Education: There’s a Better Way….Find it.

Nobody’s Opinion

Not many candidates are talking about our very poor educational system. They all give lip service to it, but the fact is, it’s an overgrown behemoth bureaucracy  of cancerous stagnation, that decade by decade, does nothing but leave too many forever in “service” jobs.

If you watched this video you cannot but conclude that: maybe that’s the plan.  

As the film suggest: the problems of our education or lack of thereof, has not been a big concern of our government. It’s NEVER been on the top of any party’s agenda: the subject is dropped once the President gets in office. The reason: unions and the money they supply.

George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” was noble in thought, it’s just that the schools had already left everyone behind so badly, nobody could catch up. 

Higher education may be no better off. Both the so-called best online colleges and the so-called best traditional colleges are still not serving students well. Thirty percent of college and university students drop out after their first year. Half of all students never graduate.

Still, despite the odds, there are some who do not let our poor educational system get in their way.

There was a small piece tonight on Sixty Minutes about an autistic boy savant named Jake, who was going to graduate from college at age 14. He excels in higher mathematics.  He had an unbelievable memory, which helped, but it was his passion and his love of numbers that is driving him to be probably the next Einstein.

Not all of us are born with “supercharged” memories in our brains. As Thomas Edison once said, “We have to learn how to think.”

“I am frequently asked about our system of education. I say that we have none. Our system is a relic of past ages. It consists of parrot-like repetitions. It is a dull study of twenty-six hieroglyphs.”

“Groups of hieroglyphs. That is what the young of this present day study. Here is an object. I place it in the hands of a child. I tell him to look at it. If we begin before we have hardened and dried his mind he studies the object with kindling enthusiasm. The mind of the child is naturally active. Why should we make him take his impressions of things through the ear when he may be able to see?”

 (Later he claims that’s why he invented motion pictures…to teach.)

“The folds of the brain grow deeper through observation; they grow fallow from disuse. If we educate too abruptly–if we cram the mind with facts memorized for themselves alone, what comes? Pure atrophy.”

“The trouble with our educating as generally followed is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mould. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and lays more stress on memory than observation.”

He goes on to say what happens to our kids from not being challenged but rather…bored to death:

Bad teaching promotes: “A flagging interest, which leads quickly to the habit of listening without hearing, of looking without regard to the existence or non-existence of interest. At present, most young leave their schools only partially educated, and rapidly forget a large part of that which they have been taught. They fail to learn because the methods of teaching are wrong. They forget because the methods of instruction have made them actually dislike knowledge. “

Now, remember, this was back in Edison’s day.

He goes on:

“Universities fail: Careful thought convinces me that this is because the men who run them never have been out in the great world of struggle. Professors usually are men untried in any sort of competition comparable with that which their students eventually must face. Speaking generally, such men cannot impart the right ideas to the boys, for they themselves are ignorant.”

Nobody Thinks this is one of the very reason we have failed in America: Too many of our teachers know nothing about the everyday world, or even how to use the subject they are teaching in the real world.

Not many algebra teachers can tell you HOW to use algebra, or why—or even who uses it and when. I know, I’ve asked almost every algebra teacher I ever knew, and they had no clue.

Too many of our leaders come from some of these many ignorant teachers, most of them from Harvard, who Henry Adams trashed with delightful abandon in “The Education of Henry Adams.” (You can imagine how I loved that.)

For instance: Daddy Bush, a Harvard alumni, while President, had never been in a grocery store. He was shocked, when he visited one, at the price of bread, and how the items were scanned by the cashier.

 It’s hard to believe, how removed from ordinary life some of these people are.

Can you imagine what Edison would think of the schools system we have now? Where kids are not only not being taught how to think, they are being stuffed with meaningless crap like: recycling, diversity, global warming, sex, gender issues, and the trashing of our own history?

All you have to do is watch Jay Leno’s boardwalk to see all the college graduates who don’t even know how many moons the earth has.

“The main objection that I have against a college graduate is that he objects to work, especially if it is dirty. He does not want a job with much work to it, and when he does get a position, he expects to be appointed foreman at the end of the sixth week. Most of the men working for me have never gone to college. Those college graduate that I have usually show a lack of imagination. They scarcely have any suggestions to make in their daily routine which might lead to improvement in their various departments. “

And so, we are ruled by those Harvard constitutional lawyers who “scarcely have any suggestions to make their daily routine which might lead to improvement in their various departments.”

Nobody Thinks…that’s also the point: the daily routine of our leaders can’t get much better, and that’s why “we the people” need to think: Do I leave my child’s education to the public school system?

Or is there a better way?

“There is always a way to do it better..find it.”…Tom Edison.

January 15, 2012 Posted by Joyanna Adams | education, Uncategorized | College, education, politics, The rich elites, Thomas Edison, Unions | 2 Comments