Education and the Federal Government

Education is not rote memorization of facts and methods.  Education is learning, sometimes being taught and sometimes learning on your own, to think.  You cannot devise a test that shows if you can think, at least not a test that most of the people that take it would survive.  But once again, by the nature of trying to standardize something involving 300,000,000 or more people, all you can do is collect numbers, and the only way to collect numbers is to test for things that don’t accurately indicate education.

Once you begin a culture of relying on those numbers to justify your existence, your job, your position of power, you end up harming the system because in your drive to get higher and higher numbers, you begin to neglect true education.

Education is not a nebulous concept, not a thing that exists on it’s own.  It is defined by how well a person is able to make his/her way through life, to adapt and thrive and prosper.  It is not sufficient to measure it against some nebulous global standard of acceptable worker clones.  You must be able to put it into practice where you live, where you grow, where you influence others.

A federal bureau that exists sometimes thousands of miles and often thousands of cares away from most of it’s subjects cannot be effective.  And it shouldn’t exist.

Communities are the beneficiaries of the education of their members.  Communities thrive when their citizens are allowed to learn to use their minds, not just to fill them up.  And so the center of education should exist at the very same point as the center of benefits of education, in the communities.

Methods of schooling should be considered equal as long as the result is considered equally beneficial to the local communities.  Hands-on teaching of farming and mining technologies will be beneficial in the heartlands where they would not be so beneficial in the industrial areas of Pittsburgh or Chicago.  Industrial trade education would be more important there.

Home schooling, charter schools, schools funded with local and state tax dollars, private academies, all should be regarded as valid and acceptable venues for true education – as long as the community benefits from the results.  Not the entire nation, the needs are too varied to create a reasonable single standard, all you can do is to create a lowest common denominator and then by demanding adherence to it destroy superior achievement in most students.  And by establishing the standard under the federal banner, you restrict any local effort to customize education to their own needs.

The people involved in the education arm of the Federal Government would find jobs locally, because as responsibility shifts so does the location and need for administration.  But you can assure a greater achievement by allowing individual communities to demand the successful education of their own members than you can assure by setting a federal standard that restricts local efforts in almost every way.  The only thing the Federal Government would lose is power and control, and I would shed no tear over that loss.

I teach my children each day to do things they don’t learn in their charter school.  My community has done far more to provide education for them than the federal mandates ever did.  I expect them to learn on their own from things they observe as well.  It is my job, not just the job of the Government, to make sure my offspring are educated enough to succeed, and to make sure that I continue to gain education each day as well.

Christopher Nogy