I was reading this article on "deschooling" and had this sort of thought about institutional learning. Basically, there's two approaches to learning: a library and a school. In a library, you are self directed. You go in knowing what you are looking for, and use the tools available as part of the library in order to acquire it. If something goes wrong - you can't get what you are looking for - we ask how the library can be improved. Can we buy more books? Can we organize it better? Can we hire more librarians?

A school is the exact opposite. You go into a school not knowing what you are looking for. The school tells you. It tells you what you should learn and how you should learn it. If something goes wrong - you don't learn what you are supposed to - we ask how the student can be improved? That is, can they study better or smarter to rise to the challenge?

In short, the school expects the student to change to match the institution, while the library expects to change to match the individual goals of its users. Obviously, the school one is extremely flawed. After all, what if the institution of school is flawed? Asking the student to change to meet its expectations wouldn't be improving the student, it would be intentionally introducing flaws!

And I'm reminded of a little trouble I got in with a forum recently. Basically, I made some arguments about the usefulness of the term "racism", and said that it was largely used as a way to tie mild or inconsequential beliefs with extremist behavior. Obviously, the guy doing "microagressions" like "your English is very good" is not exactly at the same level as the KKK or Hitler, but by calling the microaggression "racist", we are conflating to too in severity and purpose.

Anyway, the mods did not like that. I got a PM which literally said that this wasn't a forum for "intellectual discussion" and that I could keep posting there, so long as I agreed to not have them anymore. Naturally, I declined the ultimatum on my terms, because I think anybody who straight up says, "we don't welcome intellectual discussion here," will get exactly the kind of community they deserve. Perhaps ironically, they'll believe they made the right choice because they are too anti-intellectual to even realize there was a choice in the first place.

But I realized it is the same problem. The forum started in service of a community of people who shared one interest (toy soldiers), but ultimately became an institution which decided that its users were in service of it. The question stopped being about how this forum could change to better serve the community, and more how the community could change to serve the forum. And obviously, that's not a particular wise, nor reasonable position.

I've always maintained that the biggest threat to us, as a society, right now, is moderators. The purpose of a moderator is to be invisible, to moderate a discussion so that it can productively take place - not to decide which discussions can be had in the first place, much less taking punitive measures against the people who have the wrong opinions. But this extends beyond forums themselves and applies to stuff like Facebook and Twitter, which have their own moderators who are anonymous, but not invisible. And we're getting to the point where even Google searches and Wikipedia are getting there. Wikipedia used to be like a library, but now it is like a school. And that's not a good thing.

Increasingly, I've come to see teachers as moderators - but I think only because that is what they are seeing themselves as. I read an article a few weeks back from teachers that were complaining that parents were undoing their moral education. They said stuff like they were having trouble getting their moral lessons about racism through to children when they have to go up against the ideas of their conservative parents.

Think about that for a moment. A teacher is complaining that they are having trouble installing a specific morality in a child, and see the child's own parents as an obstacle. Teachers no longer exist to aid education, but to impede it. Because teachers see themselves as intellectual moderators - in the current understanding of the term. They are there to decide which thoughts are thought, and to take punitive measures against those who think the wrong things.

I think it is probably the destiny of every institution to turn out this way. The primary purpose of bureaucracy is to sustain the bureaucracy. Everything else is secondary. And a bureaucracy loves rules, because rules generate more bureaucracy.

Take the concept of diversity. Originally, it was an effort to make opportunities for people who did have it. Now, there is a bureaucracy surrounding it. My wife works at a college and any time she hires a white person, she has to write a letter explaining why she didn't hire the minority candidate instead. To any rational person, that's racist, immoral, and stupid. And yet, the bureaucracy believes that there should be a system of rules to enforce this idea, and where there is a system, there needs bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the expanded bureaucracy. It is a bureaucracy spiral.

When it comes to schools, and particularly teachers, what can be done about it? The obvious solution is to not participate. Choosing to home school our kids was a tough decision, but after we made it, we realized something. We sent our kids to school primarily to socialize and be part of a community. When the schools took that away out of paranoia for COVID-19, we realized that everything that was left was bullshit.

