Conversations

The weather for the baby shower is expected to be 55 F and sunny.

There will be 22 grown women here and two men.

And it is a safe bet that we not be able to find anybody to make us a sammich when we get hungry.

Life is hard.

Chit-chat in the living room

 Southern Belle is a teacher in southern-Florida.

Discussion turned to teaching methods.

The earliest part of the Industrial Revolution was fueled by labor from the agricultural sector migrating to cities

Power from a central water-wheel or steam-engine were often distributed to the factory floor via overhead shafts and belts.

Increased automation reduced the need for labor. A single 20 horsepower steam engine, for instance, can eliminate the need from the muscle-power from a hundred humans per shift.

Suddenly, there was a surplus of workers and mandatory education was a way of removing the 6-through-12 year-olds from the labor pool.

In time, education became a self-perpetuating phenomena. The biggest proponents believed that every task could be reduced to very basic elements and that it was possible to teach more complex tasks as combinations of those elements.

"Possible" is very different than "Efficient". There are still many tasks that are best taught as training rather than education. For instance, the sound of frying bacon when it is time to flip it over, how a pear feels when it is ripe and ready to pick, the sound of a baby when it needs to have his diaper changed. These signals don't translate well to black ink printed on paper or pixels on monitors.

Ten-times-five equals fifty. My first-grade class picture (1965) had 35 students in it. Progress!

The fact that theoretically based Education is not always best for transferring knowledge was offset by the fact that it is very cost-effective to have one, 17 year-old woman educating 30 students. It was a cheap way to keep the kids out of the labor pool and enough kids were able to make the leap from theoretical-to-practical to keep the economy growing.

It has been fifty-five years since the introduction of The Pill and the start of the Feminist Revolution. The time to review Education as a Sacred Cow is long over-due. We do not have a surplus of workers. We have a surplus of jobs.

What is the benefit to society to incarcerating every child until they are 18 (or 22) years-old? What is the benefit of using the standard, "Education" modality of learning for professions like nursing (one example of many) when an apprenticeship path might be twice as efficient AND provide immediate relief to healthcare which is pummeled by labor shortages?

To answer the question, the Education industry and Labor unions benefit and they contribute heavily to political candidates. But society in general loses. Hard questions need to be asked and if not answered, asked over-and-over again.