Good Education

Millions of parents, students, education practitioners, politicians, doctors, and others are complaining about substandard, ineffective, useless, and often politically biased education in public schools and colleges. The question is how many of them offer reasonable solutions that would improve the quality of education and its usefulness to students.

The following are some radical but common sense solutions:

1. MINIMIZING INSTRUCTION IN USELESS SUBJECTS AND MAKING EDUCATION MORE SPECIALIZED AND EFFECTIVE

Too many subjects taught in school and in college are useless and impracticable in real life, students can not apply knowledge taught to their everyday life.

As an example, in early education, when a student hasn’t yet formed any ideas about their career, exposing them to a multitude of subjects may help them choose which one they like the most. However, when it becomes apparent that they have zero talent for or willingness to learn a particular subject, they should no longer be forced to study it and instead focus on something they enjoy studying or at least a subject that will enhance their survival skills in society.

The earlier students begin to specialize in certain disciplines where they can and want to excel – the better. In addition to sciences and humanities, students must be taught how to survive and become self-sustaining and successful in society without any reliance on government handouts.

Students should be taught many useful skills that are not being taught today such as managing one’s financial affairs and budget; learning basic laws that affect their everyday life, and learning the psychology of interpersonal communication – how to effectively communicate with peers, future coworkers, and family members. 

Rather than learn by hurting the feelings of others and their own feelings, students should also learn about dating, about courtship skills that help win the object of their desires in a civilized way and to be respectful. They should likewise learn how to politely reject gestures of sexual interest and how to adequately handle such rejections.  If teenagers learned more about gender relationships and dealing with each other in a civilized manner we probably wouldn’t need draconian sexual harassment laws that serve as a very coarse and often abused replacement for basic good upbringing. When parents and schools fail, the government and lawyers step in at a much later stage, but at the end of the day, their clumsy and often self-serving interference does more harm than good overall. 

Today, many useful skills are not being properly taught at school or in college, or students never really learn them as part of their education and end up learning the hard way, suffering multiple setbacks as they become more independent.

Instead of learning useful skills, in order to get that coveted diploma, students are forced to take classes they hate, they are force-fed knowledge they forget upon passing the exam, the knowledge they will never need in real life or their careers.  It causes resentment toward education in general and an enormous waste of taxpayer money on education materials and education professionals teaching useless classes students don’t need.

Those students who are motivated force themselves to study for the exams, pass them, and immediately forget everything they’ve learned to avoid trashing their brains with hated information. The others, less motivated, give up, and drop out of high school or college. Some smart ones realize that vocational training is the way to go.  

A good education system would allow young people to only learn what they want to learn and must learn to be successful, not the useless stuff and to spend less time going to school and more time building their careers early on. This would also help to have much less student debt. With less time-consuming,  and more exciting education,  young people would enjoy their best time in life dating and doing fun things instead of wasting their precious youth on stressing out under the weight of voluminous homework,  cramming for exams at night, and yawning in the classrooms or in front of the computer at home instead of rightfully enjoying their time with friends.  The less time young people spend studying useless subjects, the sooner they will be able to get an income-producing job, start working towards their specialized career as an extern or apprentice, and eventually open up their own business much earlier. 

2) HEALTHY HABITS

Today most students are not being consistently taught healthy habits, – such basic things as dental hygiene, avoiding sugar and carbs, harmful effects of computer game addiction, obesity, and lack of exercise. Students are not learning anatomy in conjunction with how to keep their organs healthy.  Sex education rather than being taught in a sensitive and useful manner became the subject of political controversy. 

Anti-drug counseling apparently is not helping any in an era of the opioid crisis, legalization of various previously forbidden substances, widespread use of fentanyl and meth, and lack of enforcement against drug trade in the cities.

It almost looks like this society lost its war on drugs and both illicit narcos, cartels, and drug traders, and Big Pharma won that war each in their own way.

