There's An App For That

Here's an SAT question: America's school system is to its students as ____________.

John Woolman, the Quaker prophet who pioneered the end of slavery, would have a ready answer for us. I believe he would challenge us to see that American students suffer the same disadvantage in today's system of indentured learning that slaves faced in the established agricultural economy of this country. Our students, like our former slaves, are caught in an unequal proposition of serving a system and its administration that is holding them back while keeping them economically dependent.

Skills that could be directed toward the development of artisan expertise are being squandered by useless efforts to make the grade - not as apprentices to a craft, but as yeomen to a peculiar institution. Students' time and personal resources are translated to stalled progress/maturity and foreclosed actualization by mass- produced education. The adage, "Those who can't do, teach", plagues the student of today as much as the plantation owner plagued the slave who was kept working at something that had no chosen future to it. The result: More and more fields, or courses of study, leading to less and less proficiency in mastering a niche economy.

Flooded markets, whether by products or labor, are ultimately counter-productive as dictated by the law of diminishing returns. Innovation and specialization, made universally accessible through the Internet and by cyber marketing, provide the same impetus to close schools and campuses as it did the slave market. Of course, the all-too-human need to have the upper hand and the right to call the shots perpetuates an outmoded system that serves the managers/educators to the detriment of their dependents.

Still, no amount of encouragement, good grades, or advanced degrees can make up for what is quickly becoming an unsatisfying and unaffordable status symbol of the educated elite. Nor does the prospectus of keeping a work force down on the farm, so to speak, hold any guarantees in a globalized economy.

Speaking audaciously for John Woolman, let me be the first to advocate for cutting the American student free from the apron strings of a solicitous enterprise. Indeed, the American educational system is a peculiar institution that enslaves minds, if not hearts, to an imposed regimen that leaves every child left behind - in particular, behind their cohorts being apprenticed to a craft and partnered to entrepreneurs.

I wonder how selective/merit enrollment in higher education is working for other countries? Oh yeah, you can check but I think there's an app for that.