Carefully Educated to Be Idiots

A plant meticulously cloned and grown within constrained pot sizes, to exact specifications, given nutrient pellets at exact regular intervals, and grown under meticulously calculated artificial lighting will form a completely different plant than one that grows in the absolute wild.

But one that grows in the wild is growing as is required for it's own perpetuation and flourishment with it's place in the environment.

Our education systems are increasingly and perhaps for quite some time now been far too much of the former.

And that many (myself included) educated under that former kind of system are now not adjusted for thriving as PLANTS_IN_THE_WILD (Humans as humans, not as [half-baked, politically-expedient, last-thursday-created metric] achiever).

From my position, I am very concerned that people no longer have access to books and libraries.

Go walk into your local university library and try to get access to a journal article. Good luck.

This is as opposed to when I was a child--I could walk into the local library, pull an actual paper periodical off the shelf and run copies off on the photcopiers--all without so much as an ID. I could get access to the microfiche and take copies as well. If I wanted, I could get a library card to any of the local libraries for free.

If I look at the current situation, I'm extremely worried that a young me of today would have no path to where old me of today sits right now.

The harsh reality is - we don’t need a zillion teachers. What we need is a high quality production team, including great teachers, who can produce high quality content that all can consume. A teachers role should shift from direct transmission to helping understanding the content.

Pedagogy is a science in itself and it got corrupted for political reasons.

I would definitely recommend that everyone read it.

They were dealing with some very big problems at the time (such as rampant disease), and were seeking ways to improve America's primitive and ad-hoc education system.

Did it work? It certainly missed the mark in a number of ways, but overall it's a damn sight better than it was!

Here's another quote from the same text:

As for the school house, we cannot now even plan the building, or rather, group of buildings. Quite likely we would not recognize the future group if the plan were put before us to-day, so different will it be from the traditional school house. For of one thing we may be sure : Our schools will no longer resemble, in their methods and their discipline, institutions of penal servitude. They will not be, as now, places of forced confinement, accompanied by physical and mental torture during six hours of the day. Straitjackets, now called educational, will no longer thwart and stifle the physical and mental activities of the child. We shall, on the contrary, take the child from the hand of God, the crown and glory of His creative work, by Him pronounced good, and by Jesus blessed. We shall seize the restless activities of his body and mind and, instead of repressing them, we shall stimulate those activities, as the natural forces of growth in action. We shall seek to learn the instincts of the child and reverently to follow and obey them as guides in his development; for those instincts are the Voice of God within him, teaching us the direction of his unfolding. We will harness the natural activities of the child to his natural aspirations, and guide and help him in their realization. The child naturally wishes to do the things that adults do, and therefore the operations of adult life form the imitative plays of the child. The child lives in a dreamland, full of glowing hopes of the future, and seeks anticipatively to live to-day the life of his manhood.

So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the home, in the shop, on the farm. We shall train the child for the life before him by methods which reach the perfection of their adaptation only when the child shall not be able to distinguish between the pleasures of his school work and the pleasures of bis play.

It goes:

> We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply. We are to follow the admonitions of the good apostle, who said, ''Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low degree." And generally, with respect to these high things, all that we shall try to do is just to create presently about these country homes an atmosphere and conditions such, that, if by chance a child of genius should spring up from the soil, that genius will surely bud and not be blighted.

It's almost like you're using a deliberately malicious selective quote that completely changes what the author is trying to say.

Also let me add that when I agree that "doing your own research" is likely to have bad results, that reason for that is that most people are stupid, not that thinking critically is bad.

And it was a resounding success. They got everything they wanted and then some. Look at HN, a community that considers itself broadly smarter than the average citizen/voter. Even it's knee jerk reaction is to solve any given problem using "more system" (typically public, but often private as well).