Here we are living in the 21st century.
And yet after 12 years plus kindergarten in the current system, students come out not
knowing really anything practical that will help them get a job in the current environment,
all these sorts of things that might be practical, that might help them achieve in this kind
of world, whether it's public speaking, or whatever it is, they haven't been trained
in any of them.
And I'm speaking from experience, I helped to design a homeschool program and create
courses for it,
the Ron Paul Curriculum. And public speaking, for example, is one of the things we teach
along with personal finance for teens, or how to start your own home business.
The kind of things that mean that when a kid gets out of school, he doesn't just have to
sit by the phone and wait for somebody to call them up and say, we think you're useful.
He's got alternatives.
When you have this one size fits all system, nothing fits anyone.
Why do we have this Little House on the Prairie idea when we're a country that's so advanced,
that even the term information superhighway seems outdated.
All the old people complain that kids spend too much time in front of screens staring
at their phones, and staring at their computers, they're expecting them to sit still staring
at the teacher at the blackboard; is someone going to say with a straight face that teenagers
have a tougher time finding information on the internet using computers and using advanced
skills than their educators do?
Look at it this way,
an ambitious high school student can build up a graphic design portfolio. By the time
he's out of high school, he'll be able to say to people, yeah, I did something different.
I've learned a skill.
I'm good at it.
Here's the receipts.
I'm motivated, and I'm different from other people.
That's so much more preferable to forcing kids to learn skills that will not only be
of no use to them, but will be of no use to their employer.
schools teach kids to read, but they also teach kids to hate reading.
Because reading is now worse.
Reading is something you do not to learn, but to please somebody else.
Imagine a system where kids are taught how to walk in the same way they're currently
taught how to read.
After a while everyone would be on crutches.
Whenever I see one of those yellow school buses go by it gives me the chills.
I realize most people don't have that reaction.
It's that the kids are being taken to go sit obediently in rows and repeat back what they're
told.
And Michael were told that these schools have a no bullying policy.
But as we know, for the most part, the no bullying policy consists of putting a poster
on the wall that says "no bullying."
And that's pretty much it.
But I would make the broader point that the bullying is the policy.
We all know someone who's got a niece, nephew, child, brother, or sister who won't shut the
heck up, because they're asking so many questions, because they're so interested in everything.
Well, our educational system takes that spirit, throttles it, and forces those kids to be in
a very real sense, prepared to work in factories. They all have to come to school at the same
time just like punching in the clock, they have to sit in rows, just like on the conveyor
belt, they have to quietly hold their hands, they have to sit, they have to listen, they're
not even allowed to go the bathroom without permission. Somehow, then, when they get home,
they have to do homework, because the teacher somehow couldn't educate them enough during
the day.
That also gives the message that every hour of your life belongs to some external authority
figure. The whole process takes place in an institution paid for by tax money, which already
gives the kid the idea that that's legitimate.
If you want something badly enough, you can just seize the resources and go build it.
And so as we mentioned before, it's no surprise that almost every school building in America
has classrooms with the US presidents from George Washington to the present, hanging
on the wall, staring down with their benign visages on the students below.
So they look at these people, and already have a built in veneration for them.
These were selfless public servants without whom we'd all be working in coal mines earning
10 cents a day and getting our limbs blown off.
It encourages that kind of thinking.
It's much easier to perceive the problem with this.
If we imagine by contrast, a system of schools funded by Walmart that had the Walmart CEOs
and board members hanging on the walls.
People would be up in arms, saying "why are we venerating these particular individuals?
This is creepy and cult like."
But it's not creepy and cult like when it's the government because that's the normal relationship
we're expected to have toward people who are better than we are who are believed to have
our best interests at heart.
This inculcates in the kids the exact opposite of independent thought, and it encourages
nothing but the most conformist kinds of thinking.
And ironically, Thomas Jefferson, who happens to be one of the faces up on that wall would have
been against this completely.
The idea that little children would be staring at his image every day would have appalled
him.