All this affects students profoundly – whereas before there was some major stigma attached to drug use, now it’s being treated not as a moral transgression, but as an illness that entitles the drug addict to love and respect from peers and society. 

There is no longer an understanding amongst young people that if they attempt to experiment with various types of drugs, such behavior will not only make them sick but also subject them to incarceration and major social stigma.  This also has to do with progressives’ fight against “mass incarceration” of drug users and small-time drug traffickers. 

As a result, there is more drug availability on the streets, less enforcement against the drug trade, and less stigma about drug use – all of this combined leads to more experimenting with drugs and more addiction.

3) HEALTHY NUTRITION

The separate subject is the lack of healthy nutrition and lack of instruction about it, especially in disadvantaged inner city communities where most people are low income and prone to eating fast food, junk food and buying cheaper processed foods rather than choosing more expensive healthier ingredients and low sugar low carb diet.

Why are children in public schools especially so obese? Well  – who drinks soda all the time? Who buys in and out hamburgers? Who eats fries and chips? How many parents pack healthy lunches with tea inside thermos instead of cola bottles for kids to avoid eating bad stuff that’s available from vending machines?

Then they talk about body positivity to comfort fat kids with the idea that they should love their obese bodies which leads to diabetes and multiple other health problems.

Some hard-core liberals would say that this is the reason why EVEN MORE  free money should be given to the disadvantaged communities of color so that they could provide better quality free food for children at public schools. Unfortunately, even if this happens, with bad eating habits they would still spend the money on junk food; and given how corrupt and inefficient the public school system is even forcing schools to open up cafeterias that provide healthier food, would only lead to more theft of taxpayer money and children would still refuse to eat the healthier food. Why would they refuse to eat it? Unless you hire a Michelin-star restaurant chef for the school cafeteria, healthy foods prepared by minimum-wage chefs would consist of some cheap lettuce with a couple of tomatoes and some corn syrup and sugar dressing at best and children would be disgusted by it. School administration would find a way to steal most of the money that the government previously confiscated from taxpayers for public schools as they always do and nothing good would come of it.  

The issue is not poverty, just like with crime, it’s bad upbringing, bad habits, and in this case bad eating habits, and lack of parent and grandparent participation. 

What needs to happen is an emphasis on homemade meals, and getting parents and grandparents involved in cooking healthier meals for their kids and grandkids rather than buying pre-made processed junk food. Children in inner cities and more affluent suburbs should be entitled to family-made meals that they can warm in school microwaves in the cafeteria.  Some of the healthiest meals can be made with very cheap basic ingredients too – no excuse for the impoverished and disadvantaged to avoid cooking. This is a non-issue with some of the minorities where ethnic cuisine offers excellent alternatives to processed foods and family structure still exists to ensure that a child will eat grandma-made lunch, not McDonalds made lunch.  In this case, our immigrant communities can serve as a positive example and role model for others! On the other hand,  lazy neglectful parents who fail to provide homemade meals to their children should become the target of shaming at parental conferences in school, and also extended family like grandparents or aunts and sisters, etc should participate in preparing meals for kids or risk being denied access to these kids by parents. If someone is a single parent or has to work two jobs and doesn’t have the time or energy to prepare homemade meals for kids, then extended family participation is even more crucial. Aside from family participation, there could also be an option of using the services of caretakers if income permits or buying homemade food from vetted by the community local providers like street vendors or little old ladies prepping pupusas and tamales en su casa! The bottom line is that there is a myriad of alternatives to mass-produced, high sugar and carb-content garbage that is being supplied to the children by the poisonous food industry with the blessing of the corrupt Food and Drug Administration!

4) ANTI- BULLYING 

Anti-bullying education should not only be applied based on race, gender, or weight but there must first be a general understanding that bullying itself is a problem – not the identity of the subject that’s being bullied.  They keep talking about bullying based on race or transgender resentment but what about being bullied because someone is too short, too tall, or too shy?  Or if someone is a nerd y or lacks social skills or even being better than others – better dressed, more intelligent, more good-looking?  All bullying is bad no matter what category it’s being applied to because it’s an act of unprovoked aggression!

