The School Revolution (8 page)

Compulsory education laws and other regulations rest on the assumption that the state has a moral and legal obligation to supply benefits to specific groups of citizens. In this case, the citizens are not yet of voting age. This is an extension of the idea of the state as a healer. The state is supposed to intervene to make things better for certain groups inside the state’s jurisdiction.

When we see these kinds of laws, we also see the expansion of state power into areas of our lives that ought to be left alone. If there are individuals in the community who are not providing a proper education for their children, the question then arises: Who has the legitimate authority to determine what constitutes a proper education for children? Also, what power should the state transfer
to these people who claim they have the ability to determine what constitutes a proper education for children?

By establishing criteria of academic excellence, the bureaucrats have been granted the power to stifle educational innovation. There may be all kinds of programs and technologies available to educators that are not being used by the tax-funded school system. These technologies
and innovations do not conform to the established criteria of the regulated school systems. They may rest on completely different theories of how children learn. They may use different technologies than those accepted and mandated by the tax-funded school system. They may constitute a true breakthrough in education. But schools are not allowed to adopt these technologies or approaches because these
innovations do not meet the standards promulgated by state bureaucrats in the name of the legislature.

Government compulsory education and the associated regulations that define acceptable education restrict the freedom of parents to make judgments about the best educational programs for their children. Compulsory education and other regulations substitute a completely different hierarchical
system over education. Bureaucrats make the rules, and force them on children under the jurisdiction of their parents. This assumes that bureaucrats, who seek to feather their own nests, possess wisdom regarding the education of children whom they have never seen. More than this, politicians assume that these bureaucrats have better insight into what is good for children in general than parents
have for their particular children. This system assumes that the information available through bureaucratic chains of command is more relevant to the education of children than the information available to parents.

Why do we accept this as okay? Shouldn’t the parents and local educators who actually
know
these children have the final say in this?

The libertarian position is simple:
parents have the authority to determine what kind of education is best for their children
. This means that the state should not interfere in the lives of parents and children with respect to the content and structure of their education. There should not be anything resembling a government monopoly of education. Standards that govern the
public school system locally should not be imposed on parents who decide to remove their children from that system.
Without freedom of parental choice in education, the state will pursue a policy of extending its monopoly over education
. Tenured, state-funded bureaucrats will then use this monopoly to screen out ideas that call into question the legitimacy of government interference in many areas
of life, including education. The government does not have to burn books in order to persuade the next generation of voters of ideas that favor the government. The government need only screen out books and materials that are hostile to the expansion of the state. The students do not gain access to such materials except at home, and the hours spent learning at home are minimal compared to the hours
spent in tax-funded schools.

Parents who are convinced that the curriculum materials in the tax-funded schools are not what they want for their children should be allowed to provide alternative curricula in the privacy of their own homes. This is what educational freedom is all about. If parents want to pull their children out of the tax-funded school system, there should be
no restraints on their doing so. There should be no restraints on the development of curriculum materials. The adoption of specific curriculum materials should be left to the parents’ discretion. It should not be a matter of civil law.

A
t some point in every student’s academic career, he must move away from instruction by teachers and toward self-instruction. The obvious example of someone who has made this transition is a person who has passed his oral examinations for a doctorate degree and is now working on his dissertation. But the transition
from classroom instruction to self-instruction takes place long before a student enters a doctoral program.

Classroom instruction is not efficient. This is why we find that, once a person graduates from high school, college, or graduate school, he never again subjects himself to anything like classroom instruction, except maybe for
a brief seminar over a weekend. Classroom instruction is not suited for the presentation of detailed new information. The lecture method is a good way to impart the highlights of a difficult topic. The highlights may create interest in the topic; that is what a seminar is supposed to do. But the idea that the lecture is a good way to communicate basic information, most of which is supposed to be
remembered, is ludicrous. We know this because at least 90 percent of everything in a lecture is forgotten in less than three weeks.
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It is almost random as to what information in a lecture is actually retained by the listener. What one listener will retain will be very different from what some other listener will retain.

This is why classroom instruction is a
poor substitute for reading. With reading, a person can skim over the information rapidly to get a sense of the overall perspective. Then he can go back and read at a slower pace. He may highlight certain information. He may make marginal notations. If he is wise, he records key facts and their location in a book by posting the information on Evernote, a “cloud” storage application. This way, he can
come back and search for information a decade later, or half a century later. If he has made notes in the book, he can reread his notes, or skim the highlighted portions. He can review the material when he needs to. None of this is possible with a long-forgotten lecture. Even if the student recorded the lecture, it is not easy to review a lecture. The student can read at least twice as fast as,
or maybe five times faster than, somebody speaks. He’d have to listen to the entire lecture to find the piece of information he was searching for.

