School sucks.
All this hyperbole aside, school sucks.
It sucked 150 years ago. It sucked 100 years ago. It sucked for us and it sucks for Generation Z.
All of public education is an ongoing set of social experiments. The current model is an experiment in the effects of more or less open capitalism upon the school system. More testing. Statistical models instead of uniqueness… and it’s likely a small look back over the past and you’ll be hard-pressed to find *which* generation had PURE EDUCATION in mind and deed.
Perhaps the Progressivists. Science and Reason. They *did* produce the children who became the adults who were the great engineers and scientists of the 40s and 50s… ok, I’m thinking Feynman but there are others…
… but I suspect a travel down the rabbit hole into The Matrix of political history and its likely you’ll find hands in backpockets in surprising places, just like today.
So… not so surprising.
What can be done?
At Hampshire, in 1990, I started mailing list for the rights of kids/teens. Y-RIGHTS. I had to host it off-campus because there was no LISTSERV. [the membership had grown too large to do simple forwarding as I had been].
All sorts of rights, including education were discussed. A few groups like Taking Children Seriously (David Deutsche was a member along with Sarah-Fitz Claridge – and I complained that they were talking too philosophically for a group that was open for all ages and educational backgrounds) – they did, and started an unschooling movement.
Plus, several youth rights that were more political activist started from the group – the members meeting there, became friends and spawned off groups that lobby washington to this day for the issues that matter to them.
Anyway, as an 18-25 year old, I believed I could make a difference. Fix school. Fix society. I did and I was right but I was also wrong.
The *Internet* is giving Generation Z the education they’re not getting in schools. School is gong to suck, money is going to be wasted, Common Core is going to try to wreck the natural mathematical abilities of kids by intentional confusion in order to do a “break down and remold” model like they use in military.
It sucks. Read the literature from the Common Core site. Think about what GRIT really entails. Notice how they have to stay in the program until 8th grade for it to be successful. In short, we’re going to scramble everything up and put it back together again.
Will it work? I don’t know. But I DO KNOW that they’ll abandon it after a few years. They abandoned EVERY SOCIAL EXPERIMENT they’ve done so far on kids. Long enough to screw things up, not long enough to get any multi generational data.
So, what do to?
Whatever you like. Wanna fight it? Go ahead. The program will die anyway in a few years – I give it 10-12 and something NEW that sucks just as bad will come along.
People forget about the kids. They talk education, school, funding, secret illumainti Bill Gates funding states through his non-profit venue in order to be able to sell unpopular Tablets and finally defeat Apple at their game.. now that Steve Jobs is dead and Apple has lost their vision.
It sucks. Pisses me off. And what can be done?
Like Sean Stromsten implies, complain. That’s about it. I’m all for it if it’s what you want to do. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. But school is still going to suck and society will fill in the gaps in education as it always has. The Internet at least allows current kids the self-directed education that john Holt, A S Neill and others only dreamed of in their day.
Let school do the crap it does. Let them play their games. This current generation will dismantle the current system when they come of age, and expect the same freedoms they enjoyed as kids to be EVERYWHERE and it won’t be. They’ll fix it.. unless, like every generation before, once they reach of age, they just scramble for themselves and forget about the future. I never forgot the future.
[off soapbox]