“Understand that from a child’s perspective the ONLY thing he or she has in her life is college. K-12 is so horrendously boring, inefficient, and mentally stifling, it resembles a prison more than it does a school. Increasingly apathetic parents drop their children off with increasingly apathetic teachers, where the true purpose of K-12 education is more baby sitting than it is education. Alas, most kids are just biding their time, waiting out a mental prison sentence, chomping at the bit to get out. But the biggest lie we feed them is not “follow your heart and the money will follow,” or “you can’t put a price on education,” but the canard
“It will all get better in college.””
Although I have not seen this movie, I was fascinated by Jeffrey Tucker’s piece on it, linked below. Not surprisingly, many Canadian school boards and districts have not only warned parents about it but have outright banned any discussion of the movie at school. Looks like the movie’s subject matter has hit a sensitive nerve. There must be a better way to school our young people than subjecting them to the regimented prison-like system known as public schooling. Although I don’t blame teachers directly for any of this, I do blame their unions who defend this system and have, in desperation, embarked on a major campaign to harness the coercive power of the state to handicap, if not eliminate entirely, any competing systems, and I would submit, more humane systems, such as private schools and homeschooling.
https://fee.org/articles/five-huge-differences-between-work-and-school/?utm_source=FEE+Email+Subscriber+List&utm_campaign=793f5326c2-MC_FEE_DAILY_2017_06_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_84cc8d089b-793f5326c2-107147257
This is exactly why we need more options for schooling. only through trial and error will a superior system be found. Making the same error over and over again does not improve anything. And when unions get involved, any change will only be for the worse!
I was looking up Henry Pellat today because my son is on a school trip to Casa Loma (It was his house).
He was a high school grad (UCC, but still…) who went to work for his fathers stock brokerage at 17 and a member of the Toronto Stock Exchange at 23.
Sir John A Macdonald wrote the exam set by the Law Society of Upper Canada to allow him to become an apprentice layer at 15 years old. By the time he was 20 years old he had his own law practice.
These two guys are only outliers in terms of making a mark on history. In every other way these accomplishments were the norm for the day.
We send our children to school for ages longer than we need to.
While Captain Capitalism places part of the blame on teachers for not telling students about harsh realities, I have a different take on that point.
While I was teaching at a certain post-secondary institution, I was discouraged and sometimes reprimanded by my department administrators for doing just that. I was told that telling the students what was waiting for them once they graduated would only discourage them and they might, therefore, drop out. One reason for that fear was that it might reflect badly on the department’s standings in the “student success” polls. Government “gravy” funding was dependent upon “customer satisfaction” and the higher it was, the more of that extra money would be received by the department. (A certain right-leaning provincial government deserves credit for encouraging the “student as customer” lunacy.)
As well, my department head was ambitious to rise through the institution’s ranks and was so egotistical that he makes O’Bummer seem humble in comparison. He didn’t want anything which could possibly interfere with his plans, so anything which might make the department (i. e., him) look bad had to be suppressed.
An academic ponzi scheme, you say? Indeed it was.
6o years ago at my school in England they put a complete class through 2 years of work in one year. It was a minor public school. This meant I completed my 4 A levels at age 17 and so off I went to Uni. Had my B Sc in maths and physics at age 20, immediately employable in the main frame computer industry. I was very fortunate.
Liberals and Leftists LOVE modern technology, the internet, iphones, blogs, computers, high-speed (sic) trains, and whatnot. But these same people LOATHE Wikipedia. LOATHE the Khan Academy (as an alternative to “traditional” education). LOATHE any and all information (not certified by THEM) gleaned from the internet. Yes, the liberals and leftists are educational luddites. They protect their precious Education cartel like Yellow Cab tried to protect itself from UBER and LYFT (by passing protectionist laws). Time to bypass the leftists and liberal education cartel, and start “self-educating” … 50 years of educational brainwashing is ENOUGH. Skrew Common Core and all the other so-called curricula espoused by the LEFTIST education cabal.
In a related story … I read, yesterday, that the current ratio of women to men across ALL college campuses in the USA is 2:1 female:male. It seems the more LOGICALLY-wired of the sexes has started to figure this out.
One of the many options is to stand (or run) for your local school board. Another option is to vote in your local school board elections. Democracy is not a spectator sport.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a government job and therefore all the free time to thwart the leftist school boards, state dept’s. of education, and Federal Dept. of Education. Instead, I taught my children the COMPLETE, unedited, unbiased, version of American and World History. And taught them how to “fake it” through school by regurgitating the nonsense they were taught. And without fail, the more radical leftist their essays and reports … the higher the grade. Regardless of the quality of the scholarship.
I was looking up Henry Pellat today because my son is on a school trip to Casa Loma (It was his house).
The last time I was there I nearly stood up and screamed at the other tourists, “WHY ARE NONE OF YOU LIVID ABOUT THIS??” during the “about Henry Pellat” film narrated by Colin Mochrie that they show at the beginning of the tour.
The film doesn’t even try to hide the fact that Pellat built hydroelectric power (and electrical distribution) in Ontario from scratch, and then had it taken away without compensation by Adam Beck because it was far too important not to be government controlled.
So Pellat started up an aircraft company. And the government did it again, during WWI.
If there were any justice in this world, Casa Loma would be a monument to government tyranny and a cautionary tale that being successful just attracts the attention of government parasites.
