The hidden agenda of the education system

[Mysterio448]

Recently, I have gone through a personal crisis involving a landlord from a previous apartment I lived in. I won't go over the details, but the gist of the situation is that I got screwed over. Reflecting on the situation, I realized that I got screwed over because of some simple, basic things about renting that I didn't know and only found out after it was too late. This information, although simple, was not intuitive; it was something I needed to be told. I thought to myself, "Why was I never taught this in school?" I began to reflect on the things I was taught in school, and I realized that the large majority of it was information that has never proven useful to me. And yet, there appears to be a great many things that are much more useful and practical which was never even mentioned in school. I found it strange to think about all the time and hard work I put into learning difficult concepts in math and science, the headaches induced by arduous math problems and homework, only to find out that all this effort and sacrifice has born very little fruit.

I pondered why the educational system is set up this way, putting so much focus on subjects that ultimately prove impractical. Why was school such a waste of time? Why was I taught so many difficult yet useless concepts, all the while kept ignorant of simple and useful concepts? I eventually came up with a theory as to why this is the case. It goes as follows. There are two possible goals for a nation's educational system: to teach students for the students' own edification or to teach students for the edification of the nation – in other words, the good of the individual or the good of the collective. My theory is that the American educational system is set up to benefit the nation as a whole. What do I mean by this? Well, the school subjects that are focused on the most are generally math and science. There is a reason for this. The comprehension of math and science are what fuels scientific development. It is how we have developments in the manufacturing industry, public infrastructure, architecture, engineering, computer technology, consumer and military technology, medical advancements, pharmaceuticals, etc. These things benefit the country in regards to national wealth, international trade, and military superiority.

All this sounds like a great idea, but there's one problem with this educational model. Even though the sciences are beneficial to the national as a whole, this benefit only comes through individual scientists. And there is only a small minority of the nation's students who will actually grow up to be scientists. Most kids are simply not smart enough. So what we end up with is an educational system that is essentially trying to indoctrinate all kids to be scientists, even though only a minority of them – the smart kids – will actually reach that goal. The average kids and dumb kids will then be left with a head full of complicated, abstract facts that they have no use for, as the average and dumb kids will likely gravitate to nonscientific jobs: janitors, food service, cashiers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, police officers, mail carriers, etc. This "collective model" of education is a kind of trade-off: it sacrifices the unremarkable many on behalf of the remarkable and influential few.

Now, if the educational system was oriented more towards the "individual model," it might emphasize subjects such as health and nutrition, finance management, investing, entrepreneurship, logic, interpersonal communication skills, public speaking, etc. Students would learn about the law and their legal rights and how to win a court case. They would learn first aid skills, CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, self-defense, and other survival skills. Such skills and information are beneficial primarily to the individual rather than the collective. There is a small number of classes in school that actually do function along this model: physical education/gym class is one example, sexual education class is another – however, these classes often tend to be pushed to the side in the school curriculum. Shop class is an old-fashioned class that also fits into this model, but is rarely employed anymore. These types of classes prove useful and practical to all students, not just the smart ones.


I once had a conversation with an elementary school teacher who said she felt that her job was insignificant compared to teachers who teach more advanced subjects, such as high school and college teachers. I told her that this could not be further from the truth. In elementary school, you learn your alphabet, how to read, how to write, do arithmetic, how to count, spelling and grammar – all very important and practical skills in life. As a matter of fact, I probably do all of these things every day; on the other hand, I can't recall the last time I ever used, say, algebra or trigonometry in a practical situation.

My argument is that the educational system should employ the individual model instead of the collective. Instead of focusing on advanced levels of education, we should teach practical skills and reinforce the skills we learned in elementary school. Reinforce language skills and arithmetic, further develop reading skills. At a fairly early stage in schooling, kids stop being taught how to read because it is assumed their knowledge is complete; they stop learning to read and begin just reading to learn. But I would suggest that maybe as far as in high school, students should still be taught reading, focusing on things like comprehension, recall, and speed. Instead of teaching students a comprehensive variety of subjects or advanced level of subjects, schools should simply strengthen the basics.

If you spend some time around young people, it will eventually occur to you which of them will clearly not be growing up to be scientists. So why should schools force them along that path? I would argue that schools should separate the smart students from the average and dumb students. The smart kids can then go on to learn advanced subjects in addition to the basic subjects. Meanwhile, the average and dumb students should just focus on the basics. If any of the average or dumb students are interested in learning the advanced subjects, they can always just go to college and learn it there. K-12 school is compulsory (i.e., coerced), and therefore we should not be wasting kids' time and spending taxpayer money coercing kids to learn things that have no practical value to them.

