Mass education should be abandoned as a concept. It is an abysmal failure!
When, in the end, the majority of children can look forward to, at the most, piecemeal brain dead work, the system is grossly extravagent
It is out of kilter with the economy, which prizes foreign workers and foreign students, above our own.

Hi Dan,

The writer has a point, for those of us who are fully literate and numerate: after all, if the desperately poor don't have bread, why can't they eat cake, as a headstrong woman once asked ?

Isn't it great, once one has a pretty decent education, to then suggest that, after all, it probably wasn't all that great, that so much time was wasted learning the basics ? Why didn't we spend more time on pop art, or getting a smattering of Hindi, or be allowed to go snorkelling ?

Schooling used to be broken up into three distinct levels: junior primary (by various names), primary, and secondary:

* Junior primary was vital to get kids to sit still, be fully toilet-trained (that took me time), recognise letters and numbers, and do elementary things with them.

* Primary school was to get across a solid base of knowledge to either prepare people for work at fourteen, or for the heights of secondary education. And of course,

* secondary education allowed people to improve their basic knowledge, and specialise, in preparation for either trades or university.

I make a plea to leave the lower levels alone, make sure EVERYBODY has the basics, up to mid-secondary, then let people fart around as much as they like as they prepare for their Art and Design, or Cultural Studies, courses. That should prepare them well for a lifetime on the dole, a position from which they can pronounce on the evils of an aged-person-dominated world, and ask questions like "Why can't I have a house now ?" and "What's interest ?"

It's a much more diverse classroom these days, which makes learning the basics all the more urgent. It's a much more skilled work-force too, so there is even more reason to ensure that all of those diverse kids really do learn the basics - which are much more 'advanced' now than they used to be. As you obliquely suggest.

Joe

Very true Loudmouth, but that was before the feminist take over of education.

In those far back days, those 14 year olds had enough math & English stuffed into their sometimes recalcitrant heads to take an electricians apprentiship in their stride.

Today with much "irrelevant education" used to fill the hours in senior high schools, we now have remedial math courses at both trade schools & University, to bring our 18 year olds up to what those 14 year olds had mastered.

Today our students get very little of the 3 Rs, but heaps of green blob propaganda. I'm sure Sam approves of this, completely.

Hi Hasbeen,

When I was at Penrith Primary in the fifties, we learnt fractions, decimals, simple interest, compound interest, parsing of words in sentences, etc. In classes of forty five to forty eight pupils. Now, THEY were teachers.

It's vital for all kids to get the basics, and then they can play around if their parents let them. Of course, the 'basics' are much more advanced these days than then, which should require more competent teachers and more concerned parents, even though classes are half the size.
Driving through the city a few nights ago, around 10 pm, and going past the university, all of the students crossing the road and going home were, as far as I could tell, Chinese. At 10 pm. They work. I hope they all get jobs. They are probably not doing Art and Design, or Cultural Studies (those students were probably in the next street over, with its bistros and bars). I hope they get what they deserve (what a bastard of a thing to say).

Basics for everyone first, then get irrelevant. Although I think it's a ploy by the educated elite to limit their own numbers to offspring and cronies. Oops, there I gob again, slagging the Indigenous establishment.

Cheers,

Joe

A chance to expose the division between irrelevant and unapplied was not taken. How many people use mathematics to price check the servo? Knowledge gained in History & Geography to chase romantic or sexual conversation with a foreigner, perhaps in their own native tongue? Most importantly of all, why are there no primary or secondary school classes on law? Doesn't it seem wrong we are to obey laws we are never told? Perhaps this enables police crimes and misdemeanors from the horrific death of Beto Laudisio (naked & non-violent) to police with 'traces of cocaine' avoiding any direct punishment, as we don't call out those errors with the same confidence with which we confront a spelling mistake.

A brief observation on lessons of history. Mr. Santayana's quote is most relevant. Once, when Islam allowed free questioning, it triggered a golden age in the regions of influence. This ceased due to a logic followed by Christianity for the duration of the Dark Ages, 'Holy Book knowledge is all we need, any question it cannot answer is heretical to ask'. The Enlightenment fed 'irrelevant' knowledge growth. The sort so well defended in this open letter betwixt a missionary nun and NASA Director.

A tangential question is asked 'Money spent to reach Mars is irrelevant (much as great cathedrals never interrupted a witch burning or pogrom), why not spend it on something relevant?

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html?m=1

Hi Dan,

Just to return to your assertion: "Mass education should be abandoned as a concept."

I suppose the slogan of elites throughout the ages has been "Pull up the ladder, I've made it." Something like 'Scalam extracta, successo sum'.

I take it that, as someone on the pseudo-Left, you also think that democracy should be abandoned, and that marriage should be so devalued as to become meaningless ?

I don't know that Gramsci would be proud, I'm sure he had something else in mind when he wrote about the 'march through the institutions'. Perhaps you could make a case for the abandonment of those three institutions, and how it might benefit the masses and usher in a new Utopia ?

Cheers,

Joe