DECENTRALIZATION OF EDUCATION FOR THE COMING GENERATIONS
There is a debate raging on in my community about building a new school for middle and high school students. The cost of this project is between 80 and 200 million dollars [no one ever budgets correctly, every school building I have ever seen erected goes over budget, etc.] There is no need to argue around the point of NEEDING a new school based on the current fact the old school is in a state of disrepair; because I am stating NO SCHOOL is needed to educate children in relatively rural communities.
Buildings no matter how new DO NOT make children smart; nor does it make them learn (doesn’t facilitate learning) ONLY good teachers (WITH willing students) do that. I attended a school that got many new updates around the time I was there and none of the new areas helped me learn a thing. In fact, as far as I am concerned my childhood was stolen from me and my education only tilted me toward useful idiocy (that’s elementary — high school and college). I was the first college graduate in my family [both sides], I was told under no circumstance would I be forgoing the “opportunity” to get a “higher” education. Very little of the education I received at the hands of state sponsored institutions was worth a god-damned thing; AND I was an objectively GOOD student (top 20% of my class without giving an iota of effort). I had to un-learn and re-learn almost everything in my 20s and early 30s.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
I was a business major in college (communications minor) I held down jobs through-out high-school and college (where I bought [with a friend] and rented out my first house to students); I currently own and run my own business on my own terms.
Facilities must facilitate actions that aid in practice of skills (like trade schools). We don’t need additional lecture halls or traditional classrooms ANY LONGER. Book learning can be done at home and lecturing can be had from Youtube (the very best and brightest minds FOR FREE!). Sedentary factory learning situations are cruel for children (especially boys).
We haven’t been educating students for about 75 years. We’ve been indoctrinating and sorting them by IQ and agreeableness [this is the reason girls now out compete boys in school and college despite IQs for males and females being the same]. We want head down workers we can extract from and exploit; this isn’t Orwell’s 1984, people, it’s real life!
Our rural areas need to decentralize education; it’s safer (no collection of children to shoot up), it’s cheaper (no millions and millions on new buildings), it’s more environmentally friendly; the children can WALK or RIDE BIKES to locations around these rural towns and learn whatever it is they need to during the day from teachers acting inside of an environment. Children NEED MORE FREE TIME AWAY FROM ADULTS!
(Environmental classes can be had outside on trails; history can be done at fields and around monuments, local businesses can train students for actual jobs [we have an incredible farming community] students can be involved in the community during the day actually learning the skills needed to operate in the world, etc. and so on.)[No need to travel to school on inclement weather days; the kids can help neighbors shovel; children aren’t useful idiots; they are straight-up useful if given the proper opportunities]
Watch John Taylor Gatto [https://www.youtube.com/user/johntaylorgatto/videos] (NY city and STATE teacher of the year a few years running and one of the foremost experts on public schooling) he states under no circumstance should you send your children to public school. They are dangerous indoctrination camps that purport a state ideology and they are emotionally charged hormone cesspools of decay (embellished paraphrasing).
Outcomes in the world is all that matters; at the point of high school (age) all children ought to be “practicing adults” ready to contribute to the best of their limited ability with minimal (or NO) supervision from adults.
We don’t need the buses or bus routes, we don’t need the inflated administrations, we don’t need the huge buildings, we don’t need any of it. Not the jobs, not the teachers, not the committees. We don’t need the headaches and permission slips, the overseeing bodies or the federal government up in our business. These are our towns; they are our children AND we force them (against their physical and mental well-being) to sit and regurgitate state sanctioned facts like zombies. All of which is a sin and shame!
We have all we need already; all we need to do is create a great curriculum and find out where our decentralized “classrooms” will be located. The beauty of this is children will be able to learn from those in about a dozen different towns and pursue something that is temperamentally fitting and challenging instead of being put into cookie-cutter education scenarios where NO child develops mastery in ANYTHING AT ALL.
Mastery is the way to add value. Core curriculum don’t facilitate mastery; they actively stifle it for mediocrity; “a jack of all useless abstract trades and a master of nothing useful at all!” < That’s a shitty model for schooling, if I do say so myself.
We must cease treating children as creatures to shelter from the world and start treating them as our future neighbors and citizenry. I don’t want a bunch of “pee-ons” asking state permission for everything, afraid to move a finger or think for themselves for fear of being punished. We don’t want whipped dogs; we want fully developed humans with maximal agency.
What about college!?!?! What about it? Most colleges are over-inflated indentured servant creators. Check out the most recent student loan numbers (It’s up over 1.2 TRILLION). Taking out a loan to learn things you can find in a library OR worse to study something like “yoga with goats,” is asinine. Student loans are essentially small business loans where the small business is an 18 year old “know nothing” child and the bank ropes them into a financial obligation they can NEVER be free of (no bankruptcy for student loans).
We pay trillions of dollars for an education better not taught at all; you want your kids to learn economics? Then don’t have them learn in an economically draining fashion and call it progress. What kind of ideas are you attempting to pass along? [Check out how much state sanctioned tests like the MCAS cost our schools]
I don’t want to hear about the towns real-estate valuations going up in value because of a new school. If you read what comes before this sentence than you know (cause I and the education world knows) that SCHOOLS DON’T CREATE VALUE FOR CHILDREN, so the increase in your home value is AT THE EXPENSE OF FUTURE GENERATIONS OF CHILDREN! Our public schooling model is draconian at best and pushing us back into the draconian ages at worst. It’s time to actually solve problems with something more than band-aid solutions.
{Public schooling is BAD for children. Gates and Jobs didn’t graduate college they changed the world from their garages (maybe even parent’s garages!); Branson and Rockefeller didn’t graduate high school. No one your child really looks up to went the school then college route. No (roughly no) white-collar jobs will exist in 25 years; computers are BETTER at those jobs than people…. YOU are gripping on to nostalgia and being resistant to NEEDED change; and your doing so at the expense of everyone but most importantly the children and the future!}