If schools taught anything worth knowing, it might be worth haggling over how exactly to teach it. But a school that taught useful stuff would look entirely different, and wouldn’t serve the paymaster’s goals.

For being in her eighties she is a remarkably sharp lady, as seen in this two hours long interview where she talks about how the socialist-collectivist state of education came to be, and how the system works to eliminate the influences of parents, religion, morals, national patriotism, merit…

It is almost like a tie-in to Bezmenovs lecture on subversion.

We have learned a lot about the neuroscience of learning since the 1800s, when modern factory-style assembly line education was devised.

Are we trying to create an optimal learning environment which prepares children for a real life on their own terms, or are we trying to re-create some form of “golden age of education” where every child sat still and did his ciphers and became a good little cog in the machine devised by his betters?

Age-segregating kids from the age of 5 to 18, separating them from the adult world of responsibility, treating them like little passive “knowledge receptacles” — while multiple critical developmental windows are closing shut, and their possibilities slip away . . . That is an unwise approach, no matter how well kids are forced to adapt to it.

An a la carte approach to education is long overdue, getting away from the assembly line and moving to a bistro with virtually unlimited selections.

My daughter struggled with math, not because she couldn’t understand the higher concepts, but because it would take her hours to do her nightly homework, because she had to laboriously work out the arithmetic portion of the work, as she never learned times tables and basic arithmetic. We tried to help her overcome that, drilling her with flash cards, and it helped, to some extent – but it was hard to make up for the huge hole in her basic math education on our own.

Fortunately, my son either got a better teacher, or just has more basic aptitude for math, as he was able to learn his times tables and is actually taking math classes from the next grade up. It was almost funny when we were drilling our daughter on times tables – we had to make him leave the room, as he was better at them than she was, and she’s two years older than him.

The comments on self-esteem are 100% dead-on, in my opinion…Self-esteem that’s earned is much healthier than self-esteem that’s handed to kids.

And definitely right about strict teachers. The ones I remember best and most fondly are the ones that expected a lot out of their students, who exercised strict discipline, among other qualities.

The state of classrooms these days is appalling to me. We’d have maybe one class clown, at most, in any given class, while everyone else was there to learn. And even the class clown would buckle down and behave. Now, from what my kids tell me, most everyone in the class is acting up, and the teachers have been rendered powerless to control their classes. Detention? A joke, with no real stigma, no real consequence. It’s more of an inconvenience to the parents than anything. Suspension? Whee! Vacation time! Bring back the paddle, and bring back parents who are willing to punish the kids in addition to whatever the school did!