Education Sucks, Knowledge Rules

by John Roberts

That’s right. I said it. Education, as it seems to be defined today, sucks. Let’s see if I can capture the essence of the American education system. Go to school/daycare for 7 hours a day for 12 years, and get a high school diploma, then you have an education. Simple. Although, I don’t know that people with a high school education are generally considered “educated”. For that you have to go to college. Notice I didn’t mention anything about knowledge. Knowledge is gained when you try to apply the stuff you learned in the real world, only to discover it’s not exactly how you learned it in school. Some people never live in the real world and never gain knowledge. They’re called politicians.

So, 16 years pass, and approximately 20,000 hours of “education”. We learn about history, math, english, technology, science…….or do we? 20,000 hours!? I’d venture that any worker in any field with 20,000 hours in their chosen field would be considered, well, a seasoned expert. Most products of our education system, taking basic tests on all of the above mentioned topics seem to fail miserably, meaning, not seasoned expert. In case you didn’t know, when you go to school to learn, it costs money. When you are working to learn, you earn money. Why? Because our education system sucks! Am I saying it is worse than other countries? I don’t give a crap about other countries.

“It’s because we don’t put enough money into it.” Wrong. It’s because we don’t put enough innovation into it. How do you innovate in education? You reward innovation. How do you reward innovation? I really hope you know the answer to this already. Look at the areas of our lives with the most innovation. What’s their reward? Profit!

I know, profits are evil, etc. etc. Let’s take a look at the biggest piece of crap industries in the country, and see if we can find a common thread there as well. Finance, Health Insurance, Housing…..the Post Office (another article, coming soon). Wait a minute, all of those industries are highly regulated by the federal government! Wait! So is education! No wonder education is crap.

The world all around our classrooms has evolved into a pretty amazing place over life of our country. We don’t go to school pulled by horses anymore. We can fly, we can drive, we can gps, cell, computer, satellite….but our idea of education is still a teacher and a text book teaching 30 kids. Come on! We don’t even know what education would look like now if we had some incentive to innovate it over the last 100 years.

How do we fix it? Get the government out of it, get the teachers unions out of it. Let’s focus on the kids. Parents know better than government. I apologize that some people would get rich along the way, but I promise it will only be the ones providing something that people want. Not administrators funneling tax money into their pockets.

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Posted by John on Jan 13 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.