Humans inherited some monkey instincts and one of them is anger and aggression, it’s in us, it’s normal and is not going anywhere. However, the difference between humans and monkeys is that humans are supposed to be able to use their brain and social skills to learn how to contain anger and aggression, to harness the power of anger to channel it into something productive, or at least use anger to fight injustice but not to hurt innocent people. Children are different from adults in the degree of self-restraint they possess – they lack the ability to control their impulses, so they can be really cruel and sadistic without even realizing it.  That’s why in war-torn underdeveloped countries armed rebels use child soldiers and that’s why gangs use minors to commit gruesome crimes: they have no fear, no compassion for their victims and they are almost immune from liability – especially when liberal District Attorneys refuse to charge them as adults!  

Aside from lacking self-restraint, teenagers often feel very insecure about themselves and victimize others to “advance” themselves in the eyes of their peers, to gain popularity as someone strong and powerful.

The methods of such “advancement” may, but do not necessarily have to include brutal force – it could just be psychological bullying of vulnerable peers, mocking them, finding a trait that everyone finds ugly or funny, and joking about that trait insulting the bullying victim. When this happens, mob-minded peers unite around the bully to further traumatize the victim because they enjoy seeing the mental suffering of the bullied victim and relish seeing them cry. In cases of physical violence, the mob led by the bully relishes seeing their victim cower on the floor in the fetal position in that bathroom corner or near the lockers waiting for another blow. The mob mentality is on full display in such situations.

How do you break that mob mentality and bully popularity? 

Perhaps schools could implement mandatory anti-bullying instruction where a psychological portrait of a bully could be drawn and bullies could be exposed.  There must be a major stigma attached to being a bully, but also there should be a stigma attached to being a conformist mob. Everyone must understand that a bully’s “power” is derived from emotional insecurity and weakness no physical strength can compensate for.  Also, the bully’s power is derived from the mob mentality of the conformist crowd that views that bully as a leader.

At the core of the mob mentality is the desire to be like everyone else and fear of being different, fear of standing out from the crowd, also in part based on fear of being bullied.

 Independent thinking and INDIVIDUALISM must be encouraged rather while conformism and blind obedience should be discouraged.  Young people should feel safe to do their own thing without fear of being bullied by peers and should also feel safe questioning the authority of adults, teachers, and school administrators in good faith (not rebelling without a good cause or engaging in hooliganism). 

Even though there is also a stigma of being a “rat” and telling on your peers, in cases of bullying, anonymous reporting of such incidents is vital to detect them. Once detected school administration must give suspected bullies and their parents enough due process to determine how to deal with them, but at the end of the day, if it’s determined that bullying actually took place, the penalty for it must be severe enough to deter any such behavior in the future – no slapping on the wrist for bullying.  Rather, bullying should lead bullies to the juvenile criminal justice system through a shortcut. 

In addition to psychological counseling and administrative deterrents to bullying, there should be an understanding that bullying victims could also be pushed to the limit of self-restraint and retaliate disproportionately.  This scenario played out in multiple school shootings – where socially isolated former bullying victims, not finding any emotional support or alternative recourse against bullies and the evil mob of peers that participated in bullying, decided to take matters into their own hands and just massacre them, often indiscriminately.  

Dishonest politicians love to manipulate this issue to attack Second Amendment rights and brainwash children into supporting an anti-gun agenda, but in reality, guns don’t kill people – victims of bullying do! Interestingly enough, sleazy anti-gun politicians seem to use a double standard when dealing with inner-city criminals of color and mostly white school shooters!  Inner city criminals of color who kill and rob people of all races in broad daylight or burglarize their homes on a daily basis are being portrayed as victims of systemic racism deserving some compassion and understanding.  At the same time, rural and mostly white mass shooters are not being portrayed as victims of bullying, their psychological trauma is not serving as an “excuse” and their manifestos are never being made public! Why such a double standard? Why not equally condemn both groups for being violent? Why is it not more important to take guns away from tens of thousands of hard-core inner-city criminals, than to do the same to law-abiding gun owners only because their children or former children could get a hold of the weapons and snap one day?

