| | Much in this rant can be questioned.
Public education fails for the same reasons that public transportation or public security or public healthcare fail. The specifics in each case come from the narrow field under discussion. Yet, the commonalities are undeniable. Public transportation fails because politicians decide what modes everyone should be taxed to create and support. Labor unions and their seniority systems harm transportation systems, just as they do educational systems. Other parallels also apply. As philosophers, Objectivists seek universal solutions where none may exist. Any workable solution to either transportation or education would have to begin with first principles. What is offered instead is a list of problems and an implication that our woes stem from slapping on the wrong bandaids.
"Prior to the 60s the greatest behavioral difficulties were unruly demonstrations when a teacher left the classroom, or the heinous crime of chewing gum. Now teachers must be social scientists, who are nimble enough to dodge bullets and teach at the same time."
Teachers were assaulted in the good old days. Problem children always took time away from teachng the others -- and Young Tom Edison's outbursts were an example of that.
"Private schools, which substantially outperform the public schools in every conceivable way, find no need for teacher certification."
That is not true. I have yet to find a private school that would overlook my lack of degrees or credentials. One reason is that private schools are forced to conform to the same laws as public schools. The great exception has always been Catholic schools, which, nonetheless, always favored credentialed teachers, when they were available. Now, there is no shortage of those with state approval via colleges and boards of credentials. The key difference between private and public schools -- and this is broad, not universal -- is that because parents pay directly for education, they take more interest in it. That one factor alone has been a bitter pill for collectivists: education level of parents, parents' incomes, neighborhood demographics, etc., correlate less with pupil success than does the simple involvement of parents. Schools with strong PTAs have good test scores. Period.
"It is not news that the greatest minds that exist now or have ever existed, the greatest scientists, mathematicians, poets, writers, artists, and inventors the world has ever known would not be allowed to teach in a public school."
Even in an Objectivist Utopia, that might still be true. Being accomplished at music does not mean that you know how to teach music. How you learned may not be appropriate for others. Teaching is a separate skill. Different people learn differently. That is a problem with any system of mass education, private or public.
"In the “thrilling days of yesteryear” when “father knew best” ... the job got done with nary a thought to blaming parents when students didn’t learn."
See the comments above about PTAs. Also, as creatures of free will (or whatever it is that makes you you), different individuals make different choices. My wife and I raised the demographics of our neighborhood across a decennial census with our college degrees. Our daughter always hated school. Maybe she just got enough learning at home. When I was a kid, our parents were never able to understand why the delinquent on our street was the policeman's kid. Later, Mick Jagger explained it: "Every cop is a criminal and all your sinners saints." The poor little kid just got beaten all the time. His father believed that you can force people to be good and that you should punish them for being bad. No wonder he was a delinquent. On the one hand, blaming the parents is a good start. On the other hand, people -- even children -- make choices of their own. That is free will. And you cannot construct a utopia to prevent it.
"A few kids dropped out who were not of an intellectual bent... "
Back to Young Tom Edison again, the kids who dropped out were often the geniuses whom the teachers could neither answer nor control. Also, there is a fallacy that "intellectuality" as we define it in classical terms is a useful mental habit. I have published over 200 newspaper and magazine articles. I got through literature classes in high school and college with Classics Illustrated comic books -- even Cliff's Notes were boring. I loved learning grammar. It was denigrated even by those who taught it because as "intellectuals" they prefered imagery in Tennyson to vestigial subject-verb inversion in English sentence structure. Even the word non-fiction demonstrates the prejudice against writing the TRUTH. Writing the TRUTH is an anti-concept: non-fiction.
"The dropouts took useful, honorable positions in factories, supermarkets or auto shops because that was what they preferred in the first place."
That is an intellectually dishonest. It is a obviously an insult. If you are not enthralled with Byron, then you can have an "honorable" job in a supermarket. You know what I learned about working in a "supermarket"? That is where John D. Rockefeller started after graduating from Central High School in Cleveland. How about this: If you cannot work in a supermarket or a factory, then, what good are you as a person? If I could live my life over again, in high school, I would not take history or English, both of which can be learned from books. I would have taken four years of shop, supplementing that with art. Those are the skills I lack today that I wish I had. Unfortunately, I was victimized by a public school system based on the shared values of my central European homelife that idolized "intellectual" pursuits and insulted manual labor by calling it an "honorable" vocation for those less gifted.
Bill Gates spent most of his two years at Harvard playing poker. On the Bizarro Planet, school children gamble at cards for 12 years in order to prepare them for useful careers as entrepreneurs? There is no one way for everyone. It is an intellectual fallacy shared by Objectivists and the collectivist from whom they seek to differentiate themselves that they know some grand universal truth to which every individual should be conformed.
"We were grateful for a competent mechanic."
The "intellectual" prejudice created instead a world of paper-pushers and committee-meeters and management managers. The mechanics you meet are fully competent -- at home. When you pull into the garage, however, they hate you from the instant you hand over your car keys because they know that you think that they had to settle for an "honorable" career, not having the "intellectual bent" for something better.
We learn that the ancient Greeks denigrated physical labor and elevated theoretics and idealization. That came later, from Plato -- and is echoed in Aristotle. In point of fact, I submit PROTAGORAS by Plato, the story of the debate between Socrates and Protagoras. The question was whether justice can be learned. Each man convinced the other of his point and everyone was amazed. Along the way, they agreed that in the assembly, if the question is ship-building, then only the opinion of the craftsman counts and anyone -- no matter how well born or cultured -- who attempts any opinion is shouted down an eventually dragged away by the Scythian guards for speaking from ignorance.
