rethinking daycare for dimwits

the enstupiding of the american educational system

if one aspired to the long term destruction of a society, it would be difficult to improve upon “turning its institutions of learning into calamitous clown colleges whose output lacks basic skills or grounding” and then mandating that all children participate in that system for an enormous portion of their childhood.

this is painfully obvious to anyone who cares to spend more than a cursory moment thinking about it and yet somehow we keep doing the same things over and over and expecting some sort of better result.

but better is not coming and it’s not going to come until we radically rethink the manner in which we think about education.

class is in session

i have spoken in the past about how the US university system has become a pay for play cargo cult of fake degrees for fake learning for people whom it will never really benefit in any way. it’s just lake wobegon warehousing and credentialling building unrealistic hopes and debt levels.

we’re reaching a point where the whole affair has become outright embarrassing. the “democratization of college” whereby what was once an institution for the top 5% of humans has become one catering to a full 50% as some sort of daycare for dimwits lovechild with “rules for radicals” has turned universities into a joke and in increasingly unfunny one at that.

these institutions are manifestly unfit for purpose and cannot possibly be fixed until their standards are.

consider:

i get that they almost certainly go looking for the stupidest possible people for these videos and edit them into a highlight reel of ostentatious ignorance, but ask yourself in all seriousness: even in light of that,

how is this possible?

how is a single one of these people in college?

there is a severe problem here and past a point it becomes recursive. the young lady on the right is studying “elementary education.” she has no idea who the US fought in the revolutionary war. she guesses “spain” and laughs putting on the “i’m so stupid and it’s so cute” giggle affect of the actual idiot, but would this be in any way funny to you if she were teaching your kids?

again, and in all candor, what the actual fudge is going on here? this simply should not be possible. how did these people graduate from grade school, much less high school? how were they allowed entry into college?

i’m stumped. dozens, perhaps hundreds of educational professionals have seen these people, signed off on them, given them passing grades and promoted them onward into the next years and categories of school. how?

how does one produce a system so broken that its product is this?

it’s really pretty simple: this is the DEI/woke mind virus eating education.

it exists because it’s allowed and it’s allowed because there is a simple and ineffaceable truth about the world:

“any system that is not consciously and deliberately a meritocracy will become an anti-meritocracy.”

this is not up for debate. it’s just emergent fact. as soon as you put people in charge of anything for reasons other than “they are good at it” and make the desired outcome of a system anything other than “competence and achievement” you get a system that will focus on creating failure.

every incompetent person will only hire and promote people less competent than they are in order to protect their own position. B’s hire C’s, C’s hire D’s, and on down the chain until you have eliminated all capability and start to measure to standards that make zero sense and demand an end to any sort of actual testing or objective metrics.

then the wokster warlord weingarten union, paid and egged on by government DEI grants and noxious NGO intervention, shows up to push curriculums of “anything but learning” and your goose is well and truly cooked.

really think about this. no students, not one, can read at grade level at these schools.

consider how many people had to fail to create that outcome. students, teachers, administrators, politicians, departments of education, the size of it is staggering. the money spent to no good purpose is staggering. it’s just hyper-expensive daycare for ding=dongs, crushing all aspiration and achievement and socially promoting kids who lack even basic skills.

what possible chance do they have when fed into the greedy maw of the AFT local 1 who claims they just need more money to fix this problem?

this is a real sign. it’s held by a teacher who claims to be “underpaid.” i mean, how much more proof does anyone need that the system is entirely broken?

this teacher would fail 4th grade english.

here are the hard facts:

the world is now global. competition is global. innovation is global. we need to advance our best and brightest and give them the tools they need to make it in that competitive arena. it’s the whole ballgame. and the US educational system has been infiltrated by wreckers and cannot possibly serve that purpose any longer.

it needs to be ended.

the whole idea of public schools needs to be ended. it was never about teaching. all the way back to bismark, it was about indoctrinating. and we just don’t need it anymore. it serves less than no purpose and does FAR more harm than good. the best case outcome is emergent incompetence and the worst is outright capture by those seeking to render ignorant and indoctrinate the kids of america. the wastes of time and treasure are astonishing and the whole of the system is an anachronism organized around kinds of scarcity than have not existed for decades.

consider:

why did we have universities? why were they necessary? they began as seminaries to train a clerisy. they grew into collections of academics in a variety of fields and sciences because clustering knowledge was vital to providing access to it. the only way to gain the obscure learnings of august professors in funny hats was to go to where they were and partake of their tutelage face to face in real time. the libraries of universities were full of books and books were rare, writings hoarded and parceled out only to worthy acolytes.

all that is over now.

