Think, Jane, think!

2005.01.21 — Culture | Education | by Wegal Pinsky

My daughter Emily is in kindergarten. Although I'm a moderate Democrat, I'm beginning to really wish we had voucher programs or something like that so I had some kind of reasonable choices about where our kids go to school. Nobody mentioned to me when I went to the very first parent open house at the beginning of kindergarten that basically kindergarten is the great equalizer in public education.

Kids who show up already knowing almost how to read have to basically sit still and be quiet for a whole year while other children—who have apparently been raised by wolves—learn things like how to color within the lines.

Emily's teacher is a dizzy blond divorcee who apparently is also a slut. She's pretty hot, and she was raised in Holland for a while, but I am stangely unattracted to her. Maybe because she's irritating (of course that doesn't ruin the hot factor for other chicks... but I digress).

My wife volunteers at the school once in a while and today she noticed that Emily had a total of four broken, nubby crayons, an empty glue bottle, and a pencil with no eraser. We are basically only one step away from using sticks and rocks here. I suppose that wouldn't be so bad if they were learning basic set-oriented math like, "the group of items which contains both sticks and rocks but only those that are all small enough to fit up your ass is called the intersection...." However, that is not what they are doing.

I am more convinced than ever that if children could be measured in a variety of ways to determine their affinity for various learning strategies and approaches (instead of their aptitude) that we could basically teach everything a kid learns in K—8 in about 2 or 3 years. High school couldn't be compressed as much in the same way, but we could get much better learning all the way through. That way, the first two years of college would not need to be wasted by redoing advanced placement high school classes.

We'd have engineers and accountants who were 12 years old. We'd have full out PhDs and MDs by the time people were 16 or 18. All of that without people hating school, feeling disenfranchised and all that crap because it would be much better directed at their ability to learn material. Kids would more quickly get a sense for what they enjoyed. We might even experience a revolutionary boom in personal productivity as people learned to extend their respective strengths into their professional lives instead of doing their new job the same way the last guy did the job.

I bet we'd be pretty stinking globally competitive when engineers could start out making $12 an hour and love their jobs. And how much tax money would be saved by having half as many teachers or schools?

Update

Emily's teacher sent home a sad face sticker (as opposed to a happy face) that included a handwritten note which said:

Emily is being definant (sp?)

Apparently my daughter can already tell that her "boss" is an idiot. She may also realize that she will continue to have to sit still and color within the lines for idiots for the next 12 years. Why shouldn't she be defiant?

f e e d b a c k

Jason Botwick writes:

Your ideas for education are good, but they'll never fly. It's too expensive, or at least it's perceived to be so. Plus, the conservative tide is still close to its peak, so new ideas and education will quickly be dismissed as more of the same by the DeLays and the Hasterts. Of course, the liberals are no better, since new ways of doing things would probably wreck the monopoly they've had on those issues for decades.

You know what I've always thought is interesting about education? Education is a science, or you would think so. I mean, you're saying it here, right? Like, people learn differently, there are different ways to teach things, etc. And it's so obviously important for so many reasons. So why wouldn't a nation pour money into educational research on par with how much they spend on other stuff?

Think about how many great thinkers in the field of education you could name. I can't think of one, can you? Thomas Dewey? [You mean John Dewey? Melvil Dewey? —Ed.] Shit, I don't know. I think it's a significant and overlooked deficiency of capitalism that it doesn't value the individual implicitly.

Derek Jensen writes:

I hate it when someone says something is impossible when I can point to Europe or Canada and say, "Look, they have frickin' flying cars," or national healthcare or whatever. Better education is possible. What may not be possible is changing the minds of American edutainment zombies.

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