Mind's Eye The Minority Report

The more experience of education I get, the less respect I have for it.  I believe we should all get more opportunity for education, but also that most of what is on offer is part of a dreadful control fraud.  There is an urgent need for a substantial minority report that doesn't treat our schools and universities as sacrosanct.  My own belief is they do us great damage.

Most people don't do well at school and don't get to university.  If we take IQ as a reasonable measure (it isn't in the end) we find most people aren't going to find university education much use to them.  It was designed for people with high IQ above 115.  This is a small percentage and we aren't much good at increasing IQ.  In recent times, we have increased the percentage of kids who can get into university, largely by dropping standards to qualify more at school and college.  We may have gotten much better at teaching, but I've seen no sign of this.

What is obvious around the world is that the prestige of your education is more important than content.  We still have an elite being put through very expensive schools and Ivy League institutions.  Science remains largely unknown.

Schools and universities are not much about education.  If they were, then all of us would be able to tell the story of it going dark and night and hence big bang.  Very few know even something as basic as this.  Child-minding is the most essential function.  Indoctrination and socialisation is next.  Increasingly, we hear it is all about preparation for jobs.

If we started again, what kind of education would we design?  One that leaves thick kids with, say, autistic spectrum disorder, to the wonders of a basket-weaving future in a world in which baskets are better made by machines?  Or one that trains the 'smart' to make it politically incorrect to call them 'thick kids' but leave the 'educationally challenged' to the same fate?  An education that leaves us voting on the economy, yet not knowing how one works (this is peculiarly true of economists)?

Anyone any ideas?  Probably not, you all went to school!   

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