The Solution to our Education System : There is none.

This post begins a series that I will pen (in theory only) to reveal the superficialities of my theory of pedagogy. I’ll point out what is wrong with the American Education System, as I now find myself to be firmly a part of it. My overall belief is that the system will never be fixed. To do so would require that many rich and powerful people losing their money and prestige, common folk accept extremely discomforting realities and the education system attempts to educate children rather than adhere to its historical purposes.

Education progresses cyclically. Every two decades or so a new revolution in reaching occurs which quickly claims to eradicate our education woes. The zealots of the movement cite some loosely related, over-reaching articles drawn from the social sciences to give credence to the unstoppable force that is this new theory. The fact that this approach to education mimics a previous failed approach never gets mentioned. Millions of dollars are spent in training, curriculum reform, textbook changes, and new school projects to accommodate the “new” untested solution which has won over a select group of bureaucrats and politicians, forced to make some change as inaction spells political suicide. Another massive failure reveals itself as false hope subsides, and another faux solution rises from the ashes of previous ineptitude.

Humans have been able to accomplish an awful lot. We’ve tackled seemingly more difficult problems than the question of how to properly educate our children. To invoke the mantra of every complaining S.O.B. on the face of the Earth, “We can send a man to the moon, but we can teach Johnny to add fractions?” In the face of such monumental failure to solve a problem well within our means to solve, it helps to examine the underlying axioms that theorists use. For centuries, astronomers were unable to explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury despite the extraordinary success of celestial mechanics. The problem, as Einstein eventually revealed, was that everyone operated with the innocuous and friendly assumption that time is an unyielding constant. Bad assumptions give you junk results every time. The educator’s assumption is just as seemingly benign as the physicist’s. Educational theorists began with the axiom, “There is a solution.”

Unfortunately, there isn’t.

Malcolm Gladwell touches on this same point in a TED talk (here if you’re interested). He talks about sauces, but the overarching principle remains valid. Social scientists have a nasty habit of treating people like physical scientists treat control populations: heterogeneous and indifferent to the act of observation and experimentation. However, an individual’s subjective evaluations vary remarkably from person to person. The population of people to be educated gives a myriad of differing curiosities, strengths, weaknesses, educational levels, social pressures, desires, career paths, learning styles, and reactions to stimuli. We’ve been operating as if we’ve failed because we’re trying to jam a round peg into a square hole. We could succeed if only we could find the right dimensions to carve. In reality, we’ve been trying to jam thousands of fractal images into neat polygons that we carve one at a time.

With this idea in mind, centralized academic control is a cancer to society. This isn’t a Republican talking point. I’m not suggesting that we just need to abolish the Department of Education, offer a voucher system, or let kids pray in the classroom. The issue is much, much deeper. This is an admonishment of private schools as much as it is of public schools. Returning education to State control would allow for some heterogeneous products. However, State’s are still behemoth sized beings. Most families do not have the fluidity necessary to move across State lines just for a set of educational standards. Add to it the fact that these would still be at the whim of feeble minded, reactionary bureaucrats and this is even less of a feasible solution.

To truly provide the diversity of instruction methods to meet the abound diversity of the individual, all forms of regulation on the delivery of knowledge must be eradicated. Education cannot exist alongside academic standards. All forms of (governmental) accreditation and certification must be thrown into the dustbin of history. Along with them must follow the laws which dictate mandatory attendance in institutions of learning.

This is the first step towards a coherent system of education with this one being more of an organization than a pedagogical nature. Nobody has the correct answer for how to educate the nation. The answer doesn’t exist. However, methods can be devised to educate the person, but the mechanics which will do so cannot operate bound to a small group of individuals’ preconceived notions of what is right or proper. This is not a free market argument. The nature of the individual dictates this regardless of what economic system is actually ideal.