Mental Mutilation: The Mediocrity of K-12
I think a lot about education. This is probably to be expected, as I’ve made the beginnings of my career in higher ed. I’m surrounded by colleagues who are passionately dedicated to making learning better and the discussions I overhear can get pretty heated.
Yet, this isn’t anything new. I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about education.
When I was a boy, I hated school. Not because I didn’t respect the power of learning. I hated it because I desperately wanted to absorb every piece of human knowledge and schools were designed for some dull purpose entirely unrelated to that pursuit.
Sure, there was a bit of learning that happened occasionally. But the greater purpose of public education, as I view it in retrospect, seems to be more focused on the homogenization of young minds than in equipping them for a lifetime of growth.
In the United States, education forces our children along rigid, non-customized paths for at least six years of early life. Regardless of your talents or interests, you spend all of your time learning the exact same things as your peers. Think of this — six formative years, a tremendous span of opportunity, and it is squandered on one-size-fits-all busywork and enforcement of “color within the lines” thinking.
It misses the point that out-of-school activity gives these students the opportunity to diversify their lives in the few scraps of hours between their daily internment and dinner at home. The trouble is that school is a significant chunk of their waking lives and it is very likely to be time mostly wasted.
Would-be reformers of education share my fury at this reality . Yet I don’t hear much conversation surrounding the overall cause. That’s what I’ll talk about next.