>Understanding Human Ignorance< >>>>> Chapter Ten >>>>> Education 2019

People in 2019, therefore, live out their earthly sojourns without meaning or any understanding of why they do what they do.  They are spiritually adrift and psychologically facile.

 

People in such condition are in no position to construct systems of education. 

 

Some nations do so better than others but no country educates the bulk of the population well, and in every nation what passes for a well-educated person is most often a specialist in some field of study or endeavor but with huge gaps in knowledge of the worlds of natural and human creation.

 

Finland has gotten a lot of buzz and those who have devised and articulated the Finnish system in the course of the last ten years do seem to understand the importance of the well-paid and knowledgeable teacher and to comprehend the need to assess objectively what students have learned across an array of subject matter.  But in Finland, as in all corners of the globe, humankind  goes forth with many gaps in knowledge of history, economics, psychology, natural science, mathematics, the arts, and world cultures.

 

East Asian systems (Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, certain cities in the People’s Republic of China) train students well in math and science and present enough challenging reading material for the pertinent skills to be more advanced than in other areas of the world.  And the architects of these education systems certainly understand the importance of standardized, objective testing.  But these systems emphasize mastery of mathematics and science over knowledge across the liberal arts, and they are so exam (remembering that I do regard objective assessment as highly important) as to lose sight of the broader purposes of education.

 

Students in other nations, notably those of Canada, Poland, and Germany also score well on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) instrument that measures knowledge and skill in mathematics, science, and reading.  But the same curricular gaps appear in these nations as in all other educational systems internationally.

 

For a nation to which legions flock for higher education (four-year colleges and universities), the United States does preK-12 education particularly poorly.  In the 19^th century, children of wealthy parents went to private schools or sat with tutors who emphasized mathematics, classical literature, Latin, history, and sometimes natural science.  Common schools emerged in many communities that through McGuffey Readers and the like gave students of humble means some semblance of the curriculum (sans Latin) imparted to the well-to-do.  Few students went beyond the sixth grade, but in absolute numbers more students did seek high school education by the beginning of the 20^th century.  Those devising curricula for these schools often referred heavily to the classical models of private schools and tutors.  By 1911, junior high schools appeared;  as their names suggested, these were essentially first-stage high schools, academically serious institutions that would lead smoothly into high school. 

 

But by the third decade of the 20^th century, African Americans in the aggregate still had limited access to advanced education, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were heavily tracked into vocational courses.  The phenomenon of the education professor in teachers colleges (all on the model of Teachers College of Columbia University) presiding on college and university campuses rather than in independent normal schools meant an emphasis on pedagogy and a great diversity of social and political objectives, rather than on knowledge-intense curriculum.  By the 1970s, the impoverished jargon and vacuous promulgations of education professors permeated the public schools.  Less than ever did the great bulk of students receive anything approaching a broad, knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.  Systems of pre-K-12 education, especially for students living at the urban core, failed to deliver even basic skills to the bulk of students.

 

And private schools and well-regarded suburban schools were overrated.  Parents of students at such schools additionally hired private tutors to elevate SAT and ACT scores and packed their offspring off to college while hovering in a metaphorical helicopter and exhorting from a figurative megaphone messages that asserted goals for specialized training for a materially lucrative profession rather than excellence of education across the liberal, technological, and vocational arts.

 

And administrators and curricular decision-makers at institutions of putative higher learning in the main complied with those messages from the megaphone.

 

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Some nations in the world still feature literacy rates below fifty percent. .    

 

No nation provides to the bulk of the population a broad, culturally enriching, knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.

 

Even in nations of highest literacy rates, the standard is low;  only 15% of citizens in these nations have full prose proficiency.

 

Given the crudeness of human religious and psychological understanding, the creation of excellent systems of public education will be difficult.  There abides a vicious circular pattern whereby ill-educated people have designed and continue to design prevailing education systems, which produce more ill-educated people who are not themselves able to do better than the ill-educated designers who assured production of an ill-educated citizenry.

 

Thus, the situation is of the sort that beckons for epiphanies.

 

Someone, in some place, must make the breakthrough.

 

Thus do we project again more work for women and the historically dispossessed, who upon the inspiration of such epiphanies must envision excellence of education and thus establish the vital link to self-comprehension, meaning, purpose, and ethics of which humankind in its full potential is capable.