What's Wrong with the Schools

It seems lately like there's a big propaganda campaign to convince us that "higher mathematics" or doing quadratic equations are necessary to achieve success in this society.

I lived in Seattle when the personal computer boom was getting underway, and what impressed me at the time, was how all those shops and guys who used to be auto repair places, were now computer repair places and experts -- because those were the guys who liked to do things with their hands rather than learning the theory of computer science and higher mathematics.

That's really been the new model of achieving success for the past 35 years -- instead of the old education model of simply accumulating more academic (theoretical) "knowledge" -- as typified by the computer industry/revolution being founded in the proverbial garages of people learning by trial and error -- which even people acquiring and "learning" new products and technologies have to do. It's a different kind of learning -- on demand, as needed -- rather than the legacy model of education of just piling up knowledge hoping one day they'll find a use for it -- or the kind of generalized learning that astute people have noted as useless academics waiting for an inappropriate moment to exhibit itself.

You just can't learn theoretically and academically -- but have to have an actual need and application to do so. So it seems like this is one of these propaganda campaigns by the "education industry" still trying to sell more of "their" kind of education which they claim to own the monopoly on, yet at the same time, claim that parents should be responsible for its appalling failures in today's world.

Obviously we need the new learning model rather than the preservation and perpetuation of the medieval scholastic tradition of learning infinitely more for learning's (the education industry's) sake.

Recently, another reader/commenter decried the need for people to still learn the multiplication tables -- instead of just learning to operate a computer/calculator to do that -- better and unfailingly.