School's Out

From AlterNet:

Our high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don't just mean that they are broken, flawed and underfunded — although I can't argue with any of those descriptions.

What I mean is that they were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Today, even when they work exactly as designed, our high schools cannot teach our kids what they need to know.

Until we design high schools to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting — even ruining — the lives of millions of Americans every year. Frankly, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.

The idea behind the old high school system was that you could train an adequate workforce by sending only a small fraction of students to college, and that the other kids either couldn't do college work or didn't need to.

Sure enough, today only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work and citizenship.

Click here for the rest.

I'm sure this guy's heart is in the right place, but the problem with his analysis, as with virtually all mainstream analyses of public education, is that they accept the conventional wisdom that schools exist so that our students will become educated. The reality is that public education's main mission is to indoctrinate children into the culture of obedience and authority, and to preserve the existing class structure.

Don't get me wrong, some learning does, indeed, go on within our schools, but that's no surprise: schools have lots of books and stuff. Ultimately, the limited amount of learning taking place in the schools is simply a byproduct of a system that is to provide the illusion of education while performing its true function of creating a docile workforce. So the schools are doing quite well when measured by that standard. However, most people buy into the illusion. Consequently, public discussion about the schools is flawed from the get-go.

It's like trying to figure out why your car won't run, when that car is, in reality, a large cardboard box with the word "car" written on it. The problem isn't that the car won't run; it's that the "car" is a cardboard box. You can put wheels on it. You can put an engine in it. You might even be able to get it out of the driveway and into the street. But you just can't get past the fact that you're dealing with a cardboard box instead of a car. The fact that everybody believes it's a car doesn't matter. It's just a box. And it holds things quite nicely. It doesn't need to be fixed because it does that for which it was intended quite well.

If you don't buy my wacky assertions about the schools, check out this post from a while back, where I explain these ideas much more fully.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$