Frustrating reformer
I've previously expressed frustration with Gove, the British ed minister. His goals are admirable and his focus on discipline is wonderfully correct, but his focus on rote learning is wrong.

Now we have an even more frustrating 'manifesto' by one of Gove's associates, Dominic Cummings. His diagnosis of the terminal illness of education is spot on. It's a very old illness, and every attempt to cure it has been swallowed and co-opted by the Satanic black hole of educrats. I heard my father cussing educrats in the '50s, I ran up against them in my own teaching in the '80s, and now Cummings takes his turn.

Of course the problem was around long before my father. Here is an extended quote from an 1899 book on Manual Training by William Hailmann. I transcribed instead of pasting a screencap as usual, because I want this to be searchable. Hailmann gives the same old diagnosis, followed by the CORRECT prescription.

The traditional school... puts an end to 'full life' in the development of the child. It seals hermetically the sources of the vitalizing stream that was meant to feed the child's soul with sparkling waters of personal experience and personal purpose. And then it dribbles into the captive soul in measured drops the stale waters of a spiritless conventionalism, of a distant past and far-away environments.

What wonder if the children learn little, and this little so slowly and painfully. What wonder if what they do learn lacks the warmth of life and is of little value to them in the concerns of practical life.

This is the situation which the so-called new education would change. It would keep the sources of fresh inflowing experience open and bring in new tributaries.

The business of life is adaptation to environment, to nature, to the universe. This implies knowledge and control of self and surroundings. The business of education is to lead the child to these things with the greatest possible economy of effort. The child should learn to rely implicitly on his power to see, say and do. He should acquire in these matters the habit of success, a calm sense of power, a firm conviction of mastership.

This is possible only if head and hand have been trained simultaneously and in unison; and for this manual training is indispensable. Manual training leads the student to use skill and knowledge in his geographical, historical, literary and scientific studies, in such a way that facts and relations, principles and formulas, become his living possession through rational doing, through their eager application in interesting creative work, rather than as a residue of tedious verbal repetition.

Why is Cummings so wildly frustrating? Because his diagnosis is so painstakingly complete and accurate, and some of his prescription is appropriate. (Get rid of teacher unions, get rid of educrats, open the system to charter and private.) But his purpose is fatally wrong.

Cummings says that social mobility is almost entirely dependent on genetics, so there's really no point in expecting education to help most kids. Education should be aimed primarily at the elites, the Mensa types who will Save The World By Pure Thought And Computer Modeling.

JESUS H. FUCKING CHRIST. DEAD WRONG ON ALL COUNTS.

CONSTANTS AND VARIABLES, FUCKHEAD.

First: Social mobility has drastically decreased in recent years, while human genes haven't changed. This should tell you that something external has changed. And the something external is no fucking mystery. We have ALREADY placed 100% of social value on the Mensa elites. We have OBLITERATED all value-adding jobs that non-elites can do. We have either shipped those jobs to China or robotized them. In short, we've eliminated HANDS from the economy.

Second: Public education wouldn't affect Cummings and his Mensa tribe because they are NOT IN THE FUCKING PUBLIC SCHOOLS. They are in Yeshivas or Country Day Schools, or they are home-schooled by armies of private tutors. They have an ideal constant, and won't be touched by this variable. If you build it they won't come.

Third: Pure Thought And Computer Modeling are PRECISELY why we've gotten into the current mess. We've relied on models for criminal Climate "Science", for nutrition, for business decisions, for government decisions, and ABOVE ALL for derivatives, options, lightspeed trading and QE counterfeiting. We don't need MORE modeling, we need PRECISELY ZERO modeling. Using models should be a shoot-on-sight capital offense.

If universal education had focused on hands instead of heads, we'd have the economic and intellectual force needed to reject formulas and models. Our factories would still be running because we wouldn't have allowed the modelers to take over business and government. Our ordinary non-Mensans would still have jobs that paid enough to buy what they made.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Experiential education

  ¶ 2:50 AM