“library” is an anachronism. information is everywhere and basically free. you can learn anything you want from basically anywhere and it’s getting easier every 30 seconds as new AI models drop and domain coverage from them explodes. you can easily communicate and collaborate with people all over the world. information once so rare as to be borderline occult is now always on instant access through grok or chat GPT. you can probably get a better education with a $100 a month in AI and X subscriptions and arguing economics online than just about any undergrad econ department in the world.

the dirty secret is that top universities were never about the professors and the curriculum. they were about the students. the value of their degrees was not in what you learned there, it was them selling you a diploma that attested to what a high caliber person you were and that you had the gumption to make it through a rigorous selector and coursework.

but even that has become a joke. standards have slipped so far in the DEI devolution that even the absolute top of the pile now has kids who can’t do 7th grade math. so what then is the fricking point? because i’m increasingly not seeing much of one.

the enstupiding and nerfing of schools and universities has made them nothing but fading brands for faded products.

it’s time to really take a clean sheet of paper here and rethink how this works. “public school” has become a public menace and “college” has mostly become a scam. neither suits any meaningful purpose for most kids. i doubt that even 50% of americans are well served by a 12 year school track. i doubt that more than 5 or 10% should consider college. requiring it and shoveling the unmotivated and unprepared into the forms of school that have become so bereft of substance is just an extended exercise in pushing on a string.

it’s potemkin education, fake schoolhouses full of fake students aspiring to fake credentials that map to nothing. and so we get “elementary education” majors who think we declared independence from spain and everyone just sort of giggles.

i watch the children of my friends who home school get more done in 3 hours a day than public schools can in 7 or 8. most of public school has become alarmingly expensive mal=socialization and warehousing of kids.

end it. all of it.

here’s my plan:

you’re never going to make “ending public role in schools” politically palatable, it’s too big a hostage puppy, so move to full vouchers as an attainable alternative and get the government out of the business of providing education. fund students, not systems. every kid gets money. go spend it on any education that seems fitting. school, trade school, even internships and apprenticeships. you can literally use it to go learn to be a plumber or and engineer or whatever else looks fruitful by paying a professional to teach you.

vitally, teaching needs to resume moving at very different levels. you cannot teach the best and brightest in a curriculum and pace that the 30th percentile can keep up with. you need to let them run hard and learn fast. it’s the core intellectual capital of america and stifling these student out of some misbegotten fantasy about “equity” is grossly unfair to them. this is why experimentation and leveling and standards based acceptances are so vital here and why DEI has so badly damaged once elite schools. you cannot run them for dimwits without sacrificing the bright lights.

full freedom and competition fixes this.

no system is perfect. sure, people are going to mess it up and do dumb stuff and get bad educations in some cases, but ask yourself: worse than this? because this is a real teacher and this is what the kids are getting now. honestly, given a month to shop, could you find worse value for money?

so how do we measure it and see how it’s working and what it’s producing?

create a serious and nuanced set of standardized tests for reading, math, history, science, medicine, trades, whatever, generated and administered by multiple competing private entities who have incentive to put out valid product with results that are predictive and indicative of capability and learning. don’t let government of DEI anywhere near it. these are important certifications that need real brand integrity.

students can take them or not anytime they want in order to prove what they have done and learned. let a whole ecosystem of AI mediated ability and knowledge testing arise and flourish, speciating into the sorts of exams that inform universities or employers about what a student can do. let employers generate their own. in the age of AI this will get easier and easier.

there is a huge opportunity emerging in testing because diplomas have become garbage, more participation trophy than championship ring. you simply cannot trust them to mean much anymore. so generate tests that do mean something, stand them up as targets, and let education adapt to them and the tests adapt to education and need. let them specialize and stratify. this whole “one size fits basically no one” idea is outmoded nonsense and the SAT has become another nerfed and grade inflated joke seeking to efface distinction rather than produce it.

we need to full on break the box here. this codified idea of all day classroom instruction by increasingly unqualified and unaccountable systems of ersatz educators has become actual no fooling around clown college. it doesn’t make a lick of sense. perhaps it never did and “this is how we have always done it” is a deeply stupid motto when the results of the system are collapsing as rapidly as ours is. we’re wasting incredible amounts of everyone’s lives and money here. we have never even tried to explore the possibility frontiers of “better” or “optimal.” there is no experimentation, no learning, no progress. school today is just the same as school in the 1950’s but with lower standards and at 5 times the cost with a side order of gender confusion. only government can stultify a market like that.

and we need to do better.

“the system” cannot be fixed. it doesn’t need to be. just get it out of the way and let free enterprise and free choice solve the problem.

we could have the best school systems in human history in short order.

and it’s time we got serious about it.

education is not too important to be left to free markets, it’s too important not to be.

the headmaster will see you now…