by
Fred Reed

Recently
by Fred Reed: Some
Things Detwaddled

I wonder what
purpose the public schools serve, other than to warehouse children
while their parents work or watch television. They certainly donÂ’t
teach much, as survey after survey shows. Is there any particular
reason for having them? Apart from their baby-sitting function,
I mean.

Schooling,
sez me, should be adapted to the needs and capacities of those being
schooled. For unintelligent children, the study of anything beyond
minimal reading is a waste of time, since they will learn little
or nothing more. For the intelligent, a public schooling is equivalent
to tying an anchor to a student swimmer. The schools are an impediment
to learning, a torture of the bright, and a form of negligent homicide
against a country that needs trained minds in a competitive world.

Let us start
with the truly stupid. Millions of children graduate – “graduate”
– from high school – “high school” – unable
to read. Why inflict twelve years of misery on them? It is not reasonable
to blame them for being witless, but neither does it make sense
to pretend that they are not. For them school is custodial, nothing
more. Since there is little they can do in a technological society,
they will remain in custody all their lives. This happens, and must
happen, however we disguise it.

For those of
reasonably average acuity, it little profits to go beyond learning
to read, which they can do quite well, and to use a calculator.
Upon their leaving high school, question them and you find that
they know almost nothing. They could learn more, average not being
stupid, but modest intelligence implies no interest in study. This
is true only of academic subjects such as history, literature, and
physics. They will study things that seem practical to them. Far
better to teach the modestly acute such things as will allow them
to earn a living, be they typing, carpentry, or diesel repair. Society
depends on such people. But why inflict upon them the geography
of Southeast Asia, the plays of Shakespeare, or the history of the
nineteenth century? Demonstrably they remember none of it.

Some who favor
the public schools assert that an informed public is necessary to
a functioning democracy. True, and beyond doubt. But we do not have
an informed public, never have had one, and never will. Nor, really,
do we have a functioning democracy.

Any survey
will reveal that most people have no grasp of geography, history,
law, government, finance, international relations, or politics.
And most people have neither the intelligence nor the interest to
learn these things. If schools were not the disasters they are,
they still couldnÂ’t produce a public able to govern a nation.

But it is for
the intelligent that the public schools – “schools”
– are most baneful. It is hideous for the bright, especially
bright boys, to sit year after year in an inescapable miasma of
appalling dronedom while some low-voltage mental drab wanders on
about banalities that would depress a garden slug. The public schools
are worse than no schools for the quick. A sharp kid often arrives
at school already reading. Very quickly he (or, most assuredly,
she) reads four years ahead of grade. These children teach themselves.
They read indiscriminately, without judgment – at first anyway
– and pick up ideas, facts, and vocabulary. They also begin
to think.

In school,
bored to desperation, they invent subterfuges so as not to lapse
into screaming insanity. In my day the tops of desks opened to reveal
a space for storing crayons and such. The bright would keep the
top open enough so that they could read their astronomy books while
the teacher – “teacher” – talked about some
family of cute beavers, and how Little Baby BeaverÂ….

I ask you:
How much did you learn in school, and how much have you learned
on your own? Asking myself the same question, I come up with typing,
and two years of algebra.

The bright
should go to school, but it is well to distinguish between a school
and a penitentiary. They need schools at their level, taught by
teachers at their level. It is not hard to get intelligent children
to learn things, and indeed today a whole system of day-care centers
only partly succeeds in keeping them from doing it. They like learning
things, if only you keep those wretched beavers out of the classroom.
When I was in grade school in the early Fifties, bright kids read,
shrew-like, four times their body weight in books every fifteen
minutes – or close, anyway. In third grade or so, they had
microscopes (Gilbert for hoi polloi, but mine was a fifteen-dollar
upscale model from Edmund Scientific) and knew about rotifers and
Canada balsam and well slides and planaria. These young, out of
human decency, for the benefit of the country, should not be subjected
to public education – “education.” Where do we think
high-bypass turbofans come from? Are they invented by heartwarming
morons?

To a remarkable
extent, dumb-ass public schools are simply not necessary. I asked
my (Mexican) wife Violeta how she learned to read. It was through
a Head Start program, I learned, called “mi padre.”
Her father, himself largely self-taught, sat her down with a book
and said, see these little squiggles? They are called “letters,”
and they make sounds, and you can put them togetherÂ….. Vi contemplated
the idea. Yes, it made sense. Actually, she decided, it was no end
of fun, give me that bookÂ…Bingo.

The absorptive
capacity of smart kids is large if you just stay out of their way.
A bright boy of eleven can quickly master a collegiate text of physiology,
for example. This is less astonishing than perhaps it sounds. The
human body consists of comprehensible parts that do comprehensible
things. If he is interested, which is the key, he will learn them,
while apparently being unable to learn state capitals, which donÂ’t
interest him.

What is the
point of pretending to teach the unteachable while, to all appearances,
trying not to teach the easily teachable? The answer of course is
that we have achieved communism, the rule of the proletariat, and
the proletariat doesnÂ’t want to strain itself, or to admit
that there are things it canÂ’t do.

In schooling,
perhaps “from each according to his abilities, to each according
to his needs” isn’t a bad idea. If a child has a substantial
IQ, expect him to use it for the good of society, and give him
schools to let him do it. If a child needs a vocation so as
to live, give him the training he needs. But donÂ’t subject
either to enstupidated, unbearably tedious, pointless, one-size-fits-nobody
pseudo-schools to hide the inescapable fact that we are not all
equal.

May
2, 2012

Fred Reed
is author of Nekkid
in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well, A
Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Bem, Curmudgeing
Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle, Au
Phuc Dup and Nowhere to Go: The Only Really True Book About Viet
Nam, and A
Grand Adventure: Wisdom’s Price-Along with Bits and Pieces about
Mexico. Visit his
blog.

Copyright
© 2012 Fred Reed