From Teachers’ Unions to Teaching Cooperatives

It’s time to talk about the American public school system. It has had its triumphs, but most of them occurred early in its inception. It did standardize educational practices, and raise the level of basic literacy for the overall population. However, as additional regulations, bureaucracies, and practices were piled on, the shortcomings of the system have become apparent.

While the Prussian education model of education worked for agricultural and early industrial civilizations, that model in this age has become nothing more than a State worship indoctrination system. There is no logic, reason, ethics, or critical thinking taught is this system; merely rote information regurgitation and compliance to “authority”. If we want to start to move society forward again, we need to abandon 19th century teaching infrastructure and form a new system more suited to the reality of the 21st century.

The thing that stands in the way are the legislators and the teachers’ unions. These institutions have a lot to reason to maintain the status quo. Depending on your level of skepticism, this could be an innocuous and high minded aspiration to serve mankind, or a deep rooted conspiracy to breed illiteracy and compliance into the general populace. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

In any case, it is time for change. This means decentralizing education, online education, and contract-based teaching. That means home schooling, unschooling. Most basic education aspects like reading and math can be taught in less than 100 hours. Why waste so much time confining kids to a prison-like institution that fails to prepare them for the real world? A system that prepares kids for 1950’s life today is less than worthless.

The Unions are afraid to lose their status; their position of privilege. The same with Congress. I will admit to being okay with that if it happens. However, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. We can achieve modernization of education while still utilizing existing resources. All we need to do is to make the federal Department of Education advisory, and the Unions into a cooperative. Remove the non-voluntary aspects from the institution.

Once that is accomplished, we can again have 50 (or more) separate laboratories devoted to educational best practice. Localized teaching cooperatives can contract their services out to their communities, using various methods. Whether a city sets up umbrella schools, or teachers contract out for gigs to families or neighbourhoods. This allows the co-op teachers to specialize to particular types of education. This also allows curriculae to be customized to the learner. it also raises the earnings potential of good teachers

Time for a sea change.