Dazibao 4 (I'm Getting Better at Writing These)

Have you ever wondered why schools try to prepare teenagers for life in the real world, a representative republic, by subjugating them to a bureaucratic dictatorship? When the teacher asks your class at the beginning of the year if you remember anything from last year and no one raises their hand, has it ever crossed your mind that perhaps if it only takes three months to forget an entire years worth of schoolwork, maybe school isn't doing a very good job teaching anything? Have you ever thought that maybe your math teacher could make better use of your time than teaching you how to calculate projectile motion on Mars?

ELF has the answer for all these paradoxes: School doesn't work. The school system wasn't developed to teach children, it was developed to turn farm hands into factory hands, but we have Chinese eleven-year olds working ten cents an hour for that, now, so our school system is a bit outdated.

The biggest problem with the current school system is that it's supposed to be a general education. Anyone interested in math and science doesn't have much use for fine arts, and anyone interested in a career in art, while in need of a backup (the art industry is pretty dodgy), doesn't need to know calculus because s/he'll hate it and forget it five minutes after the test. It's a specialized world and I don't see why we don't allow students to specialize. You know, like the real world we're supposed to be preparing them for.

Also like the real world, the information they receive shouldn't be dissonant pieces of random trivia, designed to help students pass tests. Passed tests don't do much good for anyone, they're still just a bunch of paper and ink that no one in their right mind would pay for. Instead of science teachers spending twenty minutes on the scientific method and then diving into the "exciting" world of obscure black scientists who didn't actually do anything particularly important but who have been included in the book in order to be politically correct, what if they focused on the scientific method and experimentation, and let the students figure things out more or less on their own through research for said experiments? The information would be connected to their experiments, not dissonant trivia, and thus it would be more easily retained. What if, instead of teaching math, math teachers taught architecture or economics or physics or computer programming or some other useful application of math? It would all be a lot easier to hold onto that way.

A happy side-effect of this is that students would be producing marketable products and learning marketable skills. There aren't terribly good odds that students would be able to compete with professionals in regards to quality, but given they have no living expenses they could probably offer pretty competetive price tags. In fact, a lot of them would probably be willing to give them away for free, just to build a good reputation with a potential future customer who might come back to them once they're actually good at their job.

And there's also no need to go on with the current overly strictly scheduled setup. Of course there has to be some kind of scheduling, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be more like the class schedule of a university, except, of course, that factories run on shifts that are begun and ended with a whistle, just like classes are begun and ended with a bell, and if you want to train factory workers you need to get them used to factory scheduling.