Do you agree with my theory? Is the educational system too oriented towards the collective? Is it fine just the way it is? What are your thoughts?

[Hereandnow]

I don't see that it is so much an education to be scientist. Sure, there is a science requirement, but the core program is history, math, PE, English, foreign language; you know,everything, and science is just a part.
I have never approved of stratifying kids according to testing. They should be allowed to flourish and flounder in the broad social context, and find themselves and their place in this. I do think it's a good idea let strengths in individual mentalities play out more fully, as an athlete is allowed to play ball, but there is a lot of time at home for personal interests to grow and find expression.
I do fear this: start letting the education system systematically omit curricular themes, themes like social studies and theory (which should be given greater emphasis across the board), just to allow someone to spend more time in shop class, and you and up with a formula for a disfunctional democracy. Kids need to learn how to think morally to vote properly, to understand what it means to be a person. Philosophy classes should be compulsory at the third year of high school.
Education is NOT exclusively for making a productive citizen.

[Count Lucanor]

Do you agree with my theory? Is the educational system too oriented towards the collective? Is it fine just the way it is? What are your thoughts?

Modern educations systems are designed mostly for training the work force and sustaining the social institutions that the power structure has defined as fundamental for its goals. In that sense they are oriented collectively, but not necessarily for the common good, but the good of those in power.

[Sy Borg]

I have wondered about this, why so much important everyday information is not taught.

The educational system has not adapted to the new world. In the old days many of these things would be taught to younglings by parents. Today, parents are struggling to keep abreast with systemic changes, as are teachers. So there is a gap. I agree that it is high time schools started to teach more life skills relevant to surviving in society. How to save, to structure finances, investing, finding, renting and buying a place to live, how to manage difficult relationships in a modern world, etc.

Given that work is increasingly being given to intelligent machines, workforce training per se will be increasingly irrelevant. Ironically, about the only way that the education system will properly keep pace with the pace of change is if it is run on a screen by AI that adapts the syllabus and testing in real time, for extreme errors in the texts, and regularly reviewed each semester.

Education has been underfunded in the west for many years, with predictable results - as George Carlin put it - producing people who are just smart enough to run the machines but not smart enough to see through the propaganda of deeply biased and ethically suspect outlets like Fox.

[Hereandnow]

"producing people who are just smart enough to run the machines but not smart enough to see through the propaganda of deeply biased and ethically suspect outlets like Fox."
Brilliant.

[Sy Borg]

That's rationalism for you, HAN - all the good stuff is progressively rationed, budget trim after budget trim, to the barest (cheapest) minimum possible.

AI will change this dynamic, though. It looks to me that "the masses", in lieu of being useful as players in industry, will increasingly be thought of by societal organisers as "cattle" from whom information is "milked" (eg. marketing), or they will be thought of as vermin.

The poor are currently undergoing the kind of "demotion" experienced by dominant species that were supplanted by the rise of humanity.

[Hereandnow]

Greta:
That's rationalism for you, HAN - all the good stuff is progressively rationed, budget trim after budget trim, to the barest (cheapest) minimum possible.

AI will change this dynamic, though. It looks to me that "the masses", in lieu of being useful as players in industry, will increasingly be thought of by societal organisers as "cattle" from whom information is "milked" (eg. marketing), or they will be thought of as vermin.

The poor are currently undergoing the kind of "demotion" experienced by dominant species that were supplanted by the rise of humanity.

The kind of things revolutions are made of. Wickedly scary!

[Sy Borg]

Greta:
That's rationalism for you, HAN - all the good stuff is progressively rationed, budget trim after budget trim, to the barest (cheapest) minimum possible.

AI will change this dynamic, though. It looks to me that "the masses", in lieu of being useful as players in industry, will increasingly be thought of by societal organisers as "cattle" from whom information is "milked" (eg. marketing), or they will be thought of as vermin.

The poor are currently undergoing the kind of "demotion" experienced by dominant species that were supplanted by the rise of humanity.

The kind of things revolutions are made of. Wickedly scary!

