American Mis-education

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”
— Albert Einstein

INTRODUCTION
Children in America deserve a proper education, education that promotes individual rights, critical thinking, creativity and productiveness. The public school movement has hi-jacked our children and are promoting socialization and mind-numbing, dumbed-down schooling aimed at those least interested in learning. We do not want the primary mission of our schools to create just more tractable citizens, inculcating social values and respect for authority. It is time to get control and turn schools into places of learning that prepares children for productive lives in a challenging modern world that increasingly requires better intellectual preparation.

See the history of public education in the USA Wikipedia.

The school system in the USA is

1. Compulsory
2. Funded by taxes
3. Unionized
4. Over-loaded with administrators
5. Wasteful and costly
6. Progressive rather than Classical or Objectivist

COMPULSORY
Public education reigns. In most states, if parents home-school their children, their curriculum must be certified, in some states the parent must be a certified teacher (state_regulations). This discourages home schooling. The same regulation applies largely to private schools. The encroachment of these controls will likely increase.

The fact remains: it is required that all children from grade 1 level to grade 12 receive a state-approved education. And the vast majority of children “choose” to attend public schools. It is already paid for, after all, when you have paid your taxes. There is no need to shell out additional money for private schooling when the public school is in effect “free.”

If perchance the "school choice" movement should succeed in removing the cost obstable to non-public schooling, it would no doubt be in the form of vouchers or another form of handouts. And in time, since there would be strings attached, the realm of private education could easily come under the total control of teachers unions and government. That would not be the Libertarian way out.

TAXATION
Most public school funding comes from property taxes. This might seem to single out and discriminate against owners of private homes. Not so, for owners of apartment buildings pay property taxes as well – on top of income tax on the rent collected – and are bound to pass on this cost to the customers in the form of higher rent.

Take a close look at suburban schools compared to inner city schools: regardless of revenue sharing, they are by no means providing the same results. Inner city schoolchildren get much lower national test scores than suburban children. Many more inner city children drop out of schools. Massive attempts at diversification by using expensive busing systems to get poor children out of the lower quality schools has not yielded any improvement. However, school budgets have grown. (See Waste and Cost, below)

TEACHERS’ UNIONS
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public education is one of the most unionized industries in America. This is particularly true of public school teachers. About 63 percent of all public school teachers are union members. This compares to 44 percent of all public education employees and 37.5 percent of public employees.” (From the Public Service Research Foundation). Many teachers would prefer the status of professionals instead of union membership, but we must assume that they do not have a choice or are forced to join the union by law.

ADMINISTRATIVE IMBALANCE
Whereas in private schools the number of active teachers to administrative and support staff is usually 5 to 1, the U.S. public schools system has a ratio close to one to one, per the U.S. Department of Education

Granted that some justification can be shown for librarians, counselors, nurses, psychologists, and the like, full-time positions for these seem excessive.

WASTEFUL AND COSTLY
“The cost of attending private schools (K-12) in the San Francisco East Bay counties of Alameda and Contra Costa is much more affordable than commonly believed," according to data collected by the Independent Scholarship Fund (ISF) and national studies.

For the whole country (in a more fair comparison): according to the U.S. Department of Education, the average private school charged $4,689 per student in tuition for the 1999-2000 school years. That same year, the average public school spent $8,032 per pupil. (Capitalism Magazine)

In addition to this, it is shocking to see how the cost of public education rises hugely even while school enrollment falls. National statistics show this:

School year	Total Expenditures 1	Cost per Pupil	Enrollment	Teachers
1910	$447	$25	17814000	523000
1920	$1,036	$48	21,578,000	680,000
1930	$2,317	$90	25,678,000	854,000
1940	$2,344	$92	25,434,000	875,000
1950	$5,838	$232	25,111,000	914,000
1960	$15,613	$433	36,087,000	1,387,000
1970	$40,683	$877	45,550,000	2,131,000
1980	$95,962	$2,290	40,189,000	2,300,000
1990	$211,731	$5,149	40,543,000	2,528,000
2000 2	$333,828	$8,032	47,159,681	3,381,000

From IES US Dept of Education National Center for Educational Statistics
1 Total expenditures in millions
2 for the year 2000 the sources are other documents from the same organization: 1, 2, 3, 4.

The above data are graphically displayed thus:

School costs have risen seven-fold during this period, the number of students has just doubled.

And the number of teachers has also risen almost seven-fold.

 

Have the results risen at all?  The scores in reading, writing, math and science are quite flat or show extremely small improvements.

