American Education: The Roots are Rotten
The roots of American Education make it maladapted for the 21st century.
Our education system is largely based on Puritan and Prussian roots. The modern system is mostly traced to Horace Mann, who built the Massachusetts system on the Prussian (modern day Germany) model back in the early-1800’s, which focused on providing an extremely standard and regimented system.
Does that sound bad? The Prussian schooling system was based largely on the work of Johann Fichte who said:
“On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty.” [Source]
Translating out of tedious academic language, Fichte is saying that education should aim to destroy the free will of the pupil.
This is the lineage that the American education system comes from. And sure, we’ve evolved it a bit, but most things never deviate too far from their roots. At it’s core, America’s education system is still about regimented standardization and a focus on cultivating good little factory workers/soldiers/paper pushers.
That sounds bad, but it worked well for America in an industrial economy that needed a lot of people doing the same thing in a standard way. Having a standard education base and training people in a specific way of doing things made a lot of sense.
Now though? Not so much. Like many things, we are stuck with an out-of-date legacy system that is too bureaucratic to adapt to modern times and largely just operates on a forced “this is how we’ve always done things” rather than a first-principles view.
For the techies in the crowd, relying fully on government-run schools is like saying “Yeah, I really want to build my startup on an Oracle DB and host it on an IBM mainframe, and our marketing strategy will consist of sending CD-ROMs in the mail.” That may have worked in 1990. Nowadays, such an approach would guarantee failure.
Sadly, many private schools still operate mostly off this model. Catholic schools do, aside from the obvious introduction of religion into the mix. Plenty of other “elite” private schools are infected with postmodernism and will spend more time asking your child their pronouns and examining gender identity than they will teaching your child math.
This is evident when we look at proficiency scores. If schools were truly trying to cultivate knowledge, you’d hope that they could do better than this:
That’s the cold hard reality: only a third of fourth graders are proficient in math. By 8th grade that number goes down to 26.5%. Proficiency in reading sees similar declines.
It should be pretty clear: our schools are not there to educate children. The purpose of a system is what it does. They are there to babysit them and ensure they grow up to be compliant. In this realm, they are actually quite proficient.
That’s a long way to say: don’t be surprised if the education system in this country fails your kid. Expect it!
Okay, now that you are hopefully with me in knowing that the American Education system will fail your child, what can we do about it?
The hard truth is that anything you can do here to better prepare your child for the real world will take time and/or money. For busy parents on a budget, that’s a hard pill to swallow. But you have to do it.
That said, here is just a sampling of ways you can better prepare your child:
1. Homeschool
Homeschooling is more popular and more accessible than ever. Social media has, for once, done some good as it’s given homeschool families ways to connect and give their kids plenty of opportunity to socialize. If you are smarter than the average teacher (which includes almost anyone reading this), it’s probably worthwhile to consider homeschooling your kids. You can choose the curriculum and ensure that your child is actually learning.
2. Supplement Your Kid’s Education at Home
An important step is to set expectations for kids that school by itself, and even getting good grades, is not sufficient. There is much more to learn about and much more to accomplish than what can be done in school.
Starting from an early age this can be ingrained, and just 30 minutes to an hour a day at home could provide so much added value to a child’s education.
There are a ton of ways to do this, and we’ll share more on this at a later time. For now, check out Intellect Inbox (full disclosure: I built it, but it’s also free) which is a tool I built to provide personalized bite-sized lessons on any topic, straight to your e-mail.
We used it to generate ideas for science experiments that our nieces and nephews have really enjoyed.
3. Hire a Tutor/Engage in Extracurriculars
If you don’t feel up for providing the educational enrichment yourself, there are tons of ways to get your kid more opportunities to learn. Public libraries often run a lot of free programs, there are tons of educational camps for the summer months, and much more. Here again, a quick search online could give you tons of options to choose from.
Similarly, personal tutors or tutoring centers can offer excellent tailored education and help kids catch up to where they should be or stretch beyond it if/when school becomes unchallenging.
Those buckets are broad, and just scratch the surface, but it is meant to be more of a thought-starter than a prescriptive “you should do this.” And yes, that’ll take time too. But education is important to get right and spend time on early because everything a child learns builds atop previous knowledge.
The reality is, if your child is behind when they are 8-years-old, they are probably only going to fall further behind by the time they are 13, and even further behind when they are 17. We see this in the data referenced above: proficiency tends to decrease over time.
So please, put some thought in now as to how you want to educate your kids. Invest some time in that. Come up with a plan. Because it’ll never get any easier to pursue education and make a difference in your child’s trajectory than it is today.