Education Shmeducation

Education performs three basic functions:

A) The transmission of culture.
B) The transmission of knowledge.
C). Babysitting.

Needless to say these divisions are arbitrary.

By (A) I mean, basically, that besides from teaching "facts," schools, to some degree, exist to turn "kids" into adults. You can expand this to mean "American adults who can function in a democracy" and include saluting the flag, the four freedoms, etc—but the bottom line is your basic culturalization stuff. Standing in line, waiting your turn...people learning to live with people in a group.


Damned if I've ever seen anybody else write about this, but it seems like one of the big problems in schools is the fact that the students already have their own culture. The kids are their own tribe. They want to raise hell, hang out, party, etc. On the other hand...these boring adult types are droning on about chemistry, geography, history and all the crap.
Schools exist to turn kids into adults. 
There is a powerful kid subculture that works against that.


I've talked to a lot of people who've told me basically this: "Life sucks. I'm never going to get a good job. I'm never going to own my own home, own a decent car. Once I get out of high school/college...that's it. My life is over. I'm going to spend the rest of my live slaving away in some shit job. This is the last chance to enjoy myself I'm ever going to have so screw it, why should I study, why should I learn anything--I'm going to have fun while I can."


There's a war going on right now about what exactly our culture is. The left says the educational system has been a cunning ploy by rich white males to dupe the suffering masses into submission. 

But at the same time the legitimacy of school as a cultural-transmission institution is under attack, the institutions in our society that normally transmit culture (church, family, neighborhoods, etc) are failing. The teacher is given a raging mob of disaffected rebels and told to teach them "values."
Who's values? The values of the "dominant culture"...gasp!
Fascist decrees like "raise your hand to speak"

This puts teachers in a double bind. They're given a responsibility without the authority.

(B) By B) I mean both practical and abstract knowledge.
Thinking, of course, is really practical knowledge. Thinking is something to do, a series of skills that can be learned.
Our culture is anti-analytical. 

Skills. The big problem here is that most people come out of the educational system not knowing how to do anything. The curriculum is dumped on students in isolated, abstract chunks of facts. Here, says the school system, learn these facts, these facts are good for you. What's the point, says the average student...

So a mass of unemployables is continually being ejected into our culture--with destablizing results. Strictly speaking, no one is really responsible for teaching job skills. It isn't the employer's responsibility. The employer wants to hire somebody who already knows something and can already do something that will help him/her make money. Justly so. It isn't the government's responsibility. The educational system exits to teach insolated chunks of facts! We want to teach the joy of learning as a thing in itself...the pure Platonic joy of knowing facts-as-facts. All triangles have 180 degrees. How beautiful. How pure.

Vocational education is a joke.
The government's vocational education is pathetically underfunded and behind the times.
Vocational education is the private sector is largely the work of con artists.
What's left?
Well...get a job that you're not really qualified for and desperately try to figure out what you're doing and hope you don't get fired before you finally figure out what you're doing. 
There is also prison.

C) Babysitting. This is the absolute bare minimum of what the educational system actually has to do. Keep young bodies in buildings, off the streets, out of peoples' hair, and try to make sure they come out in one piece at the end of the day. It will take a helluva lot of educational cuts until this function starts to fail...but we're getting there.