Our education system is broken. Instead of forming adults that know the basics and are able to think for themselves, we have “free thinking” adults assured of themselves in their ignorance. The education system is set up to make getting an education nearly impossible.
As we approach one year of “15 days to slow the spread,” these problems have been greatly exacerbated. Kids are failing more, ADHD diagnoses are up, and the teachers are making impossible demands. This has forced people to look elsewhere.
Homeschooling, charter schools, and alternative solutions were on the rise before COVID. Now, those trends are accelerating. Because COVID made schools worse, these options became much more tenable, and people seem to be happier than they were with “normal schooling” before COVID.
Take part in the solution:
However, these shifts are being hampered by the teachers unions. These organizations are not seeking to improve education, but to help teachers get as much as they can from the school system for as little as possible.
Teachers unions are holding the “education” of our country’s children as a hostage, and leveraging that against the taxpayer. And the thing is, they really don’t have any leverage. They aren’t actually providing an education. Rather, they’re instilling a prideful ignorance in our children, and sending them off to be drones of the state.
How do we move forward? What can we do now, in our own lives, to improve our education? Despite the bleak diagnosis, I see two easy changes each of us can make in our mindset and our actions to improve our education.
- Use school for training
- Seek your own liberal education
School has become necessary only inasmuch as it is a credential for a career. But, that is changing rapidly with new ways to get job training like coding bootcamps or other digital tool certification. If you need to go to college, do that. However, if it can be avoided, you should avoid it.
Get your classical education here:
Furthermore, you should still get the liberal education that puts you in touch with our history. We shouldn’t shrug our responsibility to pass down the wisdom, art, and beauty of our culture. It just can’t be found on the college campus. Each of us has to go and read the classics, learn about our history, and find alternatives to the college campus.
That’s what I’m providing here. I’m launching the first installment of my new course on the Nichomachean Ethics, which will be a greater part of my course on the Golden Mean. This is just a teaser of what’s to come.
Sign up for the course here:
Nick, as a certified teacher who has spent my life around educating students and a person currently working in the social emotional learning space, I wholeheartedly agree with your opinion.
I appreciate your input, and I’m glad that you didn’t take this as an affront on teachers in general. I think there are many teachers, especially in government schools who do just go along to get along for their job. But there are obviously a tremendous number of teachers who are really trying to do the best they can in a broken system