The Educracy

After many years of reflection, I have come to realise that the vast bulk of the knowledge I use both privately and professionally has been amassed through private study. I like to read, and that has been where I have accumulated the knowledge that I use. The major exception is the low-level tech course I did, but even then the instructors themselves made it explicitly clear that you would learn far more in industry than any course could teach you, and that has been the case.

Of course, schools cannot teach people all the facts. It would be a boring world if you could learn everything about everything by the time you were 18. What they should be able to do is give their students the tools to learn the world for themselves: writing, reading, maths and intellectual curiosity. I think it is fairly clear to most, that the majority of students do not come away from school with any kind of intellectual curiosity, that they got from school. The ones who wanted to do science and learn more always did, and the ones who didn't never did.

What I'm building to is this: it is a waste of money spending thousands chasing the the lower end of the student body, to create the 'knowledge wave', which even if it has been dropped from official language is still the key principle guiding our education bureaucracy. It is the notion that if we can just get everyone to become brilliant intellectuals, we'll solve our problems by exporting profitable ideas. And it will never work, no matter how much money is spent on it.

What we need is the ability for students with talent and interest to access the paths to development, and for everyone else to be ready for the workplace, with functional maths and English. Now, there seems to have developed over time the notion that physical labour is not as rewarding as intellectual pursuits, either materially or intellectually. I'd suggest the origin of this notion is none other than over paid education bureaucrats, but I might be being uncharitable, it probably goes back to their predecessors, the aristocracy.

Ultimately, a child's education is in the hands of their parents and themselves, and it is not only useless trying to change their values if they are interested in physical things, it is decidedly counter-productive.