Quality

Teach the children well...

The outcry about public schools, all schools for that matter, is wrong on all accounts. Those who bemoan public school cuts by making children out to be victims deprived of a mediocre education system are as misguided as proponents of cutting school funding. The claims of those who want to cut school funding are uninformed that schools need to get back to more rigid "three R's" and regimented schoolroom structures for a good quality education.

Neither of these views is well thought out and doesn't take into account the real need that all schools, public, charter or private, must provide for the future. The current public system does waste money and doesn't teach basic reading, writing and math skills, nor does it level the playing field for all kids to get a good job, advance in the ranks of employment, business and so on.

That is actually the real problem. Our school systems are modeled on turning children into commodities for the corporate society to make them low cost, high production cogs in the wheels of commerce, spend money as consumers to distract them and then be put on the shelf in hypnotic retirement to consume some more. If some schools do teach subjects on a high functioning level, it is at great cost to creative thinking, unfettered ways of approaching things differently and stifling free association and individualism. They are conforming obedience factories to churn employees out for the corporate and financial complex.

Our society is no longer going in that direction, a throw back to the Industrial Age, in the short or long term.

We need kids to learn how to read, write and do math creatively with a depth of thinking that allows them to imagine using these skills in unique ways. Who also learn other subjects in the categories of science, history, the arts and much more, so they envisage how to apply them with uncommon methods. Above all else real education means allowing children to grow as individuals in their own inimitable right and not as grinding gears for some mass market employer.

Seth Godin on Education

Failure of our education model...

Seth Godin discusses with Lee Stranahan how our public schools were designed to do two things:

1. Train people to become compliant factory workers, sit in straight rows, do what they're told, follow instructions,
2. Teach kids the best way to feel good and fit in was to buy stuff and it's done a great job at both things.

"...They churn out people who await instructions, who can fill in with number two pencils perfect ovals but...
we don't churn out people who are creative and innovate and ask questions...
we don't turn out people who by any definition who are artists, we actually shun those people."

Hear what he says about a "shortage of people who are going to do something unique."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea5IgyVd3_U

http://www.youtube.com/Stranahan