Bob Cringely is shocked and appalled by the amount of homework — busywork, really — assigned to his 8-year-old son, Channing:
When I was Channing’s age, 50 years ago, my parents’ attitude was one of benign neglect. They were busy doing whatever parents did back then (drinking and smoking cigarettes, mainly), but it sure didn’t include helping me with my homework. Somehow my siblings and I survived just fine. Yet today we’re supposedly faced with plummeting test scores and surging dropout rates despite whole generations of parents slaving away every night on homework. What gives?
His point goes beyond education: Public officials don’t like good news:
Well one thing that gives is something I learned during my many years experiencing droughts in California: public officials don’t like good news, seeing it as un-motivating. If we had a dry year it was bad, they’d explain, because there wouldn’t be enough snowmelt, the reservoirs would be down but, most importantly, the forests and grasslands would be tinder-dry, increasing the danger of forest and wild fires. But if we had the occasional rainy year their line changed. Now the reservoirs were full (though that could change in a moment so don’t take any extra showers) but the extra snowmelt meant extra forest and grassland growth creating more combustible material making forest and wild fires even more likely. No matter what happened it was bad according to these guys because they didn’t want to ever give up the chance to preach down to us. They were determined to remove whatever joy there was in life.
Same thing in education. We aren’t as good as we used to be and that’s going to have a major impact on, well, everything. So the answer is always more resources, more testing, more consultants. Oh but no more art or music — those are too expensive.
Frankly I’m not sure any longer exactly what is the truth. Things might be getting better or worse, I don’t know. But I know I don’t generally trust the idiots who are telling me what to worry about.
As an aside, he notes that this is about educating the masses, not keeping Silicon Valley competitive:
The distinction between those two concepts is lost on a lot of folks but I have been pointing out for the last 20 years that most of the top technical work comes from an incredibly small number of people. Xerox PARC changed the world, remember, in 3-4 years with fewer than 100 people, defining back in 1973 pretty much our computing world of today. The Bob Metcalfes and John Warnocks aren’t affected by any of this educational policy BS.