Posted on 06/06/2016 3:20:25 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Okay, America, listen up! This is your Education Establishment speaking. You may take notes. In any case, you’re free to obey these instructions.
Whatever you may think, whatever foolish misconceptions you may have acquired, your children do not belong to you. They belong to us. We will love and cherish them to the extent that we can turn them into what we want them to be. Your job is to remain on the sidelines and say nothing.
Now, be good parents and keep out of things you don’t comprehend. Preparing the young for their future roles in our complex society is a difficult, demanding task. You couldn’t be much help.
A nagging problem throughout the school years is that parents insist on getting in the way. You want to be involved, as you say. It’s not good for you. It’s certainly not good for us. So just forget about it. Watch a good movie.
Our job is to create the perfect society, the brave new world of the future. Your children can play an important role in this new society. But only if they know their parts. They must think the thoughts we give them and say the lines we have written. That’s the simple path to a wonderful future. All that’s required, really, is letting go of old fallacies.
Parents often make the mistake of thinking their children are geniuses who need to know a lot of miscellaneous information. Your children are not geniuses. Trust us, we’ve seen their test scores. They don’t need to know anything. Again, trust us. Your kid will probably be working in a factory or store. Training will take a week or two. That’s what your kid needs to know.
We have found that ignorance works well for most people. Accordingly, we’ve instructed teachers to stop teaching. That’s the genius of Constructivism. Whatever knowledge your kids can glean from reading Wikipedia, that’s what your kids will know. If they don’t remember something, this proves it wasn’t worth knowing. In our last confab, we had a strong consensus that children should be able to spell their names and the city they come from. Facts should not be emphasized. Typically, they’re just a waste of class time. The real goal is making sure students share the same correct opinions on all subjects.
Another thing that’s vastly overrated is reading. Books allow people to escape into their own selfish worlds. That’s not acceptable in a socialist paradise. If parents would stop meddling, we could eliminate reading instruction altogether and save a lot of time and energy. (As it is, we use the next best solution, which is called Whole Word. Students are told to memorize hundreds of sight-words—which is virtually impossible—so the children lose interest. We end up in the same place, that is, no one becomes a fluent reader. Remember, research shows that low literacy is just the right amount.)
Mathematics proved to be another tricky area. Parents constantly repeat the refrain that children need to be able to add, subtract and all that other stuff. This is empty talk. Most people, in the course of a year, add and subtract only a few times. In every case, a calculator would do it faster and more accurately. Nowadays, instead of unnecessary skills, we teach critical thinking and problem solving. Agreed, no one knows what the phrases mean. Obviously these are exotic skills that your children don’t need. Anyway, they don’t learn them.
Self-esteem is perhaps the school’s main function. Students should have a high opinion of themselves and a good attitude about life, even if they don’t know anything and have no future.
Over the past century, we have been perfecting the templates we want to impose, the models we want to follow, the prototypes we want to emulate, the pedagogical methods we want to enshrine. Don’t feel bad if you don’t understand a lot of those words. (You probably went to a public school. Ha-ha. Yes, even super-smart professors joke among themselves.)
Education should be as easy as falling off a log. Don’t worry, be happy.
Our main instruction to parents and children is: do not fight your destiny. Ah well, that’s a fancy word. No problem. Your destiny is what we tell you it is.
[Note: this is satire. The Education Establishment would not speak candidly in real life.]
Complementary articles / same themes from different directions:
“Public Schools Ruining US Kids With Indoctrination”
“Four Reasons Why Educators Hate Geography”
“Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education”
Our local public schools administrators are like many bureaucracies I come across
Superficially helpful and friendly, but actually, unable to accommodate any request, and unable to change a thing, because they are frozen by state rules, Federal regulations and union work rules and contracts. They don’t work for the parents, and they don’t work for the kids.
It’s the legal doctrine of Parens Patriae, one of the lawyers’ favorites. Look it up.
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