A Radical Proposal for Education

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

February 1, 2007

It is a simple fact that the more successful a person becomes; the more he or she advances in a career.  The better at maintaining healthy relationships they become, the more they have worked absent of and in opposition to all the time and energy spent in school.  

The very nature of all these successes is that they are brought about by progressive changes both reacted to and caused by human action. It is our value judgments, hunches, and imaginations that we bring to our surroundings and use to determine relationships of cause and effect and of how to set about bringing those ends which will make us most fully human and satisfy our wants the best.  

In short, we become most fully human or uniquely individual when we are free to specialize and develop specific aspects of our personality, with all our aptitudes, interests, strengths, and weaknesses. It is the ability of each of us to relate information we are learning to something that we, in some substantial way, already know, which enables us to learn even better and faster.  

For instance, once I understand the laws of addition and subtraction, I don’t need to memorize every possible addition and subtraction table, which would be impossible. I can merely use the logic of basic algebra to apply it to any numbers. From there I can more easily learn algebra, geometry, then calculus, physics, and so on. I can group like things and understand relationships between them. And once I learn how to study these subjects better according to my own aptitudes, such as by reading as opposed to oral lectures, I can now refer to this understanding in other areas of study.  

In my case, the more I learn, the more I realize how antithetical to a real education school is. This means private or, for obvious reasons, public. Each person manages to be successful and get educated despite whatever time they spend in school, not because of it. This is not an indictment merely of government-run schools. This is one of all schools and universities.  

This means that the best way to educate each person is on an individual basis, so as to allow people to tailor instruction, formal or informal, to their own tastes and aptitudes.  

Formal education, however, is necessarily conservative and doctrinal. Whereas the volume of knowledge in existence is being added to every day, classrooms must use a kind of violence on students in order to form them all into one mold. No matter how good the teacher, one must, of necessity, try to always cater to that middle ground of students so as to maximize the education of all of them. But in doing so, the uniqueness and growth of each individual is compromised and thwarted.  

To paraphrase Murray Rothbard from Education: Free and Compulsory, in a classroom setting, the slow kids are frustrated because they can’t learn the material; the gifted kids are frustrated with the slow pace; and the average students are frustrated because they have to work hard just to keep up with the fast students.  

The unifying nature of classrooms is the very aspect least conducive to the growth of one’s imagination, which is where learning really happens. A strong imagination means one can reconstruct arguments, logic, or complex series of causation in one’s own head. It means that one can recreate in their mind that much more strongly a particular passage or relevant piece of information, and apply it to another, from which another idea altogether emerges. It enables one to shed light on the complex forces at work in physical nature and in human actions and dispositions where others merely see random movement.  

This skill is everything which is systematically eroded, if not destroyed, by the doctrinaires in schools, who merely transmit traditions and the peer reviewed wisdom from one generation to the next. What you are subjected to in school are not tests of your imagination--which can only be applied, not tested--but the ability to summarize exactly the information your teacher wants at test time.  

It is true that there are teachers who have an understanding of this and try and nurture each student’s individualism and growth. However, in school their efforts are necessarily limited to what time, curricula, and selection of students they must attend to. Their efforts to develop the uniqueness and individuality of each student is only made in opposition to all the restrictions which formal education places before us. And the best teachers can only encourage self-education, since it is what the individual interprets and brings to the subject before him that makes an education worthwhile.  

Classrooms are conducive to those who can transmit doctrines and avoid those forbidden questions or drifting from the standard curricula. In other words, schools favor the most dull and irrelevant courses and methods and doctrines.  

Practice makes permanent, not perfect. So even in the private sector, which enables us the great freedom and ability, free of artificial obstacles, to adapt and tailor our efforts to that volume of knowledge being added upon at every moment, formal education will still have the inherent tendency to curb imagination and individualism and perpetuate those false paradigms and dull pedagogical methods which creates in teachers’ minds the belief that their courses should be taught and their egos stroked regardless of whatever subversive or individualist influences should confront them.  

