Wednesday, February 07, 2007 school levies Current mood: cranky Category: News and Politics Today is the local school levy election, and all I can think is: No, H**L NO ! It wasn't always this way. There was a time when I cheerfully voted yes and thought of how much the children would benefit from the tax on persons richer than me. But bitterness has taught a new lesson: Why should I be paying to socialize and brainwash other people's kids? Bear with me. Consider the Gross Domestic Product. Better, consider the span of human life. Think of them as various resources to be divided among competing needs for the maximum benefit. Here lies the source of my rage: The needs for food, shelter, clothing, transportation, or medicine may be met in various cheap or costly ways. Though the price they are worth may be haggled over, they are real, verifiable, objective needs. Education stands as the exception. Its need is not proven by harsh experience but rather by platitudes. The main purpose of the schooling industry is not to transmit knowledge, it is to confer of social status. Teachers are beginning to become uncomfortable with their role as "gatekeepers" in society. They should not be getting "uncomfortable." They should be doing honest work. Doubtless, some useful knowledge is taught in school. But there is not a way to distinguish what is valuable from what is not. Without competition between various types of schooling, without an objective measurement of what sort of lessons are important and which are not, there is no way to justify the system which is in place. Thus, the rhetoric of Levy supporters is usually devoid of facts. How much money is needed? The answer is never a number, it's always "more." Education cannot be permitted to be the sector of the economy which does not have to justify its expenses. It is the opposite of liberty for the government to decide who may ply what trade. Yet this is the very reason that students are encouraged to keep studying: without academic permission, they will be forbidden to work at a good job. To forbid is the only purpose of accreditation boards. Consider the bogus: In Washington State, Astrology is an accredited subject. If pure lies can be accredited as a profession, does any certification have meaning? The answer again comes back to objective standards. Accreditation boards of the professions demand that students endure general education (beyond the 13 years of a high school diploma). They say it makes a person better and more "well-rounded." Their authority is the sole justification. Solemn nonsense is the usual answer to valid objections. Question some utterly frivolous subject, for example, Elizabethan poetry, and the response is something vapid, like "so you learn how to learn." Beyond being absurd on the face of it, psychology proved a century ago that study of one subject, such as geometry or Latin, does not aid learning in another. Again, education does not have to justify its existence. Its purpose is not to teach, but to establish a class system. Like every class system, education is also a system of morality in which dominant individuals are morally superior to the subordinates. Witness "grades." Notice also, the special preferences awarded to the learning impaired. If school were a matter of passing on knowledge, students who learned the material would get good grades and those who did not would get bad grades. But things are not so simple. In America, the land of Equality, everyone, smart or stupid, must have an equal chance. And that is because school is not about learning, it's a proof of moral worthiness. Stupid kids from working-class families get bad grades. Stupid kids from professional families get diagnosed with a learning disability. And since worthiness in the land of Equality is not based on competence, but on trying really hard, the dumb rich get extra consideration. Which goes to show that education is essentially frivolous. Don't believe me? Consider the quarrel over standardized testing. Testing opponents argue that high, measurable standards will hurt the graduation rate. Which means that to these opponents a diploma doesn't represent learning, it represents turning 18, voluntarily subjecting oneself to the system (not "dropping out"), and being agreeable to the school administrators. Entire subject areas are without value, and sometimes without substance: literature, economics, business, education, clinical psychology, political science, and kinesiology (aka - gym) begin a long list. Even within hard sciences, subject matter often strays into mere nostalgia, as when first-year physics texts regularly devote pages to discredited theories of the atom, or the lives of prominent researchers, and may run 500 pages for a subject which the professors like to summarize in a few equations. What is the real effect of education? * It's to break the spirit like a horse. * To achieve passive submission. * To divide the rich from the poor, the smart from the stupid, the common from the rare. * To make boys the same as girls. * To provide free babysitting. * To increase the power of the older generation over the younger. * To provide comfortable jobs for mediocre and timid adults, who have spent their entire lives in school and are afraid to venture beyond it. * To perpetuate itself. Mandatory education is not part of a free society. It is not in the interests of a country to p**s away 22 years of life studying topics of unknown and unexamined value, nor is it profitable that the more talented an individual, the more of his life wasted. School attendence must be voluntary on the part of the parents up to a young age of consent (15?) and then voluntary on the part of the student. If tax money is to be spent on college, public or so-called private (who receive nonetheless enormous grants and loan guarantees) it must be free and open to all. Licensing boards must be reduced to advisory power only, and stripped of their right to deny livlihoods to earnest workers. As for the giant, bloodsucking academic bureaucracy, it must be strangled at the proboscus. Today I vote no on the school levy. Join me in voting no on every levy. It's one small step toward liberty.