Education

Now that I am having direct exposure to public schooling I can start to see why people are sending kids to private schools. The teachers seem to behave like they are in a bureaucracy and their level of commitment to feedback and responsibility appears very low. Now I have to temper that view with the knowledge that I work in the high-tech entrepreneurial world where everyone is highly skilled and highly motivated; the contrast is extraordinary.

This is a problem with so many layers its almost not worth worrying about, since I can’t fix it. It just means I will have to work that much harder to fill the educational gap for my daughter.

Ignoring that insight, I wonder if it would help if we paid teachers more and required them to do less? Obviously that is one solution. I am not sure it would work unless we also made teachers directly responsible for outcomes and treated parents like customers. That last one worries me for some reason.

The point of education is to lift people above the fog of bare existence, that is to give them more skills than are required just to cope with the complex world we live in. Ideally we want our kids to have the skills and confidence to solve problems and grasp opportunities. We want them to be good people and to treat others fairly. We want them to be able develop life philosophies too … the ability to position themselves comfortably into a personal world-view.

This is only going to happen if the teachers and parents cooperate because one or the other of these is not sufficient to create these outcomes. It seems to me that teachers, unfortunately, see parents as a necessary evil, to be avoided at all costs. Wrong answer – parents are the key partners in creating the educational outcomes that we all want to see. It’s a shame most parents are such dickheads.

I give the whole educational system in Australia (and I am including the home front here) a C+. Lots of room for improvement. However the current efforts to improve the system are focused on cost efficiencies and levelling of the opportunities, and not genuine across-the-board improvements (as I see them). The fundamentally flawed nature of education will not change.