All this is to say that lectures are at best supplemental exercises in conveying new information. On the other hand, some people might be wired to learn better through a lecture than through reading. Other people gain mastery by careful reading.
Still others are best taught through discussion. Again, as always,
one size does not fit all
.

When the student begins to make the transition from a classroom instruction environment to self-instruction, he begins to makes the transition to academic maturity. Academic training is supposed to be governed by this principle:
as a student becomes more mature, he becomes less dependent
on any teacher
. He learns mostly on his own, and he approaches teachers for further illumination only when he gets stuck. Yet even here there is a compromise with teacher-based instruction. First, the student becomes dependent on a teacher to get him through the hard places. Second, he may not learn the techniques for mastering new and difficult information. Third, he becomes dependent upon a
classroom environment. At some point, this comforting environment is going to be taken away. It is therefore best to wean a student away from classroom instruction as early as possible. This will be at different ages for different students. It may also be at different ages for the same student in different courses. But, at some point, the student has got to be kicked out of the nest. The classroom
is the nest.

Because classroom-based education is geared to multiple students in a room, the principle of the lowest common denominator takes over. The teacher is tempted to concentrate on showing the least prepared, least intelligent, and least gifted student in the class how to master the material. The brighter students therefore
get bored fast. They are being held back by the least competent student. In other words, classroom instruction favors the less-competent students.

If the goal of education is to maximize the learning experience of every student in the program, the best form of education is self-education. The student is not put into a classroom environment. He is not held back by slower students. If
he is one of the slower students, he can review the material until such time as he is ready to go on to the next level. He does not become a liability to other people in a classroom. He does not feel as though he is the dummy. He does not feel singled out as the least competent person in the room. It is not good for a student psychologically to be at the bottom of the heap in a classroom. If he is
at the bottom of the heap in several classrooms, he will be tempted to drop out of school. That kind of mind-set can persist into adulthood, when it may have been easily avoided.

This is a reason that homeschooling is superior to classroom education. The homeschool student can go at his own pace. If he is very good in a particular course, he moves ahead rapidly. If he has trouble with
another course, he keeps reviewing the material until he is ready to go on to the next level. He sets the pace. He may set the pace in a classroom environment, but only when he is the one who learns slowly, and so becomes an object of derision. This is not the kind of mental attitude that favors personal progress in education.

Most students are ready to make the transition to self-taught
education by the beginning of the sixth grade. Some students achieve this earlier. When the student is capable of reading without moving his lips, and of writing a brief summary of what he has read, he is ready to be placed in a self-instruction program. He has the fundamental skills to read and write. He can assess what he is reading, and express this clearly in writing. In a well-designed
homeschool curriculum, the student begins writing no later than the fourth grade. Through the fourth and fifth grades, he develops his writing skills. By the sixth grade, he should be ready to learn on his own.

Such a suggestion horrifies professional educators. Professional educators have spent their lives thinking about how to make classroom education more efficient, or fairer, or
less expensive, or whatever. An educator is focused on an environment in which learning rarely extends beyond graduate school, and probably should not go on much beyond the sixth grade.

What does a student need to become an efficient self-learner? He needs the ability to read rapidly. He can get by if he does not read rapidly, but he certainly has a tremendous advantage if he does.
Second, he needs the ability to understand what he is reading. Third, he needs a way to help remember what he has read. Fourth, he needs to be able to express himself in writing. He needs to be able to put on a piece of paper or on a computer screen whatever it is that he has learned from his reading assignment. Fifth, he should also begin to develop the ability to verbally summarize what he has read,
and even better, to integrate what he has read recently with what he has read over a longer period of time. In other words, he has to be able to think analytically, breaking down topics into their component parts, and he has to be able to think synthetically, which means putting the various parts back together into a coherent whole, one that he understands.

This kind of education is
what sustains a person after he leaves formal education. This is what he needs to be a success in any field. This is what parents want for their teenage children. Yet the educational programs imposed on students by professional educators do not emphasize these important skills. This is because the lecture method in front of a classroom is slow, and is geared to the person in the room who is least
academically competent.

It is all right to have a lecture. But it should not be aimed at the least competent student in the classroom. It should be aimed at whatever the target audience is. Maybe this is the student in the middle of the pack. Maybe this is the student who is the brightest in the class, except that there is no class. The lecture is posted online. It is digital. It can
be easily viewed and reviewed.

