Does QC add value?
Does quality control add value? In most areas the answer is simply and easily YES. In education it's an open question and a real problem.

In manufacturing and farming and mining, QC is a necessary part of value-adding. Manufacturers have to reject bad welds or sloppy assembly. Farmers have to reject poor crops or sickly livestock. Mining is mostly rejection, getting rid of the unwanted minerals that incorporate the valuable minerals.

QC is often analog, with a continuum of grades corresponding to price. A big customer or retailer is often able to do its own grading, and may be able to use the non-prime stuff. Stew instead of entree, understressed circuits for non-prime transistors and ICs, subflooring for ugly wood.

Much of our pre-college education is neither added value nor QC. It's just wasted time.

Vocational courses like cooking and carpentry are pure added value, permanently improving the student's skills and functionality.

Basic reading and writing and arithmetic are added value, changing the brains and muscles of the student to make the student more useful and capable in life.

"History" and "The Humanities" and "Grammar" and the usual "Science" courses are SUBTRACTED VALUE. These courses temporarily infect the student's brain with perfectly wrong and often perfectly murderous "facts" that have no relevance to life. You remember the "facts" long enough to pass the test, then hopefully forget them. If you retain them, your thinking will be disordered and chaotic in ways that serve Deepstate.

Math beyond basic arithmetic is where the QC question arises. Graphing and trig and basic calculus are useful skills. Traditional math teaching is NOT meant to train most kids to use those skills. Math is presented INTENTIONALLY in a way that resonates with the students who will do well in college math, the students who can get math degrees. All others gain nothing more than a permanent distaste for math.

A few good teachers, and all teachers in vocational subjects, train math AS PART OF THE JOB, so the math procedures are a unified part of the real added value of job skills.



It's likely that "history" and "grammar" are taught for the same reason, but I don't know that for sure. In math the QC purpose is well known and discussed, but it never disappears because the profs at the end of the production line can't possibly handle Negative Externality students.

Labels: Asked and partly answered, Experiential education

  ¶ 7:44 AM