Failing in school does not mean that one can’t be taught or isn’t learning the proper material. All it means is that on a particular test or assignment a student did not provide a teacher with that material demanded. That’s it. You haven’t summarized what a teacher commanded of you in a manner of his or her own liking.  

That could be symptomatic of the fact that a student is lazy, irresponsible, or disrespectful. In these cases, school does nothing but delay the corrective and painful consequences which come about when you try to be lazy, irresponsible, or disrespectful in any relationship other than the student-teacher one, i.e., any one that matters. Get the student to take a tutor all day and pass the class, and they have not done anything but now given back that information and those formalities that are demanded of him, and nothing more.  

This happens often, but we have government foremost to blame for this infantilization of society.  

The other reason that students don’t do well in school is that they know better. They have vivid imaginations. They daydream, read, play music, are artistic, watch movies, play games and sports, and have aspirations. They don’t apply themselves because they know that school just gets in the way of their education. For them, school is a place that imposes constraints on how to express themselves. Instead of learning how they like, or learning things that can’t be taught in a classroom, they are given specific time limits, material to learn (to the exclusion of what they want to or have the aptitude to learn), and rigid modes of being tested for that which they were supposed to learn. Then, repeat.  

Or, they are subjected to those paradigms and schools of thought they object to or that are simply wrong and contradictory. They’re taught these subjects because intellectuals and politically correct textbook writers think they should.  

I’ve encountered so many fellow classmates and economics students who are frustrated by the econometric models of indifference curves, labor coefficients, and perfect competition, which they can neither understand, or, once they answer the standard questions, feel as if all they haven’t answered anything at all and have not met their own objections.  

To them I have said that they are perfectly right to be frustrated. It might be too late for them if they weren’t! Their frustration is symptomatic of the fact that school asks all the wrong questions, so the answers don’t matter. It’s heartening to see their frustration because I know these students expect more. The pain they feel is a corrective reaction to a system they very appropriately do not understand, since it makes no sense.  

It’s in all the laws of nature that, should we deviate from them, we will experience negative consequences. Should we try to cover up the symptoms of this disturbance with a further action contrary to our own natures or those of the physical universe, more bad consequences follow, until eventually the painful effects are too much to bear. This is only so because natural law does exist and can be understood. When adhered to, we become most content and grown.  

In classrooms, there is no value for an entrepreneur who has a hunch about the next great way to deliver a service to someone and can envision this process in their minds and follow through with it. Schools have no use for people who want this responsibility and will risk their livelihoods for it. Alternatively, they can do little with bullies and students with bad manners who can terrorize and harm other students short of expelling them entirely.  

Finally, schools, and universities in particular, regularly turn out the worst people in society. These are politicians, lawyers, intellectuals, lobbyists, economists, central bankers, socialists, leftists, activists, conservatives, and egalitarians.  

It is what you bring to education which makes the learning process so dynamic and constructive. The most useful knowledge can’t be tested, but applied. A good musician doesn’t just play a piano according to notes, dynamic marks, and key signatures written on a page. A good musician is tough. He is rigorous in learning how to interpret music, something no one can teach or test. He cannot be produced by entering a classroom, but by learning how to learn music through trial and error. And whereas an 80% on a test may be above average, such a performance in real life or in a concert hall is horrible. People get fired for giving still upwards of that, and deservedly so.  

The radical proposal should be painfully obvious by now. It is that of abolishing, or reducing as much as possible, formal education and universities. This is a program for perpetual radicalism, and is both individualist and conservative in its respect for the roles of private property and traditionalism in the wisdom of families, parents, and other legitimate authorities.  

It is only this lack of a system of education, absent the status quo, which can produce well adjusted individuals who are far sighted, imaginative, thoughtful, respectful, and out of decency forbid of themselves those anti-social activities that schools are powerless to stop and those tasks which we outsource to the state.