One of the great mistakes parents make is to ask for small classrooms for their high school students. By the time a student reaches high school, he should not require any kind of intervention from an adult. He should possess the aptitude for self-education at this point. He should be able to master new material
without continual intervention by any adult. It is best if he does this without any adult intervention at all. This may not be possible in all cases, but it should be possible in most cases.

The parent who demands that his child be given special attention by a high school teacher is making a big mistake. That student is being coddled. When he walks onto a college campus, he is going
to be blindsided. There will be nobody there to look over his shoulder. There will be nobody there to encourage him. There will be nobody there to nag him. He will be almost entirely on his own. Nobody will tell him to go to class. Nobody will tell him to participate in course discussion groups.

The student who has received specialized attention all through high school finds himself
completely on his own when he enters a college. He is not self-confident, because he has not been involved in a program of self-education. His only hope is that others in the classroom have been similarly coddled.

If what I say is true, then why does the student have to go off to college at all? Why does he have to go into a classroom environment?
Why does he have to listen to lectures, especially lectures delivered to hundreds of students in a large lecture hall? Why is he subjected again to an inefficient system of education? The answer is simple: It is traditional. It goes back almost a thousand years, to the very first medieval universities. There were no books for most students at that time. The printed book did not appear in the
West until the mid-1400s. So students had to write down the material. They listened to a lecture; they wrote very fast. This mode of education stretched back to priestly classrooms in ancient Egypt. This is how education was always conducted. But when movable type became used in the West to produce books, this ancient form of education became far less efficient when compared to the educational
system based on the careful reading of printed books. The continuing justification for classroom teaching was that this enabled students to interact with one another and with the professor. In other words, it was some form of Socratic dialogue. It was not based on the lecture system.

The fact that university students today are expected to sit at a desk and write down notes from a live
lecture is silly. It is a denial of the power of the printed page and the video lecture. In the twenty-first century, it is also a denial of the power of digital communications. Why in the world are students required to sit silently at their desks, frantically writing down what they hear in a lecture, always falling behind, because they cannot write as fast as the professor is lecturing? It is
preposterous, and it is universal. Parents are asked to pay up to a quarter million dollars to send the student to a major private university whose teaching methods became obsolete sometime around 1450.

This is not an argument against a tutorial system. A small class of students who discuss the material they have read is a legitimate form of instruction. It is the old Socratic method.
But it is extremely expensive, and it is suitable only for students of the very highest caliber. It is used with undergraduates mainly at Oxford and Cambridge, as it has been for about a thousand years, and in graduate seminars everywhere.

Students need specially designed online courses that involve all three of the basic techniques of learning.
First, there should be daily reading assignments. Second, there should be either daily or weekly writing assignments. Third, there should be introductory lectures geared to the reading assignments, in the form of screencasts. A screencast is an outline narrated by the person who has produced the outline. There may also be charts, formulas, or other tools for communicating numerical information.
These lectures should be introductory, and they should be geared to help those students who learn better from a lecture than they do from an initial reading. A lecture should not be longer than about twenty-five minutes. Beyond twenty-five minutes, most students forget the material.
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Only highly skilled lecturers can get away with longer presentations, and even then, the student is still going
to forget 90 percent of it within about three weeks. A lecture should be geared to introducing students to new material, and then motivating them to pursue it. It should be a video.

If the student can master new material on his own, break it down into its component parts, and then put the parts back together in an essay, followed by a summary video lecture, he probably
does not need to listen to a lecture in the form of a screencast. There is no reason for a student to subject himself to a form of education that gives him no particular advantage or the ability to learn new material faster. The student should adopt whatever approach to education works best for him.

If a student gets really stuck, it is legitimate for him to ask for help. But he would
be wise not to ask the professor. He would be wise to ask a student who has successfully passed the course. The professor is still operating at a very high level, whereas a student who has passed the course is in a much better position to help another student master the material, because he remembers how
he
mastered the material. He did not have a mastery of the material when he started; he did
have a mastery when he ended. He has sufficient mastery to be able to serve as a teacher. This is a better way to learn than to go to the teacher. The larger the number of students in a class, the less likely the teacher is going to be able to provide one-on-one assistance. Even a teaching assistant has limited time to take slow students by the hand and get them through the material. But if the
educational program has forums in which students who have taken the class and done well can assist those not doing well, the program is more likely to produce a larger number of students who master the material.