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for children. Neighborhoods need their own children and vice versa; it’s a reciprocating good,
providing surprising service to both. The factory school doesn’t work anywhere—not in Harlem
and not in Hollywood Hills, either. Education is always individualized, and individualization
requires absolute trust and split-second flexibility. This should save taxpayers a bundle, too.
Make everybody teach. Don’t let anybody get paid for schooling kids without actually spending
time with them. The industrial model, with pyramidal management and plenty of hori-zontal
featherbedding niches, is based on ignorance of how things get done, or indifference to results.
The administrative racket that gave New York City more administrators than all the nations of
Europe combined in 1991, has got to die. It wastes billions, demoralizes teachers, parents, and
students, and corrupts the common enterprise.
Measure performance with individualized instruments. Standardized tests, like schools themselves,
have lost their moral legitimacy. They correlate with nothing of human value and their very
existence perverts curriculum into a preparation for these extravagant rituals. Indeed, all paper
and pencil tests are a waste of time, useless as predictors of anything important unless the
competition is rigged. As a casual guide they are probably harmless, but as a sorting tool they are
corrupt and deceitful. A test of whether you can drive is driving. Performance testing is where
genuine evaluation will always be found. There surely can’t be a normal parent on earth who
doesn’t judge his or her child’s progress by performance.
Shut down district school boards. Families need control over the professionals in their lives.
Decentralize schooling down to the neighborhood school building level, each school with its own
citizen managing board. School corruption, like the national school milk price-rigging scandal of
the 1990s, will cease when the temptations of bulk purchasing, job giveaways, and remote
decision-making are ended.
Install permanent parent facilities in every school with appropriate equipment to allow parent
partnerships with their own kids and others. Frequently take kids out of school to work with their
own parents. School policies must deliberately aim to strengthen families.
Restore the primary experience base we stole from childhood by a slavish adherence to a utopian
school diet of steady abstraction, or an equally slavish adherence to play as the exclusive
obligation of children. Define primary experience as the essential core of early education,
secondary data processing a supplement of substantial importance. But be sure the concepts of
work, duty, obligation, loyalty, and service are strong components of the mix. Let them stand
shoulder to shoulder with "fun." Let children engage in real tasks as Amish children do, not
synthetic games and simulations that set them up for commercial variants of more-of-the-same for
the rest of their lives.
Recognize that total schooling is psychologically and procedurally unsound. Wasteful and
horrendously expensive. Give children some private time and space, some choice of subjects,
methods, and associations, and freedom from constant surveillance. A strong element of volition,
of choice, of anti-compulsion, is essential to education. That doesn’t mean granting a license to do
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