Educational Reform: Scrap Or Overhaul?

The Daily Beagle Gets Asked By A Paid Subscriber

A paid subscriber has asked the following question:

Should our approach to education be scrapped or overhauled?

A good question. Scrapping implies the education system has to be replaced with something else, effectively a breakdown-and-buildup, and overhauling suggests a radical reform of the pre-existing infrastructure into something new.

In my view, they’re not overly distinct positions, and a direct answer would be “yes” to both. I think it is more beneficial to understand why education is flawed, what should be scrapped, and what should be overhauled, and why, and before we can do this, we need an understanding of the history of education.

The First School?

It isn’t easy to define what the ‘first’ school is, because what even defines a school? A place of learning, but of how many people? Is a mentor to one apprentice a school? Are we counting private schools, or only public?

Depending on who or where you ask, you will get differing answers as to where the first schools appeared, some saying 3000-1500 BC China, or Egypt, or Greece, all varying technical definitions. If you count Christian monasteries and the like in the UK, then the earliest is 597 AD.

For America, the first recognisably public school appeared in the US in 1635, although a single school isn’t much of a ‘public education system’. Indeed, despite Britain’s long headstart with ‘schools’ - most of which were private - the first education system in the UK didn’t emerge until the works of Thomas Barnardo, who created the ‘ragged schools’ in 1867.

Essentially, the running theme was schools have historically been philanthropic or charitable endeavours. It is crucial to note this important distinction from that of one controlled “professionally” by a government. They say charity starts at home, and for the British education system, it did.

What Was The Schools' Purpose?

In the case of Barnado’s work, it was to address poverty by teaching basic skills such that illiterate (unable to read/write) and innumerable (unable to work with numbers) children could get jobs, in order to address the poverty and despair they were facing.

So there is clearly a need for an education system of sorts, but the ones found in countries these days are a far cry from their intended and original purpose, which was either to teach morality (in the case of religious systems) and teach relevant job skills (in the case of Barnado’s work).

We can infer therefore we cannot completely scrap an education system because it is vital to teach life skills to children who would otherwise be horribly disadvantaged in a modern world of words and numbers, where scientific literacy determines the entire course of nations, and morality determines the entire course of the world.

What Should Replace The Current System?

Now, I write as someone - and there’s no way to be humble on this part - who had a sharp and keen mind who was readily let down by the education system. There were an eyewateringly high number of flaws. There were parts where, as the student, I was explaining history to the class because the history teacher didn’t know it.

This wasn’t a result of ‘bookworm nerd’ research either, but casual knowledge I had picked up from other lessons in other domains. Information does not cross-pollinate between curricula, teachers are disjointed, isolated silos of knowledge, who run disjointed, isolated pieces of course work. Often on subjects that give children no real life skills that aid survival.

I knew more about the Tudors and wife murdering Henry VIII specifically (who was talked about in three separate levels of education), and nothing about financial literacy besides maybe a flimsy attempt at “budgeting” with an unrealistically ‘high’ income (who knew you could spend £80 on some bread?). I could build electrical circuits using scientific classroom equipment, but no school courses taught it (why did they even have it in the first place?).

There’s two major factors that impede education from both an intellectual and normative standpoint: lack of scalability, and cost.

How Do We Solve Scalability?

So scalability is how many pupils a teacher can teach. There’s a finite limit, dictated by the Dunbar number (150 total across the entire school, roughly), and when a teacher encounters a classroom where all the pupils are struggling, they are often overwhelmed, and cannot devote necessary time to all pupils. As a result, everyone suffers.

The smart ones get sacrificed on the altar of needs versus wants, because the disadvantaged pupils need the support more than the smart ones want the extra information. This does mean if a smart student has a genuine problem, they rarely get help because why would they need it? They’re a smart student.

Sometimes this role gets reversed, and exhausted teachers prefer the smart students because they are less work overall to teach, and will just neglect or ignore the dumber students. The ones permitting me to teach the other class members fell into this. They didn’t verify my work. I could have been wrong. I was trusted simply because I seemed smart.

Some teachers are awful in both senses, neglecting both, resenting the smart student for rising above them and hating the dumber ones for “wasting” their time. After I finished maths work, I would open a book and jump to harder sums, and the teacher would admonish me for ‘not doing the intended work’ and would insist I ask them for more of their intended - typically braindead - work, as meanwhile students flung sweets, chewing gum, bits of paper at each other.

