The Education Mess and The Better Way

How standard education strangles curiosity and breeds passivity

Ah yes, that feeling I’m feeling is hopelessness.

Education is a mess.

“How did our country get into this situation?” I wonder to myself. “We’ve been chasing standardized test scores as ways to demonstrate, as ways to prove, learning without actually teaching anything.”

It’s a system designed to serve administrators, controllers, and regulators — not the clients of the school system, kids and their parents.

Big questions:

Has it always been this way?
Does it have to be this way?
What’s a better way?

Big answers:

No, just the last few decades, started in the 1930s with the new deal.
No, definitely not.
End the bureaucracy and trust the children.

Silly standards:

“It was good enough for me so it’s good enough for you kids!” is what most parents, including mine, argue to avoid the 5-figure-financing task they’d have to undertake to send their child to a private school, or sacrifice to homeschool.

While the public school system is not so different from what existed 10, 30, 50, 80 years ago, the world the public school system is preparing them for is different.