In French Revolution, they smashed the enforceable apprenticeship system, and in the nineteenth century, the British smashed their enforceable apprenticeship system. After the enforceable apprenticeship system was ended, the quality of workmanship declined with each generation for several generations, as revealed by old furniture.
This was a move to priestly power. The priestly class were seeking to force all children to spend endless hours at Church school. And ever since then education has been getting longer and longer, and sucking up people’s entire youths, when they should be working and having children.
It is time for the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
The priestly myth of education is that there is some magic juju with education, that there is a special magic secret way, and if your kids do not get it, they will be irreparably harmed.
From time to time, drinking their own Kool-Aide, they have experimented with various magic formulae for teaching children, but each experiment produces the null result
On the face of it, this would seem to show that education simply does not work. But this is an obviously absurd conclusion, since it is obvious that when you do stuff, you generally get better at it, and it is obvious that when a child does stuff under the supervision of an adult who is good at that stuff, he gets a lot better at it.
Rather, the conclusion should be that there is no magic special sauce for education, and that priestly education is only good for teaching people to be priestly. If your dad makes furniture, and makes you help, you will get better at making furniture.
The control test for formal education is unschooling and Sudbury school, Sudbury being a school that just does not school children. There are 50 years of anecdotal evidence that the original Sudbury Valley School works very well, at least for middle class kids who are already probably of above average intelligence, and the numerous imitators produce similar results. Also works with parents volunteering in place of staff, which approximates the deliberately less formal and less organized unschooling programs.
Reading surveys of the unschooled, looks like the results are similar to schooling, supporting the null hypothesis, and that the results are better than schooling to the extent that it leads to the child spending a lot of time with adults, and worse to the extent that it leads to the child being socially isolated – that a child learns more spending time one on one with a random adult, than in a class of thirty kids and one teacher, and learns more in proportion as he spends time with several different adults. Bad outcomes occur if the only adult contact is the mother, and the mother does not know much or do much, but even bad outcomes are not conspicuously bad. An unschooled boy who has had bad unschooling is not obviously and radically worse off than the boy who has had good regular schooling. The worst unschooling does not make a dramatic or consistent difference, short of locking the kid in a dungeon and feeding him through the keyhole.
Unschooling is often combined with, or a result of, a theory that children don’t need discipline. If you have an undisciplined four year old in your house he will make a mess, break stuff, and hurt people. Starting at a quite early age children need to be stopped from doing lots of stuff they want to do, and made to do some stuff they do not want to do. Otherwise they will occupy the entire house and leave no room for anything or anyone else, and occupy everyone’s entire attention, and leave no time for anything else. But the priestly class does not have any magical special high value formula for stuff that children should be made to do. Most of their magic rituals are a great big waste of child’s time, when he could be actually learning something, such as learning how to do useful work by actually doing useful work. When kids transfer from unschooling to schooling, as often happens with college, they seldom have any problems catching up on all the stuff that the college kids were supposed to learn, but frequently failed to do so.
There is nothing obviously very wrong with unschooling. Most unschooled kids do OK. If a child spends a lot of time with adults who know stuff, he will learn stuff – but he will learn a whole lot better to the extent that those adults have loco parentis authority over him and he is compelled to treat them with respect. The most educational activity of them all is child labor under adult supervision. It is not that teaching does not work, but that a special cast of priestly highly trained specialist teachers using special magic juju methods does not work. Children spontaneously soak up knowledge from adults like sponges, and they soak it up better if compelled to treat those adults with respect. The rest is details that the priestly class, the educationists, have no special knowledge of or ability at. If the knowledge is around, the kids will pick it up.
In practice most stuff is learned from Joe Random, where Joe is not an educationist, but you glommed on to him because he was good at something you needed to do.
The professor is high status, and he tells people that everyone can be high status, thereby propagating his religion to other people’s children – and producing an oversupply of priests. Throw more money and power at the professor, and supposedly everyone will be affluent and high status like the professor. Probably writing essays on hermeneutic lesbianism in seventeenth century French poetry, and getting master of arts in intersectional basket weaving.
We obviously want to cut off open entry into the priesthood, and cut the priesthood back to reasonable numbers.
Assume an apprenticeship system. We used to have something very like apprenticeship for the officer class. That is a path to high status. We have something very like apprenticeship in the judiciary, with judicial clerks tending to become judges. And then Trump’s show “The Apprentice” marketed apprenticeship as a path to high status in the merchant classes. That was a path to high status. Most people are not going to get high status positions, but a plumber probably makes more money than you do. We are going to get excess demand for apprenticeships to high status positions, and the solution is to filter the applicants for intelligence, diligence, pro social qualities, and good breeding.
We want all kids to learn reading, writing, and counting. Not all of them, left to their own devices, will, but it seems that most will, much as all white kids and most black kids pick up human speech without any elaborate state intervention. It does not follow that we need to incarcerate all kids through most of their childhood and young adulthood. Maybe we should detect and incarcerate problem children, and the children of problem parents, into low status institutions for low status people.
Education obviously works, in the sense that if you practice something, you get better, and if you practice under the supervision of someone who is good at it, you get a lot better. The null hypothesis is not that education fails, but that if you try to bureaucratically mass produce it and make sure no one slips through the cracks, the results are not much different from what happens if kids educate themselves under the supervision of parents and adult associates of parents, that mass produced education fails to produce the expected and hope for results.
Education is not only “book learning” of various sorts, but socialization. Morals and ethics. Religion. Asabiyyah. Thus, for example, most American children still pledge allegiance to the flag every day. This sort of ritual binds the nation. We can do that for an hour on Sundays, and when people are being hatched, matched, and dispatched. Also various special occasions, such as thanksgiving and Christmas. We don’t have to suck up everyone’s childhood.
Reading old books, stuff written before 1935, it is obvious that the elite and upper class did not think the stuff taught at elite upper class schools mattered. The important thing learned at Eton was sportsmanship and forming social bonds with other upper class kids and social cohesion within the upper class. Some time during the twentieth century, we forgot the joke. People wanted to believe that if you gave everyone the right education, everyone could be upper class. It was said that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”. In the book “When Worlds Collide”, written in 1932, the author takes it for granted in his character descriptions of upper class characters that that is the elite attitude to education, that elite believed that the sports and ensuing elite social cohesion was what mattered, that the educational material at Eton and Oxford was mostly pointless, not very useful or high status, and that the elite is correct to believe so. The null hypothesis of education is what all gentlemen believed back then. The trouble was that the priesthood running Harvard did not like people to know that truth. And now people don’t.
Classic Chinese, is I am told, a shared body of allusions and in jokes to poetry, history, story, and legend. Looks like the mass production of a shared elite culture, to hold China together against the centrifugal forces of empire. That is a legitimate and useful function of mass education, though cramming is going to give you a shitty elite culture of test optimizing grinds who are not actually all that good at anything.
But teaching engineering does not give you engineers. I know this well, for I was in on the dawn of software engineering, when no one was trained in software engineering and academics had not yet reinvented it as an academic discipline, and I subsequently had to interview no end of people who were trained in engineering by academics. Doing engineering gives you engineers. It is all self taught or learned by apprenticeship. If East Asian grinds think otherwise, they are all wrong.