Teachers often engage in a power abuse dynamic where student concerns are overridden entirely because ‘they’re the adult and you’re not’ - an actual adult wouldn’t need to abuse this argument or abuse a child.

I’ve had teachers refuse access to toilets - a violation of basic human rights - then complain of the consequences. One complained about ‘too much farting’, even though any doctor will tell you holding in farts is very unhealthy, a health risk. Farts relieve internal intestinal pressure.

Scrap Teachers

No doubt many students who have sat under exemplary teachers might be horrified by this. Perhaps private education has better teachers than public. But the few good teachers rarely outweigh the masses of terrible ones, and, no, the teacher being ‘nice’ isn’t sufficient to qualify them as being good at teaching. I’ve met many ‘nice’ teachers, I’ve rarely encountered any capable ones besides those who came direct from profession (barristers, for example).

The instances of abuse of power are only just beginning to emerge, with reports of pedophiles, teachers trying to radicalise school children, and others trying to make specific races feel bad about themselves (see the rebuttal to white privilege here), the human element is wildly variable, and can make or break students, regardless of the quality of the educational material on hand.

We’re not talking about the philanthropy good-intent of Barnado’s to help impoverished children find work. We’re looking at a for-profit exploitative system that allows outsiders invent and generative exploitive political agendas with zero oversight (and no, the answer isn’t more mass surveillance cameras on children).

This doesn’t necessarily mean ‘back homeschooling’, as some parents who both work jobs 9-to-5 to make ends meet require school as a ‘childcare’ package, but this need should be distinct from education as a whole and not dictate it. A localised school, not a big sardine can of learning with crowded lockers.

Imagine if everyone had to keep their dog in a centralised dog kennel (mandated by the centralised dog authorities on penalty of fine or imprisonment) because some dog owners don’t have the free time to look after their dog. This seems offensive as an idea for dogs, but not for our own children.

Aren’t Parents Dumb Though?

And before anyone raises the ‘parents aren’t qualified’, the teachers I saw in the public education were basically said unqualified parents. The difference between qualified and unqualified seems to be whether you got ripped off ‘buying’ an education degree from a University that keeps the education industrial complex going, and how many overpriced books you bought and read, in order to get underpaid work. No wonder kids aren’t taught financial literacy.

I once asked about a maths degree and was told - by the person studying for it - it was good only for teaching maths. When I asked about other work, such as in a bank, or say, scientific research into fuel equations for rocket engine development, they told me those fields had specialist degrees for those specific fields and that a maths degree was worthless for it.

I then spoke with a man who was studying for financial auditing work - highly paid, financially literate - and he had a stack of 12 books on a desk, studied for 12 hours non-stop, and said you had to be escorted to the toilet to prevent cheating during exams in a field with something like a 1% success rate, with no resit options. It makes the educational system look like a joke in contrast.

Essentially maths was a closed-loop cycle where you learn maths to teach maths, and any other actual skills like financial auditing, meant you did work elsewhere (because actual skills are in-demand by higher paying fields), meaning the teachers are the ones who failed to become field specialists, and thus are the least capable to give industry insights, hence why they often fail to answer student’s rudimentary questions.

This makes most of them no better than parents, and the ones who excel are the ones who worked previously in industry and picked teaching as a ‘retirement option’. The exception, not the rule. Scrap teachers. Have actual industry specialists teach.

Solving The Cost And Quality Problem

Chances are, most of you have learned a lot of your knowledge online these days. I’m not referring to the embarrassing Zoom calls, but the online searches where you dug through raw statistics, peer reviewed papers, looked over history sites, and more.

The Internet is so saturated with information that it overwhelms the knowledge of teachers in schools. It often evolves so rapidly that teachers who finally qualify for work are between 1 to 2 decades out-of-date on their knowledge (they still incorrectly teach ‘I before E except after C’ even though more English words have E before I without C, like “their”), and even if they keep up to speed - examining bodies often don’t.

The fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to solve the issue of education worldwide, is to use open source developments. Like GitHub does with code, there should be a centralised repository of educational courses that real, industry professionals write up for children both at home and in person to follow. And maybe parents learn something as well? Courses for everybody, even the impoverished in countries with no physical schools.

