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parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push, or even permit our
schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy
of churning out predictable, testable, and mediocre factory workers?
As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at
teaching leadership, and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory
itself, we’re in big trouble.
The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage
of it?
4. What is school for?
It seems a question so obvious that it’s hardly worth asking. And yet there are many possible
answers. Here are a few (I’m talking about public or widespread private education here, grade K
through college):
To create a society that’s culturally coordinated.
To further science and knowledge and pursue information for its own sake.
To enhance civilization while giving people the tools to make informed decisions.
To train people to become productive workers.
Over the last three generations, the amount of school we’ve delivered to the public has gone
way up—more people are spending more hours being schooled than ever before. And the cost
of that schooling is going up even faster, with trillions of dollars being spent on delivering
school on a massive scale.
Until recently, school did a fabulous job on just one of these four societal goals. First, the other
three:
A culturally coordinated society: School isn’t nearly as good at this as television is. There’s a huge
gulf between the cultural experience in an under-funded, overcrowded city school and the
cultural experience in a well-funded school in the suburbs. There’s a significant cultural
distinction between a high school drop-out and a Yale graduate. There are significant chasms in
something as simple as whether you think the scientific method is useful—where you went to
school says a lot about what you were taught. If school’s goal is to create a foundation for a
common culture, it hasn’t delivered at nearly the level it is capable of.
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake: We spend a fortune teaching trigonometry to kids who
don’t understand it, won’t use it, and will spend no more of their lives studying math. We invest
thousands of hours exposing millions of students to fiction and literature, but end up training
most of them to never again read for fun (one study found that 58 percent of all Americans
never read for pleasure after they graduate from school). As soon as we associate reading a book
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