Measurements, Inputs, and Outputs. And a Small Civil War.
8th February 2013
Jerry Pournelle is always worth reading.
The first and most important problem in public education is to understand what the goal is. It may be that the best way to do that is to ask why someone without children should pay for the education of other people’s children. Education is not a Constitutional right or entitlement, and even the aggressive federal courts don’t assert that.
The usual argument in favor of compulsory education is that an educated electorate is necessary to the health of a republic. A secondary one is that an educated public is a good investment since it promotes economic growth and a wealthier nation.
The available evidence from the the most recent century suggests that the accuracy of this line of reasoning is far from being as intuitively obvious as most of those parroting it seem to think.
When entitlement rights get involved in education, the educational results generally are worse, and often are far worse. Of course some will argue that it is good for the children of normal and above normal intelligence to be exposed to the sub-normal because there is something inherently good about Diversity, but there don’t seem to be any valid studies showing that you learn algebra better if your class includes someone who never will learn it.
Indeed. I never profited from being roped into the same class with stupid and sociopathic people of the same age, other than to heavily reinforce my natural inclinations toward supporting regular and rigorous subtractions from the gene pool. Exposure to ‘diversity’ merely makes most people fear and distrust all the more people who ‘aren’t like them’.