The Tragedy of Our Educational Monopoly

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste“
United Negro College Fund

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
Rahm Emanuel

Monty Pelerin / EconomicNoise.com

There are many tragedies and failures in our country. Perhaps none is responsible for so much devastation, ruin and pain as our dysfunctional education system.

The purpose of education is no longer to teach or impart knowledge. Some of that still occurs, but much of that comes from concerned parents. Learning still occurs in homes where parents are aware of what is happening.

Sadly, too many parents believe the bunk put out by their local schools. These trusting folks believe the inflated grades evidence learning and progress. Too often so do the kids.

Through high school, education has become little more than a holding pen, a form of daycare where kids go while parents work or do their thing. It also has become Orwellian indoctrination center where the State is glorified. Just as Catholic schools do not teach the Muslim religion, government schools do not teach about social coordination via free markets.

If education has an objective beyond daycare and worshipping the State, it does not show up in outcomes. The US consistently ranks at or near the bottom on test scores among twenty developed nations. One area where US students consistently rank at the top is in overestimating their own abilities. While well behind their international counterparts, their self-esteem is so pumped up that they don’t realize how ignorant they are.

Jack Kelly provides some distressing details:

In a National Geographic survey, half of Americans aged 18-24 couldn’t find New York state on a map. Only 3 percent of high school students could pass the citizenship test foreigners take to become Americans, a survey in Oklahoma found. Only a handful of the roughly 6,000 students who’ve passed through his classroom know how to form a sentence or write an intelligible paragraph, a retiring high school teacher told Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mr. Kelly’s article includes additional, depressing insights and facts.

Like the post office, Amtrak and other government-run ventures, education is a maze of inefficiencies, inconsistencies, misdirection and political correctness. It costs too much and produces too little.

Education wasn’t always this way. Students used to learn and the end was achieved at reasonable cost. Control moved upward from local communities to states and finally to the big Kahuna itself. Education became just another casualty of big government. Under central control it became subject to the loony ideas of pseudo intellectuals whose “fad de jure” changed annually rather than daily.

continue at EconomicNoise.com:

http://www.economicnoise.com/2012/08/15/the-tragedy-of-our-educational-monopoly/