Heh, I am not worried. As always, each generation will have a new definition of "normal" and adjust their expectations accordingly. I suggest that, to a fair extent, the (mythological) frog in boiling water analogy will apply. Also, as with every generation, there will be the more forward-lookin thinkers who will more clearly notice what is happening and issue warnings and, as always, they will be ignored and, as always, even though it's never pretty, everything still seems to work itself out :)

[Hereandnow]

Temperature's rising. Trump elected to a second term? I hopping out.

[LuckyR]

What the OP is proposing is old school tracking or the trade school/apprentice model. Been there, did that. Knowing the nuances of renting apartments or leasing cars or selecting among credit cards is the responsibility of parents, not schools.

The US already lags in upward mobility, what does anyone think it will be if folks are tracked early on into the "janitorial" track?

[Sy Borg]

What the OP is proposing is old school tracking or the trade school/apprentice model. Been there, did that. Knowing the nuances of renting apartments or leasing cars or selecting among credit cards is the responsibility of parents, not schools.

The US already lags in upward mobility, what does anyone think it will be if folks are tracked early on into the "janitorial" track?

Parents tend to have dated information, especially with the increasing rate of change.

Janitorial duties of the future will surely increasingly be automated. I think it's more that people will not have any track and will thus be like children being looked after by our creations. One thing that each human has that any overarching AI / corporations will lack is the singular perspective of an individual, which of course is what marketers today are constantly probing in a fairly unsophisticated manner. The masses seemingly will effectively be farmed for their information by AI that will consume and process that information as we consume food.

Not easy to devise an optimal education system during a time of such rapid systemic and demographic change.

[Steve3007]

Not easy to devise an optimal education system during a time of such rapid systemic and demographic change.

Indeed.

I take the point of the OP about teaching relevant life-skills and to a large extent agree. But one problem with school-level education is the long time scale. School-level education is not like training for a job. It's difficult to predict the specifics of the job my 9 year old son will be doing if he's still working at my age. I am teaching him software design, but even in that seemingly relatively modern discipline the specific skills required in the next few decades are difficult to predict. The language we use (C#) may not be around in the future, although the language on which it is based (C) has been around almost as long as me, and the principles of algorithms and algebra on which almost all programming languages are based have been around even longer. The more abstract and non-specific the skill, the greater its longevity. That's one reason why some schools still teach Latin even though nobody actually speaks it as an everyday language any more. (That and the fact that it sounds like you're clever if you say "caveat emptor" instead of "buyer beware".)

I think that is one of the arguments for teaching such apparently irrelevant subjects as algebra and trigonometry. I still use both of them very frequently in my work, and, unlike C#, they're not going to be obsolete any time soon.

[Steve3007]

I suppose one approach to education in schools could be to recognise that these more abstract skills (e.g. Latin and Algebra) that form the basis of more immediately relevant and concrete skills (e.g. Spanish and software design) are useful only to a relatively small subset of the population, so they should only be taught to that small subset. The rest of the population should learn only the things that are more directly relevant to specific, immediate challenges. That is closer to how it was done in the past when only a small section of the population stayed on in education beyond the age of about 11 or 12 and the rest left school and started working and training in a specific job.

The problem is that it's difficult to tell in advance who that small subset is going to be. In the past it was often assumed that it would always be the children of the rich or the "upper classes" and that the rest were genetically pre-determined to do low-skilled labour. Now that we know better than that we have the concept of "social mobility", which is really just a recognition of the fact that the larger the pool of potential talent you have to choose from the more talent you will find, and the challenge of realising it.

So we give a little taste of the abstract skills to as large a proportion of the population as possible to see who bites. The ideal (I think) is to give just enough of a taste to spot the aptitude/interest and decide to give more than just a taste, but not so much that it interferes with the ability to learn more practical things.

That's my defence of learning things in school that you never use again.

[Hereandnow]

What seems to be missing is the very dangerous business of teaching how to be an enlightened person, one who is not swayed by the clever sophistry of greedy minds that tries to make the weak argument appear strong. This takes philosophy and the liberal arts. These should be a major focus of public education, lest the minds of the citizenry turn to trivia.

Let's prepare for the new society in which machines take over the tedious affairs of production while we are free to read, and think, and do science, a do and appreciate the arts, and conceive of a brave new world!

We need fewer plumbers and more philosophers (turning the tables on Rubio).

[Steve3007]

Since he started at secondary school last year my eldest son has had philosophy lessons as part of the school curriculum. It hasn't noticeably turned his mind away from trivia yet. But I guess Rome wasn't built in a day.