Redefining Education Part One – Epi-3451
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Today we will begin a multi part series on redefining education that I hinted at on the show yesterday. I thought about calling this “redefining childhood education” and while we will come at it a lot from what we should teach our kids, I am betting most adults may have to learn over half of the things we will talk about in this series as well.
The truth is education is failing out children in so many ways. Kids are subjected to learning thousands of functionally useless facts, regurgitating them on tests and then 90% or more is fully forgotten in time. And I am not talking about stupid people here. Honestly many professionals that are highly successful in careers would fail to pass a 10th grade exam on many subjects. Why? Most of the things we force upon our kid are again, functionally useless.
Education should indeed focus on primary academic skills, the core being
- Communication (reading, writing, speaking)
- Mathematics (basic athremitic, basic algebra and basic geometry)
- Science (primary how the scientific method works and general awareness of scientific principles)
- History (to understand context of our current world)
- Basic Geography (where nations, people, things, are and how it has changed over time)
- Logic and Reason (how to determine what is likely about what you don’t know from what you do know)
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Let’s be honest if you have that down in 2024 you can learn anything else you need to learn on the fly or chose to specialize in what interests you and take a path of intensive learning on that. But what is most missing here? A general knowledge of the world around you (local) and what we used to simply call life skills. You know cooking your own food, paying bills, doing laundry, etc.
Think about the fact that a child today will set in a desk 180 plus days a year, for 13 years, be told that what they are learning is “important” and the following things will be true after they graduate from K-12 education….
- They will not know how to cook a meal
- They will not know how to grow a plant
- They will not know how to use hand and power tools
- They will not know how to mend a sock with needle and thread
- They will not know how to form a well reasoned and logical argument
- They will not know how to identify a logical fallacy
- They will not understand that there are thousands and thousands of career options
- They will not know how to do taxes
- They will not know how to actually fact check a claim by government, media, etc.
- They will not know how to do a basic design and cost estimate for a project
- They will not know how to design a decent natural diet
- They will not know how to do about 1000 other things people in general could do just a few decades ago
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So what is the solution? Changing the educational system to make it better? Well you may as well plan on going to Washington, DC and talking senators and representatives out of taking lobbyist money and fixing our problems, because your chances of success are about equal.
Home school has taught me that the common argument in response to talk like this which is of course….
“Teachers work really hard, they are underpaid and we don’t have the time and money to teach all these other things.”
I a complete pile of bullshit and frankly a few logical fallacies put together to avoid the discussion. My grandkids are excelling as homeschool students. They do 1-2.5 hours of school work a day, my grandson is at an age where he’d be bringing that much work home by now after spending 8-9 hours a day “going to school”.
When we started homeschool and I saw this, my first question was, “what the hell is school really doing with our kids when 2 hours a day is sufficient for all the learning and work? The answer was of course “training them to obey the rules of the state and society and to not question authority”. Turns out when you get rid of that and simply require basic good behaviour while learning you have a metric ton of time to do other things.
In return for good behaviour and work ethics we give our kids a ton of daily freedom. They can play outside, do games, watch videos, etc. But we add in a ton of real world learning and that is where most of these things in this series come from.
Join Me Today to Discuss…
- How long does it really take to learn daily things that you will actually remember and be able to apply
- Why doesn’t the state want children to learn the way we are talking about today
- Why reforming the system is pointless and you need to do these things even if you don’t home school
- 10 life skills and projects to help kids and adults develop real world and useful knowledge
- Identify 50 local plants, trees and shrubs and be able to explain and ID them
- Be able to do a scale drawing with graph paper like say a floor plan
- Be able to make a pot of soup, with no recipe only technique and intuition
- Be able to explain basic business operations, profit, loss, wages, overhead, etc.
- How to calculate the total expense of any purchase decision (price to value ratio)
- Explain and understand the principle of basic trouble shooting
- How to do basic automotive tasks, get gas, change a tire, do an oil change, explain how a motor works, etc.
- Evaluate various careers as to work flow, earnings potential, required education, etc.
- Worksheet I Make My Grandson Fill Out – MS Word, Right Click Save as for Best Results
- How to calculate the “cost of ownership” of things like cars, houses, pets, etc.
- How to introduce yourself and start a conversation with a stranger
- Final Thoughts – We have to do this because there is literally no incentive for the current system to do so
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Resources for today’s show…
- Find Me on Nostr
- Article Explaining the GrowNostr Initiative
- Join the Members Brigade
- TspAz.com
- TSPC on Discord
- TSPC Group on Telegram (group chat)
- TSPC Telegram Channel (just messages from me)
- Jack on MeWe
- Join Me on Odysee
- All My Recommend Bitcoin Tools and Resources
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- End grain Bamboo Cutting Board – Item of the Day
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Video Version of Today’s Show
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This education series you’re doing is gold! It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. Thnak you!