By Jerry Pournelle
I had a thought while walking.
Our education system says that we must mainstream the disruptive, the crippled, the stupid, the uncaring, and the undisciplined, lest we condemn someone among them to a life of perpetual discrimination. The practical effect of this is to devote most of our educational resources to the left side of the bell curve in the hopes of getting everyone up to some average; while, of course, neglecting the right side of the bell curve.
It is as if a gemologist were required to polish coal up to some standard shine even if that meant giving only a cursory tweak to the garnets in his collection (not to mention the diamonds and rubies). This is probably not a very good analogy, but I think it's pretty clear what I mean. The future of civilization depends on getting the most out of the bright kids, so we have devised a system that insures that the bright kids will be neglected in favor of those who don't want or can't absorb an actual world class university prep education. Does this make sense?
I have a modest proposal: we spend about $10,000 per child per year in our education system. Could we have schools in which we will spend only $6,000 per child? The rules are: both teachers and pupils are volunteers. The budget is fixed; if this requires two grades per classroom so be it. Teachers and principals have full disciplinary authority including the authority to send disruptive and unresponsive students back to the mainstream. No one has a "right" to be in these schools, which are, by definition, "inferior" in that there is less spent per pupil here.
Principals have real control over which teachers are retained in these schools. There is no "tenure". Teachers who are removed from these schools go back to the "mainstream" schools.
Pupils who flunk out of these schools go back to the mainstream.
Parents and PTA and so forth are free to augment what's spent on the schools by fund raising.
The point is that we provide "inferior" schools for our bright kids; but it's voluntary. You don't have to go to these "inferior" schools; indeed, you have to compete to get into them if there are more applicants than spaces for them.
I recall that for my first 8 years in school, 1-3 in Catholic school, the rest in Capleville consolidated in rural Tennessee (half an hour on a school bus to get there in the morning), we had two grades to the classroom and about 30 pupils per grade. We also had strict discipline and fairly strict standards. In my case, I didn't get a lot of attention from the teachers, but I did get some from the librarian, and no one bothered me if I read a book during the half of the time when the teacher was concerned with the other grade.
Now I am sure we can do better than that for $6,000 per pupil, but my point is that if it were that bad it would still be better than what we have now.
Now if we could just get the schools district to do it.
I work for the 7th largest school district in the U.S. and getting these educated people to move on anything, even when it is blindingly obvious to anyone above a 60 IQ. But something need to be done now before we loose our children.
I've managed by hook and crook to keep my kid in the few excellent schools hidden, for the local gentry, in our school system. The neighborhood schools they were supposed to go to suck, using our states system of grading they are B rated. I can tell you the difference in Hillsborough County Florida, of a consistently A rated school and a B rated school is the difference between a Ruth Crist Steak and Micky D's. Anyone in Florida that puts a kid into a C or lower school dosn't love their kids.
STONEKNIVES
