[lbo-talk] Yoshie's proposal

Michael Dawson mdawson at pdx.edu
Sun Mar 6 09:45:20 PST 2005



> Another (perhaps not as good) idea: maybe we ought to think a bit about
> uncritical knowledge fetishism. As I think Kantos suggests, it seems like
> we should be able to teach people to (e.g.) read at a high school level
> and
> do algebra without warehousing them for 13 years. And what possible
> reason
> is there to ship so many people off to college for another several years
> to
> learn (or weakly attempt to learn or even in some cases weakly feign to
> attempt to learn) about matters they're bound to find uninteresting and
> useless?
>
> -- Luke

What's your alternative to "warehousing?" Send children to jobs?

As to the reasons for "shipping" people to college: a) they like it; b) it mostly works, even in our screwy society; c) brain science is finding that the frontal lobes don't finish maturing until the early 20s.

This is a topic where the left should simply advocate an education society, and save its kooky reforms for debates after the victory. We should be pushing to double the amount of GDP spent on schools and attacking the right's "reform" shit, which is a ruse to distract people from the only real issue: ACCESS to world-class teaching. That could be provided to everybody in a heartbeat, if we could put it on the agenda. Getting all wavy-gravy about the "oppression" of schools is an excellent way to torpedo ourselves. Let your great-grandchildren deal with that one. We have more basic troubles.



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