Back in the 1980’s, we had a good laugh — or a good scare, depending on how you viewed at it — when it was revealed that Nancy Reagan regularly consulted with astrologer Joan Quigley, and that her husband — who was at that time the President of the United States— may have made some of his official decisions based on Ms. Quigley’s readings.
Sure, there are some people who take seriously the idea that because you were born on a certain date, in a certain year, at a certain location, it’s possible to make confident pronouncements about what you should be doing today without knowing anything else about you. But we expect better than that from our public servants, don’t we?
Yeeeeessss… except, for some strange reason, where schooling is concerned. In that one area of public policy, it’s excused. In fact, government schooling has been based on the astrological model for decades. Except the ‘stars’ we consult aren’t the ones you see when you look up in the sky. They’re located in offices at universities and government buildings.
Shanti was born on the 9th of December in 2007. How can we know what is she ready to learn today? We consult her charts — that is, the curriculum plans that her teachers were required to file months ago, before they even knew which students they’d be teaching.
They tell us that today, Shanti is ready to learn
- what ‘onomatopoeia’ means,
- how to use a Venn diagram to better understand the story of Cinderella,
- how to read analog and digital clocks,
- how to make copies of clay seals found in Mesopotamia,
and so on.
It’s very, very specific. Joan Quigley, on her best day, couldn’t provide this kind of detail.
Yet all of this is determined solely from looking at the date of her birth, and the location of her bedroom! We don’t need to know anything else about her.
Can we agree that this is a hell of a way to run a railroad?
So today in her history class, Shanti is listening to her teacher spend 50 minutes summarizing a book chapter on Vikings that she could have read, in greater detail, and with more retention, in ten minutes.
Here’s what she’s not doing with those extra 40 minutes:
- Because she’s not allowed to do anything but listen politely, she’s not looking on the internet to find out if there are other, better sources of information than the textbook that her school board selected for her through a competitive bidding process.
- Because it’s hard to concentrate while her teacher is droning on, and because her teacher has no ‘pause’ button, she’s not considering carefully how the things she’s being told today fit together with other things that she’s learned in the past.
- Because she’s stuck in this room, she’s not asking questions about the material to people whose judgment she trusts, and discussing the answers with them.
More importantly, here are some of the other things that she is not doing with those extra 40 minutes:
- She’s not working on the poem she’s trying to write for her mom’s birthday.
- She’s not reading the book about how helicopters work that she recently checked out of the public library.
- She’s not practicing how to add fractions, something she knows that she needs more work on.
And so on.
That is, it’s not just that the subject matter (in which she quite sensibly has no interest) is being wasted on her.
What’s more important is that right now, when she is in the prime of her ability to learn new things, she is being actively prevented from doing that. In economics this is called an ‘opportunity cost’.
Multiply this by 7 hours per school day. Then multiply by 180 school days per year. Then multiply by 200,000, which is roughly the number of school-aged children in New Hampshire. That’s about 252 million hours, or about 400 human lifetimes, that those kids can never get back.
This is nothing short of a holocaust of educational opportunity.
And why is this happening? First, because the legislators and bureaucrats who believe they have the power to control Shanti’s life have decreed that she must attend school ‘full time’, or risk having her parents charged with ‘truancy’ — which really just means the ‘crime’ of believing that maybe they have a better idea of what their daughter needs than a bunch of people who will never meet her.
And second, because those same legislators and bureaucrats, who accept that they are prohibited from meddling in religion because it’s too important to be politicized, do not believe that education is important enough to receive the same protection.
Ian Underwood 