Great rant Captain. School now is useless and primarily a babysitting service for families in which both parents work. I hated school when I was younger and was terminally bored in elementary school since the material presented was was so dumbed down and excruciatingly boring. In high school, I skipped as many classes as I could and went to UofC Data Center to program as in 1960’s Alberta, 100% of ones mark for each course was based on the end of Grade 12 provincial exam. Needless to say I aced these and I spent my summers either working in the bush or studying mathematics/electronics. Usually I’d have gone through the years coursework before the next grade started.
Looking back on things, I now realize that we were 2-3 years ahead ahead of where students are now and “science” teachers now aren’t even close in terms of their chemistry/physics/mathematics that comprised the Alberta Grade 12 curriculum in 1970. What I’ve seen of current school “science” courses is crap on AGW which I could have easily picked apart and destroyed when I was in high school as that was a time that I delighted in demonstrating the intellectual shortcomings of most teachers as my response to the enforced boredom of a conventional education. Spent a lot of time in elementary school standing outside in the hallway or time after school writing “I will not xxx” 500 or 1000 times.
I have to admit that when I was in university, jobs were plentiful and easy to get. Aside from my “long duration” summer jobs of timber cruising, tree planting or organic chemistry research, there was always the minimum wage labor place where one got to sample a wide variety of interesting day or two jobs which were fun (I used to really enjoy doing intense manual labor back then) as well as working as a TA, tutoring students, working as a computer operator (someone who knew how to reboot a PDP-11 that ran a remote line printer). Initially I had planned to study electrical engineering, but then took a biology coure and ended up in physiology and did reseach in neuophysiology/pharmacology afterwards until if finally got a “real job” (as my father referred to it) after medical school.
Looking back at that time, I can think of a few really good university profs that made an impact and changed the way I think. The most surprising one, given my hard core science orientation, was my first year Philosphy prof who had a real knack for making the subject interesting. He thought it was neat that I could simplify the overly complicated way in which philosophers handle logic by use of Boolean algebra and converting each problem into a logic circuit to solve it. He had a knack for figuring out what every student was interested in and giving them a major assignment which fit with that interest. Mine was to write a critique of Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge which, given that Polanyi was a renowned chemist, I plowed through the book and realized that it was a significant analysis of the philosophy of science. The same prof, when I asked him what one could do with a philosophy degree immediately replied “become a philosophy prof at a university” followed by “those positions don’t come up that often”. I spent the bulk of my first year on philosophy either reading or in long discussions with other students in my class at the Albion hotel mens only tap room having intense discussions.
While I hated the pre-university school system back then, I realize now that it was far far better than the glorified babysitting service we now have. The aim of schooling was to drill a certain basic subset of knowledge into every student which allowed them to leave school with a minimal grasp of what it takes to be functional in society. Where this system failed is that it didn’t look at individual differences in how people learn; I preferred to do reading on my own and preferred to work on my own. I passed even what I considered to be stupid subjects like English and “Social studies” and wondered why I was in the class given that I read the textbook in one night and already knew everything. I find I function best in a highly competative small group environment where a bunch of people get together to work on a specific problem and, once it’s solved, one gets together with another group of people to work on a new problem that everyone finds interesting. In university I slept through a lot of classes.
Now, diagnosing boys with ADD is fashionable, and I’m sure I pissed off a lot of teachers in Vancouver when I would examine kids sent to me with “ADD” and determine they were just completely normal boys placed in a boring environment designed for babysitting girls. After seeing what has changed in university over the past 40 years, I now advise people thinking about going to university for a useless degree to go into a trade instead. One’s much more likely to be able to find work as an electrician than with an all but useless psychology degree (one of the seeming favorites around here). Better yet, people should read up on their own to fill in the gaps that result from the current expensive babysitting system for kids before they are bundled off for their obligatory useless university degree. I encourage parents to homeschool their kids which is by far the best way of getting a well rounded education.
By far the most deleterious effect of the globalist sheeple producing indoctrination camps (a more apt description of what would have been called primary schooling 40 years ago) is creation of generations with total amnesia for human history. In universities, this is denigrated as the story of “dead white male oppression” and the void is filled by cultural marxist BS which will likely be viewed by future historians as another one of mankind’s mass psychoses. I had a strong interest in history of mathematics and science, but my mother insisted that I read through the Durant’s History of Civilization. This is a rather imposing weight of books but well written. Given that I was reading 1-2 books a day when I was younger, slotting in one of the heavy volumes for a weeks reading was no big deal. Given that my mother had read them all I couldn’t just skip everything but the mathematical parts.
Nowhere in the current curriculum does one find the concept that most of the social problems of mankind have been grappled with and various fixes applied thousands of years ago. To a student of history, societies are structured in a way that fixes those problems and, by looking at those that are still around and successful, one has quite a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. When things aren’t broken, the wise man knows not to fix them. The current obsession in universities on “oppression” is far worse than my focusing on the history of mathematics and science.
Given that the closest historical period I can find that fits with the current world situation is that during the terminal decline of the Roman empire, what I advise kids to do when they ask me whether they should go to university is either go into something with reasonable (but nowhere as good as in the 1970’s) job prospects like engineering or learn a trade. In addition to that, learn how to fix things and have a diverse skill set so that one can get work should the whole fragile hypercentralized world economy collapse. The era of hyperspecialization on a global scale has created the most fragile civilization in history.
I can certainly relate to that.
I taught private college for 5 years. one of them, I approached the individual in charge of screening, er, ‘screening’ candidates as to their eligibility for tuition grant based on their basic grasp of their major area of study. my course being desktop apps.
alas, I found out the individual was an *employee* of same college, NOT some gubbamint lackey who happened to have office space . . .
p.s., the place shut down about 3 yrs after I got sacked for bytching about the deplorable equipment.
hint: try running Windows on a 286 . . .