What Public Education Is

The U.S. Public Education system owes its form to 19th Century businessmen who found themselves paying too much for clerks and still having too few. The system exists to give every student the chance to excell at clerkdom--Readin', Writin', and 'Rithmetic--so as to keep the books, and those as don't can of course work in the factories. Later on additional skills were imparted, appropriate to workers in the more modern factories; preparatory skills for the engineering trade schools.

The spawn of wealth, of course, must not attend public schools. None of the knowledge they impart is of any conceivable use to the Paris Hilton's of the world. Many liberal-minded wealthy people take pride in sending their kids to the public schools (provided they live in the right state). They might as well poke their kid in the eye with a sharp stick while they're at it.

The role of the good private school is to impart a sense of entitlement, a basic knowledge of the management of wealth, and to introduce these kids to their peers, and their peer's useful parents. Good private schools also give the motivated child a chance to explore the natural and metaphysical philosophies. Science is offered in these schools, the science of inquisitiveness, not the rote skills of industry.

There is a second tier of private school to which the proud and rising middle class and the nouveau riche send their children: such schools exist only to protect good private schools from riff-raff and offer little more than is found in public schools.

How Public Education is Busted

Clerkdom has been obsoleted by computers, which means that a high-school education qualified one for little more than flipping burgers. Most of the remaining jobs require not just far more education, but a far better one; or else require less. How much does it take to work at WalMart or to telemarket?

And the three Rs don't really qualify you for college; that's another busted dream. The culture of Public Education dulls the mind to a level appropriate for unquestioning clerkdom, then thrusts you blinking blindly into the glare of higher education. But Higher Education--a pursuit intended solely for those from private schools, except for the cow and trade colleges--has been dumbed down to the point where clerks can feel successful. They do succeed, they are graduated, but they do not learn and they are not educated--not in the "higher" sense.

Everyone senses that Public Education needs something else, but they are stuck at the level of first order change. They do more of the same for diminishing and even contrary returns.

Public Education for the Twenty-First Century

The modern high tech employee must meet a much more stringent standard than his clerkly forebears. What he needs, in fact, is a whole new culture of education, one that starts at the age the three R's used to start, but which takes him in the direction the United States needs for him to be competitive.

But that's the reactionary view. For the pure Progressive Conservative agenda we want to produce as many fully functional men and women as possible to conduct the upcoming economic war against China's overwhelming billions. Here's a summary of a sensible curriculum:

1. Reasoning--starting from the syllogism and expanding, how to use what you know, how to reason from both definite and indefinite premises, the limits of reason, how to test premises.
2. Problem Solving--in the vein of Polya's How to Solve It, the thread teaches how to resolve large problems into smaller ones, how to reason analogically, how to get things done.
3. Sophistry--how to win arguments through illogic, and how not to be won over by them. Most people are aghast that this gets equal time with Reasoning, perhaps because sophistry gets so much more time in real life. More than 90% of the communications directed towards me are sophist arguments. But that's exactly why the modern child should live and breathe sophistry, and not be breathed by it.
4. Psychology--how other people are different from you; how to use the quirks you acquired in your development to be more effective in pursuing your goals; how to interact and team effectively with others.

These are your elementary school topics. Reading starts early, primarily as a means of expanding one's knowlege more rapidly; it is not a goal in and of itself. Writing is a way of codifying one's reasoning, or recording one's sophistry. Arithmetic is a later extension of Reasoning, just as Algebra is an extension of problem solving. Experimental Chemistry is applied problem solving, and teaches you rules about reasoning with chemicals; but the modern rote recitation of scientific "laws" has no place at all.