Simon Sarris has some thoughts that I’ve entertained myself but never articulated nearly so well. Go read “The most precious resource is agency”. He speaks of a childhood locked in rote education robbing children of the opportunity to do meaningful work and thus to exercise agency in their life.
”We seem to have a political (public) imagination so shallow that it cannot conceive of what to even do with children, especially smart children. We fail to properly respect them all the way through adolescence, so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim.”
And
“Seizing opportunity requires opportunity to exist at all. And I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people.”
I remember well whining in high school that most of the things being taught were pointless. (Only later did I learn how much I learned was obsolete or just plain wrong!) I pined for control and fled school for work as soon as I could. I was employed and struggling to “adult” 3,000 miles from home long before I could legally buy beer. Later, when I re-entered college, the land of lotus eaters, I never stopped eyeing the exit and the instant I had the necessary degree I was gone like a flash. It was agency I needed, even if I didn’t understand it at the time.
I sincerely hope the vast increase in home schooling is benefiting at least some of the smart and capable kids out there.
Hat tip to Chicago Boyz.
so we have engineered them to be useless in the interim.”
I was twelve when I told my parents I wanted a job. They were quick to point out it’s illegal to hire younger than sixteen. I didn’t have the smarts to point out I would be happy to work with some dude who repaired and sold used mowers or bicycles. Which would have made me very happy. Just Doing something that was worth doing. Never too interested in school anyway, now I discover the same powers that demand I Go to school also have blocked me from doing something I want to do. What little willingness to try in school died. I failed that year so bad summer school wouldn’t pass me. Soo,they took me to school to take a test. Science! It was Fun! I passed the test just fine. And then they were all mad at me. It proved I could do Junior in high school level science.
Quit school as a junior, joined the Air Force. The recruiter didn’t want me bugging him anymore, so he took me to take the test, with the agreement being, WHEN I failed, I would never bother him again.
I scored in the top ten percent.
The System is not even Trying to work For the kids.
I’ve always learned much faster when not being held back by the “lowest common denominator” classroom teaching. Despite being a C+ to B- student, I out scored the class brain (valedictorian) on the National Merit Scholarship Exam my senior year in high school. Boy was he upset about that! I was bored to death in most of my classes, and as a result I didn’t really care what my grades were as long as I passed. If a particular class was something that actually interested me, I normally made an A in it.
I’ve learned a lot of very technical subjects since I have been in the workforce instead of school, mainly because I can research the subject that I need to learn and can learn at my own pace. I love to learn, but hate the system that holds back those who learn at a faster rate.
It is no accident, nor is it recent:
https://swweducation.org/when-did-the-dumbing-down-of-american-education-begin/
https://www.forcedschool.com/post/69947261758/the-prussian-model
Here in Teutonia homeschooling is strictly Verboten, insist on it and armed police show up to relieve you of the state’s children you spawned and must support. Even our mandatory ID cards are called Personalausweis (Personnel-Document) rather than Personenausweis (Personal Document). A very useful system to prevent independence, even when we were taught to sing Einigkeit, Recht und Freiheit (Unity, Justice and Freedom) instead of Deutschland über Alles. Now it’s Ode to Joy.
Maybe I should go camping, but I’m not worried it may involve a compulsory train ride and a communal shower; the new method is a profitable series of injections and a little gaslighting. Coming up soon, freezing and starving, and a little diversity.
My college years were messed up by a break doing stuff in the real world.
When I returned… well, somehow a lot of Computer Science Doctrine was clearly bogus, because I’d already done these things using alternative methods and it was obvious that the methods being taught, while perhaps easy to analyze, were inefficient in both the effort required and the results attained.
… Grumble grumble LALR grumble shift-reduce conflicts grumble….