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Education was how you acquired thinking tools and knowledge. The better the education, the more you could fulfill your limited potential. Unfortunately, public education had deteriorated to frighteningly ineffective levels. However, if you personally talked with teachers and principals, they were very dedicated to educating children. Teachers were genuinely into their jobs, and competent at the job they were given to do. And there, precisely, was the problem: the job they were given to do.
Early in the 20th century, education lost its way. Political leaders and schoolboard leaders lost their understanding of the very heart of education. At the heart of educating a child should have been: fill the child's mind with knowledge...teach the child knowledge, and teach the child how to think most effectively so that child could retain and build more knowledge. In a sentence, that was the job of educating children. And that was not the job given to teachers in the late 20th century.
Instead, sociopolitical control over government schools had given our teachers another job: to help the children "learn" from each other. Of course, that sounded good, progressive, and fashionably multicultural. The teachers performed well at the job given them, bringing to their classrooms the discussion method as their method of "teaching". And dedicated teachers admirably went to great lengths to stimulate and guide their classroom discussions. But the job given to the teacher was the wrong job. The popular discussion method was not education. In short, it was a case of the blind leading the blind. Indeed, hard-working dedicated teachers could not understand why children scored so low on aptitude tests. The job given those teachers was the wrong job: The teachers' right job was not to make children socially confident or culturally literate. The teacher's right job was to teach -- yes, that old-fashioned lecture method.
The teachers had knowledge, lots of it. The children did not. Teachers should have poured as much of that knowledge as possible into young minds. That, and nothing else, should have been the teacher's job. Motivating children should have been defined and confined to the job at hand -- that was, to pouring knowledge into children's minds via the lecture method. Motivating children in the more disciplined environment of the lecture, indeed, required greater discipline on the teacher. The teacher would have to work harder at nights making his or her lecture exciting and enlightening to students. Indeed, the effort to teach would go back on the teacher's shoulders. And, if given that job, most teachers in the late 20th century would have done a competent job educating our children.
A vital part of the teacher's job of pouring knowledge into children's minds, yet entirely lost in the late 20th century, was: equipping our children with the most powerful thinking method. That thinking method was conceptual thinking. Only through bringing together the scattered fragments of facts and figures into integrated concepts could children retain and build knowledge like a puzzle. While lecturing knowledge, teachers should have pulled together the many pieces of knowledge into integrated concepts to enable themselves to pour much more knowledge -- retainable knowledge -- into children's minds.
For example, while studying social studies, children memorized many specific facts about different countries, cultures, economies. But those 20th-century children retained little because many specific facts were not pulled together into common denominators -- into a few powerful, timeless concepts. The endless variations of prosperity and progress among cultures and economies could have been integrated by the common denominator of freedom. That's right, the prosperity and progress of each culture and economy directly related to that country's degree of freedom from the B.O.A.T. of freeloaders. Now the child would have quickly begun linking together unforgettable conceptual understandings instead of memorizing forgettable places, faces, and other forgettable facts.
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