As society continues its accelerating slide into the abyss, people are starting to realize that locking kids in state daycare prisons for eight hours a day doesn’t make them smarter.
Since I’m being contrarian on main, universal literacy and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I spent a decade being a teacher in public and private schools. For the vast majority of students there is a hard limit to their educability.
What we know about IQ backs up that assertion. Aside from a small role played by childhood nutrition, a person’s intellectual horsepower is set from birth.
People living in saner ages used to understand that some folks were predestined to be peasants, and society ran much smoother when it accommodated that fact.
(Yes, there’s a hard limit to *everyone’s* educability but for the vast number of students, what can be taught to them falls off way before senior year. The % who can’t be educated past 6th grade is near 50% in public schools I taught at and 0% in private schools I taught at.)
What we have now is a vast system of semi-structured daycare for 2 types of people: those who will never do anything economically useful in any conceivable world (%age of school varies by location) & those who could but are forced to do an additional 6-10 years of school first.
The above is only a controversial statement because people have been conditioned to think of letting state functionaries raise their kids is normal.
I think it’s true that Jeffersonian Universal Literacy is a Good ThingTM for a certain value of ‘good’, which is that 200 years ago whatever untapped potential resident in the population of the time (and for some time thereafter) could be found out and integrated.
What we should be for is not Universal Literacy but *Pareto Optimized Literacy*. Ideally there would be a mechanism in schooling to identify the endpoint of a child’s extractive potential from school and gracefully sweep them into the workforce thereafter.
Again, your first impulse may be to reject that position out of hand. But browse social media for five minutes, and you’ll soon see that the hard limit on most people’s literacy is real.
For myriad reasons, this can’t happen. But not least of which is that the very people who militate for universal schooling (teachers) would take a huge hit in job status. Public school teachers are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to GPA and GRE scores.
They aren’t very bright. (I can say this because I’m a school teacher with an MA in Ed., right?). Anyway, teachers will tell you formal education works. If it didn’t work, there’d be no need for teachers, right?
Another reason it won’t happen is because the state needs unrestricted access to your kids eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year for 16 years. It’s the most direct way to indoctrinate them into the Death Cult.
Study after study, as if I were the type to cite studies, bear out that students who are not formally schooled have absolutely no disadvantage in life outcomes vs. formally schooled peers. Feel free to check.
I did check. The image of home schooled kids as socially awkward losers is a zombie meme that hasn’t survived contact with reality – not now that we have plenty of data on the first generation of adults produced by the initial home schooling boom. The vast majority of reports show that home schooled kids not only do better in school, but in the real world.
Which is only surprising if you think it’s weird for kids to be raised by their own parents.
To be frank, people who still send their kids to public school after learning about this deserve to be in prison.
Raise your own kids.
Support creators who inform and entertain you, not cults that hate you.
