Public Schools and Parental Malpractice

Glen Reynolds of Instapundit, observed recently that sending your children to public school amounts to parental malpractice. He is referring to recent cases in which children have been suspended from school for such nefarious violations as playing with a pink toy gun that shoots bubbles, or pointing a finger at another child and saying “bang!”

He is right enough about that—traumatizing young children for no reason but to satisfy some endemic urge to bully.

But there is far worse. Most public education systematically prevents children from learning. Why else would homeschooled children consistently outperform public school kids?

It's a predictable result of trying to make teaching a “profession.” Anyone who has themselves attended school for twelve years, let alone seventeen or more, will have a thorough education in two things, in about equal measure: the subjects taught, and how best to teach them. A far better grounding in teaching, in other words, than in any other conceivable trade they could choose. Those who have earned the highest marks will of course be those who have learned best how to teach and learn.

Selecting a teacher should therefore be a simple matter: hire the person with the highest marks over the longest years of schooling.

However, this leaves no justification for a teaching “profession.” Necessarily, in order to justify its claim to special expertise and demand higher rates of pay, education schools must offer something that cannot and will not be acquired in the school classroom.

In other words, something that has nothing to do with good teaching.

To survive, they must take the common teaching practice, and turn it on its head. To prove you are a “qualified” teacher, you must do something that defies common sense, so that nobody who has not been to teacher's college would think of doing it this way.

Something, in all certainty, that is going to interfere with the natural process of learning as much as possible. Things like avoiding all memorization, or insisting on group work at all times, or actually not teaching.

This is not at all likely to produce the best results for our children.