It seems like our entire society is built upon these institutions, and most of them only work because you believe in them. With schools, this is based on the idea that you go to school and learn stuff, which gets you into a good college, which gets you a good job, which makes you a productive member of society who wants for nothing. Except college doesn't get you a good job. Worse yet, people are leaving college dumber than when they went in. The second you realize this, you stop believing in the "magic" of school, and it ceases to be something your respect, admire, or aspire to - and the whole system collapses.

In 2006, the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education discovered that only 31% of college-educated Americans could fully comprehend a newspaper story. Fourteen years later, it is those college-educated Americans which are writing the newspaper stories - the quality of journalism is so bad right now that we've literally destroyed our nation (and many others) over the false perception of a pandemic that really doesn't exist. We're making people wear masks when there is literally no science to support it, and many studies which suggest that it might actually be dangerous. We've made ourselves stupid, and we're paying the price for it.

Do I blame teachers? You bet your sweet ass I do. If they spent less time being activists and more time listening and adapting TO the children (rather than trying to adapt the children themselves), we'd be in a much better place, nationally. I actually regret the amount of schooling my kids went through as it is. Spend ten minutes in the teachers subreddit and see a bunch of chickenshit, selfish bastards who hate the children, hate their parents, and hate their jobs. Even one thread there will convince you that these people should never be among children - and indeed, probably do not belong in society at all. The fact that they have taken what many see as an essential position in our society is a travesty.

I guess to sum up, an education isn't what school says it is. School does not exist to provide an education. Like all institutions, school exists to have school. It functions best for generating students, and nothing else. The teachers have spent too much time smelling their own farts and have come to the conclusion that part of their jobs as educators is also to overrule the other factors in a child's life that may cause that child to doubt or question them. They think they are essential, but are less essential than bag boys, who actually have gone to work during this phony pandemic.

I think the entire education system is at risk here, from the top to the bottom, and the next few years are going to be very interesting.

The colleges will fail because they are charging full price for online learning, which is bullshit. People are going to stop. Because people will stop, employers will stop valuing it. If employers stop valuing college, people will stop going. College only works because people believe it works. It doesn't have any tangible benefit otherwise.

If college fails, high school fails. High school exists to push students to college. If there are fewer colleges, fewer kids will even be able to get into college. Thus schools can not use the measurement of students who go on to college as a measure of success. High schools will still be mandatory, but they'll need to reinvent themselves to provide an identity and purpose outside of college - which they will have a hard time doing.

The whole social justice aspect of school will also collapse. I think people are already suspicious as hell of it, and really, I think it can only exist in the perfect storm of schooling. The real world generally doesn't tolerate bullshit like that for too long, but does because it draws its workers from college, where it is taught in lieu of actual education. It only works because it is inextricably tied to college, which workplaces hire exclusively from. Colleges collapse, social justice collapses. (Good riddance).

With teachers unwilling to return to their jobs at schools, and insisting on a distance learning model which is objectively bullshit, more and more parents are looking for educational options outside of the classic public school system (I know we did). Freed from the obligation, they'll realize that they didn't really like it in the first place. It'll be a lot harder to get them back, even if things were to return to normal in any reasonable timeframe (it won't).

So, we'll end up with an education system which not everybody participates in. The bureaucracy will need to expand to make the homeschool program larger. Another problem is that they use schooling as a control for behavior - less people will get vaccinations if they don't need them to go to school. Because education will be split up, people will have different experiences, meaning that employers can't just assume a certain expectation for school (not that they should anyway. Remember, only 31% could understand a newspaper article).

The dissolution of the public education system will be, I think, a HUGE benefit to society. It's obvious that it isn't actually producing educated individuals, and the broadening of colleges to be everything to everyone has diluted them to the point of worthlessness. With actual competition in the educational marketplace of ideas, better ideas will finally have an opportunity to be tried without the bureaucracy deciding that "intellectual discussions" have no place here.

Ultimately, we'll all win. But nature abhors a vacuum, and it's possible that the public education system will be replaced with something much, much worse. Since public education is essentially a way to separate the rich from the poor, it'll be something of a disaster to have the rich and poor have fundamentally different education systems (rich people are creating homeschool "pods", like mini-schools using tutors as mini-teachers). It could further the class divide... though honestly, I'm not sure the class divide could get much worse.

Anyway, schools suck, teachers suck, and there's a better alternative to education out there that we can actually have a chance of finding once the institution of "education" collapses, like it always was going to.