> From: Brian D Williams <talon57@well.com>
>> From: Miriam English <miriam@werple.net.au>
>
>> So you reckon that people at the bottom of the economic ladder
>> should get to send their kids to the same kind of school that they
>> do now but pay for it?
>
> They can send their kids to any school they can afford.
Which begs the question, how much school could they afford?
Seems to me that in a private setting education would be better
and cheaper, that is, if we are brave enough to separate in
our minds "education" and "schooling". Because of various
laws and regulations, and perhaps most importantly parenting
memes, private schools are largely run like public schools, so
the fact that the results are better, but not radically so should
hardly be a surprise. However, consider what might be possible
if we junked the old school mentality and used innovative techniques
to educate our children.
Someone pointed out earlier that a good foreign language school
can teach moderate fluency in a foreign language in an 80 hour
emersion course (probably with some additional homework.) Compare
that to school. I studied French for four years in school, three
hours a week, amounting to about 500 hours of instruction. After
all that, nobody would call me anything like moderately fluent
in French. But lets assume that that schooling achieved the same
results. That means that the public schools took six times as long
to achieve the same result. That is shockingly poor performance,
but hardly surprising to anyone who studies the efficiency of government
service provision.
Consider for a moment, if we could translate that into the whole
of education. Since there is great variation in subjects, lets
assume that the average is three times as efficient. (Is this reasonable?
I think it is more than generous. I remember reading, from a source
I don't have handy, that it takes about 100 hours of tutorial style
instruction -- spread over time -- to give a child literacy and
numeracy. The public schools take perhaps 6000 hours of instruction
-- six years of elementary school -- to do the same, that is, assuming
they do ever do achieve literacy and numeracy.)
If a child spends 12 years in school, and about 1000 hours of instruction
per year (35-40 weeks, at 30 hours per week), they receive 12,000 hours
of instruction total. By our improved efficiency that would mean a
more dynamic education methodology could provide the same instruction
in 4,000 hours (assuming it is three, as opposed to six times more
efficient.)
How much would that cost? Working in US dollars, if a teacher receives
a very generous salary of $75,000, plus they have to spend another $75,000
per year to provide a room, facilities, books etc., then our teacher
costs $150,000 per year. If they work a standard work year of 2,000 hours
then they cost $75 per hour (including facilities etc.) If they teach
a class of 20 students, that comes out to $3.75 per student per hour.
(Of course that doesn't mean that one teacher has to teach everything,
that is the average cost, regardless of how many teachers we actually
have.)
So our total cost for providing the equivalent of 12 years of public
school education is 4,000 x $3.75 = $15,000, which, is the equivalent
of $1,250 per year (over 12 years.)
We might also find that if the teacher had only 10 students in the class
that they might provide education twice as efficiently, meaning that
we could get the same level of education for the same cost in money, and
only half the cost in the child's time. (Though God forbid that we consider
the child's time an important factor.)
Lets say that this education method was concerned about poor people. In
such a case, they might charge $1,500 instead of $1,250, which would
generate a fund to allow 16% of their students to attend for zero cost.
Alternatively, the poor person might take a loan, collateralized on their
future employment prospects to pay the bill. Of course our parenting memes
kick in here, and we call this exploitation, but it is no more exploitation
than college loans or venture capital.
Such a system could never be run in the manner we do now. But there is
a big difference between schooling and education. Perhaps some education
companies might have an add on cost where they baby sit your kids for
the rest of the day. However, it seems to me that it would be far harder
to argue for a "right to a baby sitter" than it is to argue for a "right
to an education." Even so, baby sitters are generally a lot cheaper than
teachers.
How is it possible to educate kids three times more efficiently than
schools do? I'm not an educator, but some things are glaringly obvious
to me. The greatly improved use of technology, for example. Kids will
happily sit in front of a computer game for hours. It doesn't seem a
big step to mould that game around laudable educational goals. (I learned
to type with a game that dropped words down the screen Space Invaders
style, you had to type the word to destroy it.) Why doesn't the private
sector provide such software now? Well it does to an extent, however,
they have to compete with the education given by the public schools,
and it is very hard to compete against a competitor who charges zero cost.
(Hard, but not impossible.)
Another obvious area of improvement is the ridiculous notion of breaking
education up into subjects, and then breaking these subjects up into
one hour timeslots, spread meandering throughout the week. This is done
for the convenience of educators and manipulation of teachers unions --
a history teacher is a history teacher, he can't possibly teach geography.
However, it is easy to see how such a system could be made more efficient.
(This week is Africa week. Mr Smith will be talking about African history,
stop by when you like. Ms Jones will be discussing African Geography,
Ms Davis will discuss African money systems.) It is a fact that
home-schoolers
often operate in this way, much more efficiently than public schools.
Another obvious area of improvement is some of the tripe, political
correctness and "citizenship" baloney, that is motivated from an
indoctrinational point of view could, and should be, removed.
Also, need I point out that the "curriculum" ideal of school is based
on a ridiculous assumption, namely that kids of the same chronological
age learn every subject at the same rate. When I was a kid I think I
can fairly say that I was never challenged at all in school. Because
of that, it made me very lazy, sloppy and taught me to hate school as
boring and a waste of time. I often hear of kids who come home from
school with straight A's on their report card. Most parents think this
is wonderful and reward their kids in some way. I think that, if this
happens on a regular basis, it is terrible, because it indicates that
the child finds everything easy, and is never challenged. They handed
in all their homework on time, they did what the teacher asked them,
but that is hardly a measure of learning. (Of course the fault is with
the school not the student.)
One final, and obvious area of improvement is to leave kids alone. We
batter them with information 8 hours a day, then send them home with
three hours of homework. Kids, like adults, need time to process
information. They need to let their minds run free for a while. It
is my belief that this whole notion of forcing kids to treat school
like a profession is simply for the convenience of parents and schools.
Kids spend far too much time in school and not enough time playing,
thinking, talking with each other, investigating on their own, making
mud pies, playing with dolls and frogs and worms, raising gardens,
reading books they find interesting and lying in the back yard thinking
how much fun life is.
One need only look at the epidemic of ADD to see that little boys
in particular need to run in a meadow occasionally. It is torture
for some of them to sit bolted to a chair. However, we consider this
a fault of the child rather than the fool who makes him sit in the
chair. We have the audacity to drug these kids rather than adapt to
their peculiar educational needs. (I'm not, btw, saying that ADD
does not exist or that Ritalin should never be used. However, when
we diagnose 30% of our young boys as mentally disabled, then I think
we need to re-examine our definition of mentally disabled.)
The greatest crime of the public school system is not
that they don't educate our kids well (though they obviously don't)
but that they instill in the kids the idea that learning is difficult,
and a chore, and something to be avoided at all costs. Or worse still,
that learning is the same as schooling, that they are learning if they
submit their wills to the teacher, rather than opening their mind to
new ideas. From an extropian point of view, this borders on child
abuse.
Especially as we move into the modern world where everything is changing,
kids need, most of all, to learn how to learn, and to recognize that
learning is an exciting part of life, something that brings joy, not
something that is a torment. Public schools are designed to make
socialist, politically correct factory workers, not extropian, free
thinking, futurists.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:14 MDT