In the U.S., one of the myths we have lived with is that everyone has access to a basic education, grades 1 through 12.  Another myth is that if you want to go to college, there’s a way for you to do it.  Social engineers, often in service of elites, love to parade these myths, but they are myths.  Like religion, they promise a better tomorrow.  The problem with the first myth is in the definition of “basic education.”  The problem with the second is that it’s just not true.  And the problem with both is that the elites, that famous 1% (you pick the percentage you want—it depends on your stats), want to make sure that neither one is true.

The definition of “basic education” has been forever a moving target.  In colonial days, neither women nor slaves went to public schools (at that time, you could just lump both those two groups together as slaves as far as voting rights were concerned, because women were also treated as property).  Those few who went to these schools learned the basics: the famous three R’s.  Most of the “learning” was through rote memorization and repetition.  If you happened to be a leftie, you were whipped until you wrote with your right hand, not the left; but, oh my goodness, what penmanship they had (e.g. the signature of John Hancock).  But heaven forbid you learned to think!  That was the job of the private schools that taught the children of the wealthy elites.

I suppose we’ve made some progress.  “Basic education” now accepts women and minorities.  You can leave the public system writing with your left hand, but it’s still a crap shoot whether you can leave it as a thinking human being.  Most teachers have gone through that education mill too, so they just repeat the same old mistakes—and their unions support them.  Even the private schools have watered down the process so much that it doesn’t matter whether their teachers have tenure or not—the students still have to move beyond the constraints of the system in general if they want to be creative, thinking individuals.

Feynman, in the preface to his Lectures on Physics, quotes Gibbon: “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”  Feynman was a Nobel prize-winner for his work on quantum electrodynamics and probably one of the best examples of how a student can rise above his superfluous classroom instruction.  He went to one of the best public schools in NYC, of course.  If we take the analogy that a student starts at the sludgy bottom of the pond of learning and swims up, Feynman had less distance to swim than the average American student because he didn’t have to start so deep.

Most schools used to teach to the average.  With time, programs for special needs students were added.  “Special needs” means learning disabilities today, a misnomer, to be sure.  Again, it’s a problem of definition, because naturally bright students have special needs too.  All too often, their needs aren’t met and they become bored.  Your better public schools have honors classes and AP classes now as a wink and a nod to gifted students, but often these courses feel the budget axe and/or are taught by teachers who have not specialized in the subject area.  Gibbon’s quote describes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I will probably bring physicist’s wrath down upon me because I think Feynman, although clearly a brilliant man, was no educator.  Truth be told, many research physicists, especially theoreticians like Feynman, aren’t great educators—far from it.  The first volume of Feynman’s series is chaotic; the second, requiring vector calculus, is dry and boring, especially if you have the edition that leaves out his simple explanation of general relativity; and the third, while a brilliant introduction to quantum mechanics, requires complex linear algebra.  Many physics curricula don’t require vector calculus or linear algebra as prerequisites (maybe Cal Tech was an exception).

In another quote, Feynman said that physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation.  If he had taken this to heart, he would have known that you can’t ask students to learn physics at the level he was asking if they don’t have the mathematical background (I will refrain from pursuing his quote any farther—this is a PG-13 blog).  And, to answer the physicists’ criticism, let me ask them if they’ve tried to teach Feynman’s course—I have, and it’s a disaster.  (In his defense, the famous and venerable Berkeley Physics Course, released at about the same time, has the same problems.)  None of this means the books are bad per se—they’re just targeted to the wrong audience!  Or, the right audience at the wrong time.

The lesson here is that teachers and so-called pedagogical experts who design curricula have to teach to the average and allow enough variations around that average to take care of special needs and gifted students.  But what that average should be is not really a question of debate.  We certainly can’t expect everyone to be a creative genius.  But we should expect everyone that passes through our public education system to leave it as a thinking and reasoning human being—a citizen who can balance his bank account; understand the issues in local and national elections; know the what, where, and how of key events that are occurring, not just locally, but nationally and around the world; and so forth.  We are failing to provide this “basic education” for the most part.

Beyond public education, our colleges and universities are also failing.  First, unlike Europe, we have failed to recognize that traditional college level instruction, too often geared just to be a preparation for graduate school, doesn’t adequately prepare the graduate, who wants to stop with just a B.A., B.S., or B.E., to be a productive member of society.  It also fails miserably in teaching them to think—the old rot of rote memorization and repetition is creeping back in at all levels, but especially in “cookbook disciplines” like engineering and computer science.  And I fail to accept the idea that a doctor, dentist, scientist, or engineer doesn’t need to know how to express himself either verbally or via the written word—but maybe I’m biased.

The bottom line is that our educational system is following exactly the path that the 1% wants it to follow.  The elites have no desire to educate the masses.  People who can’t or don’t want to think are often slaves to their emotions and easily malleable.  They will believe what the elites tell them to believe.  They can even believe in contradictory things.  The elites don’t even want any of the upward mobility that our current systems, as bad as they are, provide.  Think about it.  Every revolution, from the American to the Russian and beyond, has been a change from one elite group to another.  The masses are just asked to do the fighting and fall in rank behind the leaders—the elites don’t fight their wars.  Washington and Bolivar were aristocrats.  Castro was the son of a wealthy plantation owner.

Perhaps if the masses were truly educated, if they really were reasoning human beings, they could rebel against this manipulation and wars would cease.  Perhaps not.  But we’ve never even given it a chance to happen.  And probably never will.

And so it goes….

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 15th, 2013 at 4:00 am and is filed under Education, Science, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.