Why would this be?

PROGRESSIVE RATHER THAN CLASSICAL OR OBJECTIVIST
The American public school system was created to fill a need. Many children were not receiving any education. Rather than starting a few schools where none were available or providing scholarship funds to enable the children of the poor to attend the private schools, a completely new system was created.

It began in Massachusetts in the early 1800s with a growing interest among the Unitarians and others at Harvard College in providing a uniform education to all children in that state. The model they chose was derived from Robert Owen’s mining town schools in Scotland and the Prussian academies, which heavily stressed orderly behavior and civility. Initially the content or curriculum was probably unremarkable and included classical topics, reading, writing, mathematics and religion (a non-sectarian type but basically Protestant). Later in the 18th century behavior became a more dominant theme, stressing play, socialization and cooperative behavior.

Classical education presents students with methods and subjects appropriate to their age, each building on the previous stage, while requiring good behavior as well. Grammar precedes Logic, Critical and Creative Thinking and Persuasion follows. Each new level builds on the previous. The end result is a well-trained mind. For more on this, refer to Capitalism Magazine.

The sad history of how this developed, and more, can be found in the well-researched book “Is Public Education Necessary?" The long trail takes us back to the Unitarians who built Harvard College, Richard Owen of Scottish industrialism, the militaristic Prussian academies, the Americans Horace Mann and the founder of the philosophy school of Pragmatism, John Dewey. The earmark of success in education was not one’s ability to think critically and master one’s world, but to become socialized and to do what works. Conceptual thinking was gradually replaced by concrete-bound viewing and listening to everything, an ocean of perceptions, avoiding the letters of the alphabet and their sounds in order to focus on words (even guessing the word is fine).

“The classical method develops independent learning skills on the foundation of language, logic, and tangible fact. . . . Classical education teaches students facts, provides them with logical tools to use those facts, and perfects the student’s ability to relate those facts to others. This fundamental skill-set is more valuable today than it has ever been. . . . Classical education helps students draw original, creative, and accurate conclusions from facts and then formulate those conclusions into logical and persuasive arguments.” Foundations Academy

There are serious problems, not only with Progressive education but also with Classical education. While a child who is educated under the Classical method is not commonly ignorant of major historical events and lacking in understanding of the value of liberty and the political forces that endanger it, like too many who came out of Progressive schools, their minds are still not as well prepared for life as we would like.

A proper grasp of the relationship of concepts to reality, of sound logic and of the hierarchic structure of concepts (from myriads of percepts to more and more abstract concepts), is essential to a good education. The best foundation for this is Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. This philosophy is based on the existence of reality independent of the human mind, that human consciousness can know what exists and by using reason, integrate perceptions into concepts, find out how things work, create new things using this knowledge.
In her own words, from her shortest summary of her philosophy, Ayn Rand wrote:

“1. Reality exists as an objective absolute-facts are facts, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes, or fears.

“2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses) is man's only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

“3. Man – every man – is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

“4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting" to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.” Los Angeles Times on June 17, 1962

CONCLUSION
Education has fallen into the hands of a great power in this country. Government is co-opting of the responsibilities of parents and of teachers directly responsible to the parents have created an institution only rivaled by government itself. The American school system with its powerful teachers’ unions runs the show. Do not be surprised if private schooling begins to seriously decline before the onslaught of this juggernaut, the institution of the American public school system.

The result of compulsory education by this institution is generation after generation of twisted minds unable to think critically, relying on social consensus and obedience to authority for establishing knowledge, rather than rational thinking about reality.

All of this is happening at incredible costs, ever growing out of all proportion to the results. Student enrollments may decline, but the number of school employees and budgets increase. How can this country recapture our children and truly educate them?

“The proper goal of education is to foster the conceptual development of the child—to instill in him the knowledge and cognitive powers needed for mature life. It involves taking the whole of human knowledge, selecting that which is essential to the child’s conceptual development, presenting it in a way that allows the student to clearly grasp both the material itself and its value to his life. It thereby supplying him with both crucial knowledge and the rational thinking skills that will enable him to acquire real knowledge ever after. This is a truly progressive education—and parents and students should settle for nothing less.” The Objective Standard.

The future success of individuals in life, and the future of this country depends on properly raising and educating our young. Adopting a sound conceptual and rational educational program would both link us with America’s founders and prepare us for the future as a free and creative people. Schools need to be voluntary, privately funded, with a reasonable teachers to administrators ratio, economical and based on a rational view of man.