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what are the chances that you'll learn fractions? School does a great job of teaching

students to do what we set out to teach them. It works. The problem is that what we're

teaching is the wrong stuff.

Here's what we're teaching kids to do (with various levels of success):

Fit in

Follow instructions

Use #2 pencils

Take good notes

Show up every day

Cram for tests and don't miss deadlines

Have good handwriting

Punctuate

Buy the things the other kids are buying

Don't ask questions

Don't challenge authority

Do the minimum amount required so you'll have time to work on

another subject

Get into college

Have a good resume

Don't fail

Don't say anything that might embarrass you

Be passably good at sports, or perhaps extremely good at being a

quarterback

Participate in a large number of extracurricular activities

Be a generalist

Try not to have the other kids talk about you

Once you learn a topic, move on

Now, the key questions:

Which of these attributes are the keys to being indispensable?

Are we building the sort of people our society needs?

The problem doesn't lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins.

The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead.

Here's what Woodrow Wilson said about public education:

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of

persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of

a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

After retaining brutal Pinkerton men, trainloads of strikebreakers, and even the National

Guard to violently put down strikes, Andrew Carnegie decided that the answer to worker

unrest was a limited amount of education. "Just see, wherever we peer into the first tiny

springs of the national life, how this true panacea for all the ills of the body politic

bubbles forth--education, education, education."

The model is simple. Capitalists need compliant workers, workers who will be productive

and willing to work for less than the value that their productivity creates. The gap

between what they are paid and what the capitalist receives is profit.

The best way to increase profit was to increase both the productivity and the compliance

of factory workers. And as Carnegie saw, the best way to do that was to build a huge

educational-industrial complex designed to teach workers just enough to get them to

cooperate.

It's not an accident that school is like a job, not an accident that there are supervisors and

rules and tests and quality control. You do well, you get another job (the next grade), and

continue to do well and you get a real job. Do poorly, don't fit in, rebel--and you are

kicked out of the system.

"I Am Good at School"

This is a fundamentally different statement from, "I did well in school and therefore I will

do a great job working for you." The essential thing measured by school is whether or not

you are good at school.

Being good at school is a fine skill if you intend to do school forever. For the rest of us,

being good at school is a little like being good at Frisbee. It's nice, but it's not relevant

unless your career involves homework assignments, looking through textbooks for

answers that are already known to your supervisors, complying with instructions and

then, in high-pressure settings, regurgitating those facts with limited processing on your

part. Or, in the latter case, if your job involves throwing 165 grams of round plastic as far

as you can.

The contributions of school are often superfluous. On the other hand, the best schools are

great selectors of people with attitude and talent. Getting in and getting out is a testament

to who you were before you got there. Many successful people got that way despite their

advanced schooling, not because of it.

What They Should Teach in School

Only two things:

1. Solve interesting problems

2. Lead