How does making gun ownership illegal for normal people stop anyone including aggrieved children and inner-city gangsters commit less crime? They usually use illegally owned or illegally obtained weapons! Before the gun issue is even addressed, bullying and psychological trauma must be addressed!

This actually applies not only to bullying at school or college but also bullying at the workplace or social setting that caused aggrieved coworkers or social club members to massacre people they worked with for years or engaged in recreational activities for years.  Drastic background checks don’t help against squeaky clean but very sensitive, vulnerable, and quiet victims of bullying that SNAP one day! Had these school shooters or workplace shooters not been constantly terrorized, bullied, humiliated, and traumatized by the bullying mob they had to deal with for years, most of these shootings would not have taken place, and they would not have even applied to get that AR 15 in the first place.   

On the news, we hear only about mass shootings, but we don’t hear about thousands of cases of retaliatory attacks against bullies that happen every day on a smaller scale and could include one-on-one combat, relatives of the victim finding the bully and hurting them in retaliation, and many other incidents of retaliation that could even happen years after the actual bullying took place.

The bottom line is that schools are lacking a comprehensive anti-bullying instruction and infrastructure that strikes at the core of this phenomenon: lack of self-reflection, lack of self-restraint, inability to control sadistic instincts and of course lack of empathy for your peers who seem vulnerable for various reasons, lack of severe penalties for bullying, lack of stigma against bullies and mob mentality that supports them.

If young people believed in individualism, despised mob mentality, respected others’ private space, and learned about the virtues of self-restraint and tolerance not only to other races but also generally to someone who is simply different, live and let live mentality would spread and bullying could be curtailed.

1. DOWNSIZING EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT 

Just like with the overall political realm, where establishments comfortable with the status quo always resist needed reforms, self -serving education establishments stand in the way of providing quality education. Unionized teachers, tenured professors, and education bureaucracy that took good care of themselves by creating and expanding well-paying, secure jobs for themselves at the parent and taxpayer expense will vigorously fight any reform that threatens their well-entrenched positions.

Therefore, to make any progress, parents and taxpayers could also form some type of organizations that seek to downsize the education behemoth and fight education bureaucracy and teacher unions.  Where the resistance of the machine is unbreakable, perhaps in the process of negotiations with them educators society could offer something in return. For example, maybe in some cases to avoid completely eliminating a particular teaching position, they could just change the subject that the educator is supposed to teach with all the salary and benefit privileges remaining in place – say teach financial responsibility class instead of revisionist critical race theory class that only causes anger on both sides of the political barricades. 

There is absolutely no need for doctors to spend eleven years and for attorneys to spend seven years studying subjects they won’t need in their careers, but future doctors are forced to study some humanities and future attorneys are forced to study math in college and study areas of law in law school they will never practice instead of teaching future professionals how to open up your own practice and get paying patients or clients respectively.  Most of our professionals would confirm that they weren’t taught in universities about opening up and running a successful business, and only a few learn about challenges in the job market and how to be a competitive candidate for a desired position such as interview taking skills or even basic resume drafting skills. The professional licensing system is also far off course requiring professionals to take exams that are not relevant to professionals’ ability to provide quality service but are designed to weed out as many people as possible to protect those who pass the test from future competition.  A merit-based system is only helpful when the best professionals get the license not when the best test takers pass the exam. Today there is very little correlation between attorneys’ ability to fight and win a case and their ability to pass the bar exam and the same applies to all other professionals. Tests are not designed to weed out those who will provide poor quality service to their clients, but instead are designed to make sure that as few people as possible pass that test, so in the end fewer professionals are available to the public and this means they can charge more for their work!   The education system from the bottom to the top is self-serving and that is why it is so broken.

