Educratocracy: Mass-producing zombies

We know how to mass-produce a long chain of standardized zombies that go along, take orders, jump when they hear the bell (if they're sober), aim for mediocre performance and don't always hit it, and, in general, don't innovate, think critically, take intelligent initiative, surmount obstacles independently, or act without being ordered -- sometimes, ordered several times.

The challenge will lie in changing our existing model of education -- drastically reforming it, really -- so we instead are outputting individuals who can not only find jobs, but create them; not only memorize, but think; not only follow procedures, but improve them.

America has now experienced at least six decades of our current educational system, born of World War II and the preceding ideas of Dewey and others favoring regimentation as both a process and a goal -- a system that cranks graduates out of elementary school, high school, and college like we mass-produce weapons, cars, computers, or baloney.

So here we are, 60 years after World War II, processing B.A.s like machines, and, what is worse, turning them into machines. Between some religious institutions, which seek to induce people into a submissive state of mind, and our schools, which essentially promote worship of the Leviathan -- Education as a God, as it were -- we have turned schools into Pavlovian-indoctrination facilities. If the American motto circa 1925 was, as Gertrude Stein put it, "make it new," it has now become, "hurry up and get in line."

As a friend of mine put it the other day, "Our k-12 education system may not have been designed by Nazis, or Joseph Stalin -- but if it were, how would it be different?"

Then it's on to college, where the liberal arts ideal -- "placing students at home in the world of thought," as Beloit College put it, "or teaching not what to think but how to think," as Dartmouth Professor James Epperson stressed -- has essentially become a kind of halfway house in between our glorified k-12 Daycare Centers and the real world. Even after 13 years of regimentation by the public school educrats, it's as if we felt we still need to give the sausages we've ground them into a few more years to marinate and adjust.

Nowadays, sadly, even the much lower aspiration of training people to Get a Job is an aspiration our universities increasingly fail to realize. This may be partly because when you focus too much on a thing, you actually may not get it -- in some ways, the old liberal arts concept of making people generally capable of thinking and acting, rather than imparting a particular set of factory skills, was actually better at producing people who could get a job, do a job, and create more jobs. It's partly, perhaps, because when it comes to focus, well, you know, that's not something most college campus atmospheres are very conducive to. People in the 16-21 age range are just naturally juiced up, hormoned up, sexed up....

Perhaps its no wonder that many of the most successful people in America are people who escaped from the Educratocracy at an early age. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison. Indeed, college-dropout Ellison (the founder of Oracle) reportedly delivered a speech on this theme to the graduates of Yale University some years ago. (Ellison's "address at Yale" is reposted here).

Ellison basically consoled the Yalies on the grounds that they were now very likely to become "losers" -- middle-management types, if they are lucky, for creators and innovators like himself, Gates, and the aforementioned fellow dropouts. It appears the speech was apocryphal -- that it wasn't actually delivered. But it was a great speech, and, indeed, I hereby encourage the faculty of Yale to have Ellison come and deliver that talk for real. Better still, have him give it every fall at convocation. (Yes, I mean convocation, rather than commencement. Think about it.)

So how do we re-engineer the education system -- indeed, the whole country -- so we once again become a nation of innovators, inventors, and initiative-takers? People who not only have economic freedom, but exercise it?

It's important to remember that this radical-sounding type of transformation -- really, a revolution -- is not as extreme as it might sound. America itself is a grand experiment.

We're a startup. "Our ancestors," to paraphrase Bill Murray, "were kicked out of all the best countries in Europe." Just take a look at the names up and down the East Coast: New Haven. New Bedford. New England. New York.

It's time to experiment again, and when I say experiment, I mean experiment. Not debate -- not even analyze. The results are in. In education -- and so many other issues, from healthcare to the management of the dollar -- we need not have another focus group.

What we need instead is leadership -- individual leadership, and collaborative action. As any good investor knows, if you don't take action, you don't realize any return.

We can march into this experiment, or be dragged, but we must move forward. We can do it standing, or on our knees.

We are still standing. The logical outcome of the actions, processes, and policies we have set off, however, will eventually bring us to our knees. That is a desperate place, and not a great place to make decisions. Let's to it walking, or better still, running.

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