What Went Wrong: Education

does anyone have a clue?

As we leave behind the century of the rule of the educated class and the administrative state, we need to understand What Went Wrong.

I’ve written about how Finance and Welfare went wrong. Now it’s time to talk about Education. We take our education systems for granted, as though they are the product of deep thought and development. But what's the point? Is childhood education a good thing? Is it mainly about the Three Rs? Then after basic literacy and numeracy just what exactly are most kids in school for? Just keeping them off the labor market? Preparing them for college? For the trades? To be socialized with their peers? Is it good to do it the way we do it or should we rethink the whole thing? How did the whole thing get started?

John Stuart Mill, he of On Liberty, never went to school. His father, James Mill gave him lessons in Greek starting at age three.

He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek.[8] By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis,[8] and the whole of Herodotus,[8] and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato…

At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family.

Was that a good idea? Greek? Latin? Teaching the younger kids? Or should every kid be educated like that?

Then there was Horace Mann in 1837 who became administrator of the schools in Massachusetts and invented the government Common School. What was the point? Back in the day the Boston transcendentalists didn't like the Catholicism of their Irish neighbors and so they decided that we needed a government school system to cure children of their Catholicism and make them read the Protestant Bible.

The Catholic Dagger John Hughes, a jumped up gardener who became Archbishop of New York, begged to differ. So the Catholics decided that they would build their own school system and they did it using the slogan “First, build the school, then the church.” And so all over America, the Irish Catholics built schools alongside their churches so their children could be educated free of the ideological pollution from the Boston transcendentalists.

In 2024, which is better? Catholic schools or public schools?

Also, Horace Mann promised the common school would reduce the crime rate by 90%. How's that going, Horace?

At the turn of the 20th century, the experts had a cool idea. Why not send all the kids to high school, where they could learn valuable job skills and become good factory workers.

After World War II experts decided it would be a good idea to send all the GIs to college. And then in the 1950s Harvard President emeritus James Conant wrote The American High School Today and decided we needed big mega high schools to provide a full range of educational opportunities for the nation’s teenagers.

As the years went by public schools in the United States became more and more bureaucratized and politicized and unionized. So some extreme right-wing parents decided that maybe school at home — “homeschooling” — would be a good idea where children were educated at home by their parents and then joined other homeschool kids for various extracurricular activities. During World War COVID, when schools were closed because pandemic, many educated-class parents decided to educate their kids in micro schools for the duration. How did that work out?

What went wrong? Where to begin. Perhaps it's not a good idea to have government within a country mile of a child's school. Perhaps it’s not a good idea for children to be confined in Government Child Custodial Facilities for their formative years. Perhaps it's not a good idea to have academics decide how and what children should be taught. Perhaps it's not a good idea for unionized teachers to decide what's taught in schools. Perhaps it's not a good idea to keep children in school until their mid-teens. Perhaps it's not a good idea to have children learning academic subjects without applying them as they learn. Perhaps it would be better for most kids to be subjected to “child labor” and learn about life in the real world rather than sit in class dying of boredom.