LOSER PROFESSORS BEGET ENTITLED GENERATION OF GOOD FOR NOTHINGS

The sad part of this is that at some point in their career, many if not most of the professors at those universities providing the wrong education failed to open up their own businesses or get a high-income job so they turned to the world of academia.  These failed individuals are nevertheless claiming moral superiority to hide their deep trauma and insecurity about poor marketing skills and inability to earn money under pressure from the corporate realm or small business realm. 

Many university professors pretend like they never wanted to make money, that they despise “capitalist greed.” They feel that doing for-profit business is somehow beneath them and they indignantly “despise” money they never had or could never earn.   The word “BERKELEY” comes to mind, and with it, the words “woke” and “socialist” also raise their ugly heads. These woke socialist educators brainwash students into believing that the social worker job is far more uplifting and rewarding than being a businessman, stockbroker, or successful litigator. 

There is this tear-jerker idea that social workers are kind and are helping people in need and this is admirable businesspeople are greedy and just looking out for their own interests which is shameful. Never mind that many social workers are being used by self-serving government agencies to stick their dirty hands into people’s private lives and break up families. Not to mention the fact that businesspeople are self-sufficient and social workers are paid by taxpayers.

These loser mentors believe that owning and buying real estate is less glamorous than working for some shady non-profit organizations prone to internal corruption and often helping the wrong kind of people – such as organizations defending the rights of convicted felons in prison or organizations helping homeless thugs to live in encampments rather than being taken out of the city. 

Government jobs are being glorified while the world of business is being vilified – no wonder you get a generation of entitled good-for-nothings demanding rights to extort more from the taxpayers and from  “rich people” while lacking work ethic, sense of personal responsibility, or motivation to do anything productive. This useless cannon fodder for extremist “civil rights” organizations comes to the job interview with an attitude of how an can employer advance their career and not how they can be useful for the employer. If they are lucky enough to get a job, they have zero loyalty to their employer, they spend their time in the office browsing their Instagram and use that job as a stepping stone to something else – that’s how you get all these resumes where “steady job” means being employed in one place over 6 months!  

This work product of bad education by loser professors always remembers their rights and always relies on the social safety net in case they get booted from yet another job for bad attitude, negligence, and laziness. With this kind of “education,” students are being mentored by educators who themselves don’t know what a good work ethic means because they could never succeed in any line of work that requires a good work ethic.  Students are not being taught what good customer service implies (go to Asia and check out their EXEMPLARY customer service!). Young people can’t even follow simple instructions from the boss without objecting to them as being emotionally abusive orders by a “tyrant” boss and claiming their “rights”.  

“New Age” “educators” poison the minds of the young generation with the idea that the workplace should have no hierarchy, that hierarchy is old school – and that you and your boss should be best buddies and your supervisors should treat you as an equal colleague (even though you have zero experience) and not as a subordinate who must comply with employer instructions and accept criticism without talking back. 

The notion of “Karens” comes to mind as well: customers are no longer entitled to quality customer service by hard-working employees who rush to help you and pays attention to what they are doing.  If you demand that a manager puts a lazy, negligent, or rude employee into their place and punishes them in your presence to give you moral satisfaction is not only making you a “Karen” but may also be a violation of some corrupt labor codes.  This awful attitude to customer service is also taught at colleges – so when these good-for-nothings can’t really get into a good private sector career and end up working as struggling waiters or waitresses planning to become movie celebrities (like that is going to happen lol), they will give you as a customer the nastiest attitude with their unsubstantiated big ego because that’s how they were being taught. All because employees’ “rights” and “status” are now above the customer’s rights and definitely above the employer’s rights or status!  

