.e. it’s not “he needs to play college ball so he gets scouted for the pros.” The scene is shot in a way that makes it clear that they expect many viewers to be taken in by this speech as well.
So even in 2000 many people were willing to accept the idea that someone who couldn’t learn even at a grade school level still somehow would benefit from college.
The 1990s was big on “college will fix your life as long as you get in there” messaging. The most famous in my mind was Boy Meets World who treated Eric and Shawn getting into college as the most important thing in their lives.
Oddly enough, the sequel series, Girl Meets World shows how pointless college was for both of them. Eric basically lives as a mayor in an obscure nowhere town and is perfectly happy there and Shawn has a career as photographer. Neither of them needed to waste their time with college at all.
This idolization of the educational system as magic knowledge factories has always been bizarre, because they’re not. Most people in school either don’t succeed because it’s not for them or because they see need no need to bother. No one in charge cares, they’ll just stomp on all the flowers in the garden until they’re all the same height regardless, because proper gardening is too hard and well outside of their capabilities.
I went to college for software development, and while I was OK at it, I learned eventually that I simply didn’t have a passion for it. I could do really remarkable work if I was forced to, but I didn’t ENJOY it. Now I have a pretty well-paying job at a factory that makes medical devices, in my own hometown, and I’m perfectly content there. I could have skipped college and it likely wouldn’t have even mattered. The one blessing I have is that, since Ireland has a different payment system, neither I nor my parents had to pay an exorbitant tuition and so I didn’t end up saddled with any debt.
Couple thoughts:
1. Current schooling destroys the curiosity and will of many children. It is difficult to separate the limitations imposed by the schools from any limitations inherent in the kids themselves.
2. We fail before we begin if we allow that “education” system to define what successful learning is. Our educator class will always define success as compliance with and regurgitation of whatever the schools want their victims to do and say.
3. Testing, insofar as it pretends to identify educational success, claims to do something impossible: quantify the qualitative. An educated person must have wisdom, curiosity, gumption – these are qualities, and it’s mindless to imagine an educated person can get by without them. We end up with “front row kids” who pass all the tests and yet are profoundly damaged and delusional. But they do what they’re told: “follow the science” and bow to claims of expertise. By the systems standards, they are successes.
4. I don’t dispute what people are here saying, but rather the context within which it is being said. Saying some kids get nothing out of schooling past 6th grade is indisputable; the real question is whether they get anything positive out of school at any grade at all. As you may recall, my wife and I, reckless hippies that we are, provided no classes whatsoever for our kids prior to college level work: they took no classes, did no homework, endured no formal education at all until they started taking classes at the local community college around the age of 14. No reading instruction, no math, no history, no science, nothing at all. I did the research – there is no, as in NO, evidence standard modern schooling contributes anything positive to a person’s education. So my kids didn’t do it.
I’m not saying this to brag, but only because our kids are my data points. The four that are of an age to have gone to college attended Thomas Aquinas College (2), Benedictine, and Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. Of the 3 that lived to graduate, all earned honors. The final (much younger) son hopes to attend Wyoming Catholic in 2023. Classics degrees earned by, for example, a kid who didn’t learn to read until he was 14 – and by a kid who learned to read before he was 4. The lack of formal k-12 education mattered NOT AT ALL.
But no one will believe this. As John Taylor Gatto said: the greatest success of modern schooling is that no one can imagine doing it any other way.
What’s encouraging is that people are finally imagining another way, and doing it. In droves.
Going up to eighth grade with a special egghead option for High School with a Capital H seems to have been a very good model. Back when schools were rigorous and sane, that is.
But homeschooling for as many as possible is not in similar danger of going institutionally sour, given that it’s not an institution – not the kind that would drift toward prioritizing its own career status over the well-being of its clients.
Neglected the point I had set out to express, re: “tracking”: parents are to be trusted with knowing their children’s strengths and failings. School administrative boards with six-trait algorithms, not so much.
It also infamously destroys gifted students, as they are prevented from even attempting to find their limits so the kids who shouldn’t be there aren’t faced with the harsh reality that some people are smarter than them.
This prospect is also horrifying only if you take the contrabiblical view that there can exist work which is a) useful, b) licit, and c) degrading. Some jobs pay more, but all jobs done for the glory of God will be rewarded in His kingdom.