The value of school

A reader suggests an idea for a topic. First, her message:

Thought this little editorial might offer some different types of thoughts for your blog:

http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/columnists/gatto/v8i3_richest.shtml

I read one of the author's books earlier this year and he really made me look at education differently.

Perhaps it's something to discuss on your blog.

anyway, keep up the good work.

Picking a passage from this link to summarize it:

Mass college attendance once served America and Canada very well, but that time is gone and good riddance. It dampened down the inventive, entrepreneurial spirit in the interests of habit-training and attitude-adjustment.

We have the most efficient management in the world at a very high price: Mutilating the public imagination, vesting it in a handful of corporations. School was the factory producing incomplete human beings who were easy to manage. It worked for a century to produce national riches and a citizenry increasingly poor in spirit.

Gates is correct: North America faces an emergency. Vested interests will have to be set aside for the common good. The biggest obstacle blocking progress is the shape of our forced institutional schooling and its weapons of mass destruction.

My thoughts, expressed in an e-mail to the writer that I sent just today:

I can accept part of the premise of this piece, but not all.

I know more dropouts who didn't make it than dropouts who turned into a Bill Gates or a William Faulkner. In fact, I never met Gates or Faulkner.

I'm glad my wife's OB/GYN wasn't a college dropout when it became clear our first child would have to be born by C section. I'm glad the engineer who designed the car I drive went to college. And I bet Bill Gates wants most of his software engineers to have some sort of degree.

Have you ever heard the old saying "the exception proves the rule"? The way most people use that saying, it's nonsense. The exception doesn't "prove" the rule. The exception disproves the rule. The only way that saying makes sense is if you use the archaic meaning of "prove," which is "test." What appears to be an exception really does test a rule. The rule still applies: People are better off with more education.

You can't say Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are proof that my kids would be wasting their time in college. Maybe they would. It all depends on what career paths they choose.

It's like a pointless debate going on over on the HD user forums. One person commits a heinous act, therefore the religion that person professes is totally discredited. Do I have to explain the fallacy in that logic? But I hear it all the time.