Escaping the School Trap
1st April 2023
The Other McCain turns over a rock.
This “lockstep” nature of a curriculum based upon the average student results in what I’ve called the “Hansel and Gretel” approach to teaching. Those who recall the fairy tale know how Hansel and Gretel left a trail of bread crumbs behind them to help them find their way back home. In a similar manner, the teacher doles out lessons in a time-ordered sequence — the bread-crumb trail of knowledge — with a certain amount of math, grammar, history, etc., to be taught each day, without regard to the abilities or interests of the students. Let us stipulate that this method cannot be separated from the classroom system; we are not passing judgment on whether teachers are “nice” people, or whether they are sincere in their desire to help students learn, when we apply critical scrutiny to the system itself. No matter how intelligent or dedicated the teacher may be, so long as “education” is a matter of group instruction, with children assigned to classrooms by age (rather than by their ability or interest), and the teacher required to bring the children along through a prescribed set of lessons, this “Hansel and Gretel” method must be used, and its effects are predictable, as the critic saw in 1912.
Public education in general violates a basic principle of successful organization, i.e., voluntary association through mutual self-selection. Think about college fraternities. Candidates for membership attend rush parties at the houses that they’re interested in joining. Members of the fraternities meet the prospective candidates, then vote on which ones should receive offers of membership. A student might receive such bids from more than one fraternity, in which case he is free to choose between them. And once an offer of membership is accepted, the pledge must go through a trial period — learning the secret handshake, etc. — before becoming a full-fledged member. Each fraternity has standards of behavior, embodied in a code, and enforced by a membership committee that can expel any member who fails to uphold the code. And if member for any reason becomes dissatisfied with the obligations of fraternity life, he is always free to quit. In a free society, this is how practically all successful enterprises are organized, and a major reason public schools are such a disaster is because they are not based on this principle of mutual self-selection. Public schools are based on government-imposed compulsion, and as such are offensive to the spirit of liberty.