Posted on 06/01/2011 1:14:21 PM PDT by TheConservativeCitizen
We don’t buy tickets or recordings of mediocre or worse musicians but we keep paying for and sending our kids to exactly such teachers; the No Child Left Behind mandated testing shows it. Of course, the teachers’ unions object and the Obamans intend to satisfy them by dumping such effective testing.
In Part (1) of this article, the questions were: the necessity of locking up all the kids every day and were it found necessary, should it be done by the government or could the private sector do it better? We postponed looking much at the means for delivering education.
This is about how education might better be delivered. Or perhaps, how a better education could be delivered. Reverting to musicians, we expect to listen to the best when we go to a concert or buy a recording. Why not do the same with teachers? Great teaching can be written and recorded and provided via Internet as easily as music and provided widely and cheaply. Then you don’t need many teachers and probably, no public buildings. A good bit of successful home schooling is done that way already. Not only is learning via computers widespread now, it’s even in use in public schools, though sparingly.
For kindergarten and grammar school subjects, a person supplying the facility in use could provide necessary control and assistance, from the home school level up through private facilities where kids are gathered for the purpose. Just as in the little red schoolhouse days, older kids could help with younger ones, enhancing their own educations thereby.
Standardized testing might be used to help maintain a minimum quality level. Parents would need to supervise their kids’ progress and when results are poor, various means for improving them would be needed. Unlike the present, poor results that proved incurable should not be camouflaged and pushed along by the system; alternative choices will be necessary and seem likely to help.
At the high school level, work experience should be provided along with the instruction, another reversion to little red schoolhouse days. There’s a lot of high school instruction today that we could well do without, it seems to me. Crafts, professions and some industries might offer opportunities resembling apprenticeships; aptitude and preference testing should be added to the mix. Unions will oppose relatively cheap labor they don’t control but it will benefit both the students and the employers.
Say the government provided free (tax supported) concerts at which attendance was compulsory. They wouldn’t be very good; you don’t have to work hard to compete for a compelled audience. You don’t even have to care what kind of music attendees might like. But when the audience can choose among inexpensive, competing alternative concerts, recordings, Internet and computer programs it changes everything.
We know that these concepts work because all of them are being used somewhere, right now. And if there is one thing we can say fairly about our public schools, it’s that everything needs to be changed.
Yes, it’s a reach. So, apparently, is getting control of spending. But in both cases, we’d better, right?
ping
Another reason for the separation of school and state.
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