Unlike the current splattering of courses distributed across various websites (MIT’s online courses, BBC’s GCSE bitesize courses, Project Gutenberg historical documents, etc) or hosted but written low quality by shills (E.G. Wikipedia, see here, here, here and here), there needs to be a dedicated effort by those in education to come together and re-write coursework and centralise it, and then make it accessible to all.

Parents can then curate what courses their children need to learn. Yeah, not everybody needs the generic egg-shell walking ‘religious education’, nor does every child want to go through an analysis of slam poetry. Some might want to learn more advanced mathematics, financial literacy courses, outdoor survival skills and more.

This Can Be Developed Worldwide

This doesn’t have to be one government doing it for their own nation. This could be driven by the Internet itself, allowing all people, all specialists to contribute. There shouldn’t be any deplatforming or censorship - if any ‘boycott’ is to occur, it is by parents choosing what, if anything, they want their children to learn.

With a centralised development such as this, many can contribute, and with consistency in design, and an open source approach, educational costs would drop through the floor. I imagine all the “industry specialists” (who aren’t) selling all the expensive, overpriced education books would likely revolt and resist such a model, but the public would have to pushback.

Done right, this would make educational material borderline (not completely) free to everybody, and once a coursework was written, new ones could be developed.

Move Away From Grading - It Is A Failure

Grading is only useful for two things: bureaucrats trying to monitor performance, and lazy employers trying to sift through a ton of applicants. Even then, most recruiters will have post-recruitment regret that a degree holder was basically inept, where-as the ‘uneducated yokel’ performed beyond expectations.

That is because grades do not reflect reality. They reflect how well a child can jump through the arbitrary hoops set up by an educational board. And the educational board does not tolerate dissent. I should know, because I wrote detailed dissenting answers like this one to various exam questions that pretend to be neutral, but don’t tolerate it if you write a critical answer that isn’t the pro-establishment one you’re expecting.

One question asked “neutrally” if the Vietnam war was a failure. I said it was, cited the financial costs, the destruction to Vietnam, the damage to the US’ reputation, the success of the Vietcong over a “mighty” America with the Vietcong ultimately taking full control of Vietnam, and the post-war trauma of US veterans.

All of these were factually accurate statements. They gave me one grade above failure. None of my history teachers could explain it, and the examiners when a review was demanded barely had any highlighted flaws - but they never changed the grade, and demanded my money to pretend to “review” it again - with no commentary or feedback allowed from myself. Ultimately a scam.

Grading systems test conformance, not knowledge nor intellect. They need to be scrapped. Businesses should join me on this. What should be “tested” for is the student’s actual, real world, capability. Not how well they train for a limited segment of rotating questions and how well they conform to dullard examiner’s expectations of answers to those questions.

Businesses Should Conduct Their Own Tests

Instead of schools fudging grades or statistics, the onus should be on businesses to design their own suitable entry testing requirements (like many capable organisations do), rather than relying on a failed grading system to determine skills.

Success should be determined on the actual ability of the student to do the skills they’ve been taught. I wouldn’t ask ‘what grade did a student get in Business?’, I’d ask ‘how many businesses are you currently running? How many have failed? Why? What did you learn from it?’.

Who cares if they learnt it in a “proper” school or in the real life school of hard knocks so long as they’re capable? Focusing on ability to demonstrate skills removes the ability to cheat, removes the cost of grading, removes the requirement to determine what sets a grade boundary, removes the stress and horror of studying for tests. Which aren’t accurate to real world scenarios.

Grade-Testing Isn’t Accurate To The Real World

No, the real world is not a ‘calculator free closed-book session held in silence with no phones allowed’, it is verbatim the opposite of that. If you judged me purely by my grades, you’d suggest I was a useless failure who didn’t know history, couldn’t grasp law, had no understanding of IT, had the programming skills of a moron and had the English skills of a brain damaged monkey with a dunce cap on.

If you judged me by my work - developing a national level software system depended upon by a healthcare service, writing proposals that impacted national level policymaking, getting cost saving models adopted that reduced water consumption and taxpayer’s costs, exposing industry corruption and helping drive several distinct lawsuit campaigns to victory, you’d think I was a field specialist. Scrap grades. Grading systems are worthless.

The education system is broken. Scrapped, overhauled - doesn’t matter, it fundamentally needs to be replaced on a wider scale.

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