Gates of Limitation

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The Education Gate.

It is against the law for a student to be play hooky from school. But, if a student sleeps in class or fails to learn anything whatsoever, then nothing happens either the parents or the student. Why? Public schools are in the business of making money by body count. For a hundred years the school system got paid based solely on classroom attendants, that is, the counting of empty heads. Then, George Bush’s, No Child Left Behind came along, its purpose was to force schools to equally educate all students, not just babysit them.

NCLB can not work.  If it worked then every child would be college ready. Higher education would be a human right as well as the right to make a great living, own a lovely home and take great vacations in the new car. In reality, no child left behind is a cultural blip to the education and economic systems of America. It will not survive because there are no high paying jobs for the masses of highly educated students.  High paying jobs make up less than 25 percent of all the jobs out there. The path to a great job is reserved for the top talent or connected few, all others need not apply. The job pyramid has plenty of room on the bottom and little room at its top. Those on the top make the big money. Those on the bottom work for those on the top. If every child mastered his lessons perfectly, then who would do the jobs no one wants to do? Who would make the money for those on the top? How many doctors of medicine, of law, of accounting, business or of science do we need? How many colleges could the public afford in order to educate the multi-millions of students year after year?

Following the law of supply and demand, if we have a flood of students qualified to become professionals then each profession would have more competition and each professional would earn less. There would be no need for lifelong tenure for the teaching professionals. No calls for higher wages. No need to wait in the doctor’s office and medical costs would be cheap. The professions would become as common as day labors and their professional wages reflecting this by being as low.

The present day system works to keep the statius quo by putting proven stumbling blocks or gates up, so the education system can weed out 75% of the students from these and other well paying profession and technical jobs. The goal is 75% left behind.

Everywhere in the system there are passive and intensional gates to keep out the masses and send them down to the job pyramid’s middle or bottom. Some of these gates are locked into the culture of the system by those who benefit from being on the top of the pyramid. Doctors limit doctors, lawyers limit lawyers and engineers limit the number of engineers. In education, for example, there are several ways to acquire useful knowledge, but the education system demands the every student learn only one way, their way and that is by rote memorization and passing standardized tests. If your child can’t hold meaningless information until the test he or she is likely to fail. If college is to expensive or there are no vacancies in the lab class still another gate closes. But, the most devious gate in the anti-masses arsenal, is boredom. If the student can’t sit and hear the endless stream of droning day after day in English class then she or he tunes out. Then there are the state textbooks, textbooks are purposely written to make reading them far from enjoyable, they are even construed to suck the life out of the covered subject and leave the student bored to tears.

No one warns the bored student, who is texting a friend in abbreviated pygin English, about the absolute necessity to develop perfect writing skills, or why math is represented to them as rote busy work and the doing extra math homework as the ultimate punishment for texting in class. Later, these big three; math, English and writing are used to weed them out of college and the top of the pyramid.

Classroom boredom is used to cause  blocking ( sleeping), obstructing (acting out) and baricading (day dreaming) so to keep the student from the top of the high paying golden pyramid.
The damage done is almost irreversible when boredom unleashed on the small child. This attack is begins in the sixth grade.  Most sixth grade teachers don’t intentionally or willfully do harm. Standing in the student’s path of success is part of their career requirements. They are slaves to the state mandated curriculum and the gatekeepers of the golden pyramid. Few teachers have a choice about what and how their class is taught. Most have no path even for their own success. Their profession is heavily gated.  One teacher writes, “We are treated like slightly slow children who cannot exercise professional judgement– Therefore, we must have every move we make scrutinized and frequently just told to us.”  Teachers quit in droves, 28% never make it to their second year, many disillusioned by being sent to the bottom of the pyramid by their own kind.

There is hope. Overcoming, the many gates in public education, is  possible if the student is warned early by the parent about the jungle rules of the “education game.”  If a child knows by the fourth grade that the fix is in, they and their parents can adjust their learning styles to overcome the gates of the pyramid, thereby developing a winning spirit for successfully jumping over all the gates of limitation.

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