Some of those university professors claim that they used to be corporate slaves and then got tired of it and turned to teaching – when in reality they probably failed to be successful in the private sector and sought refuge in teaching. However, what can they teach students about private sector employment if they fail there themselves? 

These professors are part of the education establishment and part of the overall problem in the education field.  Forget about the teachers at regular public schools – for many of them being a teacher was truly a last resort – there is a reason why there are teacher shortages despite the cushy benefits and lavish union protections teachers enjoy. 

It’s almost like being a public defender – you failed as an attorney, nobody wants you, criminals with some money choose private attorneys and you are at the bottom of the food chain representing some homeless psycho fighting prosecutors in desperate attempts to get the transient some jail time to keep him off the streets just a bit little longer. 

As to the school teachers – especially in public schools in inner cities – aside from being at the very bottom of the education food chain, they also have to deal with dangerous and unruly juvenile delinquents that make up probably at least 50% of the class while the rest of them just skipping school – all the good ones with responsible parents going to magnet schools. 

No matter how much money the government will extort from homeowners to pay for public school education, nothing will improve if the entire system doesn’t change. 

Education administrative state requires that students are force-fed subjects they don’t care about and don’t need to justify the jobs of swampy bureaucracy overseeing education, unnecessary unionized teacher personnel, and shady administrative positions at the lower level that were artificially created to give affirmative action jobs to otherwise unemployable people. If all this malignant infrastructure is significantly downsized, we will see big improvements.

What should be done?

Mandatory curriculum should be downsized and should consist of mostly teaching life skills and minimal general education.  As a result, we will only have teachers who teach useful subjects and students who want to learn them. 

Public schools, especially In the inner cities, must develop a system of iron discipline that should severely penalize disorderly conduct, gang formation, bullying, flaking, etc and students may be required to wear uniforms to make a psychological impact of orderliness on them.  The curriculum should include instruction on how to pursue healthy habits, practice personal hygiene and eat healthy meals, resist peer pressure, and respect private property.  They should learn some basic laws including the penal code, learn to disrespect deviants and criminals, how to respect and even help police if needed.  There should be additional instruction on how to become self-sufficient and resist urban ghetto culture instead of glorifying it.

As to the world of academia –  as an example – 5 years of pure health sciences instruction for doctors and 3 years of pure law for lawyers with some heavy specialization and business skills included would suffice. A similar approach to other professionals’ education both in private and public universities. So many professors would lose their cushy jobs! So many establishment education officials would no longer be needed! So many useless colleges would go out of business! However, so many students would pay so much less for their education, would enjoy the time of their youth, and would start their careers so much earlier that the benefits of these reforms would by far outweigh the grief of education bureaucrats and the entitled world of academia!

Aside from teaching wrong ideology at all school levels which deserves a separate discussion, the parasitic education establishment of today is ruining the lives of our young generation and causing a shortage of professionals ready to take on the challenges of the future. Education establishment prevents many talented and driven people from entering the workforce, opening up their businesses, and being self-sufficient and successful in their careers. Education establishments must be replaced with mentors who work in private sector jobs, who know what good work ethic is and how to teach it, who instead of brainwashing students into being entitled will teach real skills to them and make them ready for real life. We need educators who will make students think for themselves and question social media propaganda, that will help students make the right career choices, and acquire only the knowledge that they need and want to obtain. New educators should teach students financial responsibility and self-sufficiency skills, and how to earn respect from future employers and future clients and customers.

SUMMARY

In order to fix and improve our education system, we need to downsize the education establishment by replacing bad professors with real mentors and educators who experienced real life and worked in private sector industries, eliminate instruction in useless subjects, shorten the time for studying to enable people to start their careers earlier, promote apprenticeships, replace useless subjects with life skills subjects, provide proper upbringing to those who lack supervision at home and implement anti-bullying and healthy habits education. With a good education system, our economy and quality of life overall will be elevated to a whole new level.