One-Room Schoolhouse

Friday, April 11th, 2008

Fred Reed wants to see the return of the One-Room Schoolhouse:

Why the one-room school house? Because it rewards initiative and brains and individualism and other things America no longer stands for and in fact can’t stand.

Think about it. In a school of one room, students can advance as they will. If a child of eight can read as well as the fifteen-year-olds, he can read with them. If he is able to do algebra when he is ten, why, he can do so. If he can’t, he can stay with kids at his own level.
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Next I am going to devastate the schools by giving the students hope. I will set up a comprehensive test, lasting perhaps a week, of everything that a graduate of a high school should learn. And I will tell the students that when they can pass that test, they can pick up their diplomas at the door. Gone, outa there.
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Better yet would be separate tests of different subjects. When a kid demonstrates that he can read at the twelfth grade level, no teacher should ever again be allowed to so much as mention reading to him, unless it be to ask him to coach her. If the kid passes what is now the tenth-grade Algebra II, or chemistry or physics, that should be it. He should then have a choice of taking advanced courses, taught by a vertebrate, or going behind the school to smoke and drink beer.

The purpose of school is to get kids to learn, right?

Of course not. Schools exist to keep children off the streets and off the job market, to serve as day care, to provide submissive drones for the office market, and to instill appropriate values, meaning those that make for political passivity and high consumption. Americans exist to buy things.

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