In Plato's Republic, a different plan of action is suggested. That Platonic/Aristotlean prejudice against physical labor became an enshrined deity in the immaterial anti-material world of the medieval university. That medieval university is the model for education, even today. Prattle all you want about the glory days of laissez faire railroads financed with bonds backed in gold, the people who created those things you admire were auto-didacts: they taught themselves by working.
I believe that children should be put to work as soon as physically possible. My daughter worked starting at age 12. She was not enslaved. She worked for money. By the time she was 14, she was making $100 a day when she worked, which was not often enough, now that I look back on it. When she was 15, she got her own job, off the books. Today, she is a bartender, going to a community college, to earn a certificate as a court reporter. I told this story in some detail on THE WELL. The WELL is the old Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, an outgrowth of the old Whole Earth Catalog of the 60s and 70s. Based in San Francisco, The Well has a lot of liberals and only a handful of "house libertarians" to provide them with amusement. When I told, this story, I got an insulting reply that the fact that my daughter works as bartender and at 25 has no college degree invalidates my claim that children should work. To be specific, it is a liberal (Platonic) belief that intellectuals are a better kind of person. That belief operates among Objectivists, as well. For all of the capitalist rhetoric, the fact is that Hank Rearden's place is in the mills and ideas are the province of Hugh Akston who only held an honest job when he was on strike.
"Young minds are taught that firmly held convictions and clear visions of the truth are ‘worthless hallucinations of the mind,’ and that truth and fact are judgmental."
Well, actually, I can tell you from my experience as a middle school substitute teacher and from my many years of intimate relationship with another middle school teacher, that most of what most teachers of any subject in any school try to do with "young minds" is exactly what Objectivists want them to do: discover the facts, integrate them into ideas, and test the theories with new discoveries of facts. The "worthless hallucination" nonsense does creep in early, but mostly comes from intellectuals in colleges. The funny thing (well not so funny) is that it comes in private or public schools alike. (As I noted above, Objectivists share many of these assumptions.) The "worthless hallunication" theory of knowledge comes from administrators and politicians working in many positions made possible by the common belief that "intellectuals" know what is best for everyone.
Consider the arguments that take place here, the 100-post threads where nothing is settled. You would think that a narrowly defined system like Objectivism -- being as it is reality-centered and reason-validated -- would have no basic disagreements on matters of common experience. Such is not the case. I honestly believe that for some of the people here -- and they might say the same about me -- their firmly held convictions and clear visions of the truth are indeed hallucinations of the mind.
That being the case, exactly, which truth, would you have schools teach?
Should we spank children?
Should we kill Muslims?
Is it moral to work as a prostitute?
Is George Bus promoting freedom?
Is Leonard Peikoff faithful to the principles of Objectivism?
How many percepts does it take to make a concept?
" Umberto Eco ... Jacques Derrida ... "
Well, the world has never been short of fools and one of the blessings of a free society is that foolish people can buy the books of foolish authors. One of the weakest aspects of Objectivist rhetoric is this habitual citation of the New Times Best Seller List as a cultural barometer. Fundamentalist Christians do the same thing, interestingly enough.
" ... many young people lead aimless non-productive lives, feeling nothing but hopelessness. Some drop out, eking out a life on the streets, others become trolls in a relative’s basement, yet others adopt greed as their standard, but universally they eschew the dreary details of existence for a slow suicide of drugs, sex, and rock and roll."
Typical of Objectivist rhetoric, that statement comes without statistical evidence. How many young people? What percentage are trolling in a relative's basement? And what's wrong with greed? How did that slip in there? Greed is good.
"It is interesting to note that what was a high school diploma in 1948, is equivalent to today’s Baccalaureate."
How is that measured? It is comforting to believe. My personal research, based on the books that I find most useful to me as an adult, working as a writer for business and technology is that education peaked about 1966. My standard handbook of English grammar -- found only last year -- is actually the text we had in 12th grade grammar. My physics books is Sears. My calculus book is Thomas. My American history book -- well,... Parrington and Hofstedter and Morison are somewhat lacking, I confess... I like the Almanac. I do not trust the Encyclopedia Britannica, so I also have an Americana to keep them honest.
In Cleveland, Ohio, in 1948, you could graduate from high school with four years of Engish (alternating American and English literature semesters with semesters of grammar and composition), two years of language (Latin, French or Spanish; German had been dropped for World War One, but was replaced after Sputnik), two years of math (one of algebra; one of geometry), two years of science, typically biology plus your choice of either chemistry or physics. The rest of the credits were electives, such as journalism, music (chorale and/or band and/or orchestra), home econmics (girls) or shop (boys) and lots and lots of study halls. That was for college preparatory. Business electives and the General option were different. One of the really smart guys in my class (1967) had the insight to take typing. We never understood why.... until we bought computers...
After Sputnik, things got serious.
Also, in Cleveland, there was, since the 1920s, a program called Major Work. Known elsewhere as "The Cleveland Program" they took the brightest kids from all the schools and gave them schools of their own. They got four years of math, four years of science, four years of foreign languages, etc.etc., etc. It was a political struggle between the Platonic Elitists and the Platonic Progressives to boost or cut into Major Work in the funding wars.
The inflation of college degrees is a result of many factors. As much as we can criticize college education -- and we do, rightfully -- the upside has been the world we enjoy today. We could not even be having an online discussion of philosophy, otherwise. Perhaps that might not be so bad. Perhaps it would have been better to put us all to work as children. Then, about now, after working and getting rich and reading in our spare time, someone or more of us might invent a cheap, effective modem to go with a cheap effective computer so that we could share ideas about cheap, effective anti-oxidants.
Or maybe not.
One of the problems -- a serious, basic problem -- with designing a better world is that we only know the world we grew up in.
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