Let's Ditch Education Reform for Production Reform

Who is tired of education reforms...raise your hand! Something about this quote from Andrew Ferguson resonated with me, although (heh) he would likely be aghast at the solutions I propose:

For nearly 40 years, it's pretty much been all reform, all the time for the nation's public school students, teachers and parents.

No question, Ferguson's quote is an exaggeration. Just the same: over the course of the forty years he references, it's been difficult to tell where one "reform" begins and another ends. Instead of a thriving, exciting marketplace of ideas which hold potential for knowledge and resource use, education comes in neat packages tied up with glittery bows and hard won assertions.

Many of those packages are no longer able to deliver on the earlier "glory days" as they were once understood. Even so, educators aren't the only ones at fault, for a discipline which desperately needs to be integrated with the fabric of our daily lives. What do we want education to accomplish, anyway?

More answers needed please, for scarcely any time has been spent deciphering what that question is really about. Everyone keeps trying harder and harder to force the square pegs of education expectations into the round holes of reality, with diminishing returns. If nothing else, consider what local, individualized education used to be about - becoming more skilled at tending to resource use in one's own environment, where it often still counts the most.

Primitive though earlier local concepts may "appear" in a modern world, they nonetheless have become relevant again, as 20th century patterns refuse to replicate themselves in the 21st century. Knowledge use, environments and the human condition suffer the consequences, when vast swathes of information are deemed worthless or inapplicable for daily options. What's more, there is little to gain from threatened regional divisions, when the hollowed out structures of centralization are the remains of the day.

Sure, there are core aspects of today's education which are important for every student, especially in the sense of basic skills. But we are still utilizing a system with massive overhead which is no longer needed to do the job in aggregate. Not only is that structure excessively demanding on property tax systems, many of the educational options that any student of life might desire the most, tend to get lost in the mix. Worse, much of what could help students to navigate life's ongoing concerns is not part of the curriculum, either.

But most importantly, today's education is not structured so that individuals can generate fluid concepts of production and innovation at rudimentary levels. That is, the student is still expected to gear one's efforts toward the imaginary will of an unknown employer with the predefined product. While this can be helpful in the right circumstance, it does nothing for the times when the ability to make sense of and adapt one's environment for productive ends, matters the most.

Entrepreneurs are celebrated for the adaptations and improvements they are able to bring about in our lives. But the reality is that too little remains, which is not already expressively defined as though etched in stone. This leaves many a student ill prepared to utilize resources which are actually within reach, when they are not called to take on the work of others. It's time for production reform.