This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)

Schooling and communism

Most people in the industrialized world realize that market economy has many advantages that cannot be replaced with an economy based on micromanaged central control. At the same time, the same people believe in the education based on centrally planned curriculum. If we realize that both (1) economies and (2) school systems are subject to similar issues of mathematical optimization, we can resolve this cultural paradox of perception.

Compulsory schooling is very inefficient at educating people. The inefficiency is analogous to problems with command economy

Incremental enslavement by propaganda

As a kid, I was enslaved intellectually. I was a communist. I believed school was good and served my development. I have changed since.

If you capture a potential slave, he is likely to react violently. However, it is also possible to enslave people incrementally and meet no reaction. Children are enslaved week by week at school. It is like slowly heating up a frog to death. Children gradually conform to an increasing level of discipline and oppression. They can no longer see a way out. They no longer see a problem. They accept the status quo as inevitable. They can also absorb school propaganda as the sole sacred truth.

Communism enslaved my mind by schooling and information monopoly. It was a gradual absorption of ideas based on incomplete information. I became realistic about communism only when I learned English, and learned about the world beyond Poland (in my mid twenties).

I became realistic about school thanks to incremental reading, which serves as a great metaphor for efficient free learning. However, I was always a happily indoctrinated student. This is why I still needed some help from children unhappy with school. Their faces told me the rest of the story. In college, I transformed my school, and tailored it to my needs. In the years 1987-1990, school truly served me well because I took it out of the equation (see: How I invented perfect schooling). This made me insensitive to the myth of good school, and kept me blind for many years. Like an incrementally boiled frog, I did not ever sense the badness of school.

It is possible to enslave people incrementally and meet no opposition

Are kids bound to stray without schooling?

I tried to quantify the degree of abysmal failure of schooling in expanding my knowledge. Schools were 16-50 times slower in expanding my own knowledge of history than was my own life free of schooling. In my investigations, I chose the subject of history because history is not part of my job. It is just interesting. Even if you take a correction for the fact that I compare the more mature half of my life with the less mature half, the numbers are still staggering.

When I say kids should decide their own learning direction, I keep hearing of those stray kids that may play video games all day, spend their days on collecting baseball cards, or study UFOs and aliens. Sudbury Valley School proves that prediction to be wrong.

Some proponents of schooling say: the kid needs to know the multiplication table or where the north is. Otherwise he won't be able to find her place in modern economy. I agree that basic knowledge is vital. However, kids master basic knowledge with or without schooling. By the age of 12-13, most kids know where the north is. I learned that before school from my brother. I could find north using the sun and a watch, before I could read the watch itself. The questions is: Do all kids need to know who Julian Kawalec is? If you don't know Kawalec, see how I nearly failed to graduate because of not knowing details from Kawalec book. Do all kids need to know all affluents of Amazon? I love geography, but I struggle to admit I have problems with recalling even one affluent despite the fact that I find all things related to Amazon rainforest highly interesting.

All those reservations and doubts about self-directed learning come from those who got accustomed to being led by national curricula, teachers, and set rules for learning. The doubts come from those who do not believe in the power of human self-determination and those who do not believe in their own powers.

This reminds me of the old communist argument that the state knows best what citizens need, while a rogue enterpreneur might abuse its workers, produce harmful products, or just focus solely on enriching himself rather than working for the good of society. I grew up in the communist system. I was indoctrinated by the rigid communist curriculum. It took me quite a while to understand why central control over economy isn't as effective as free market optimization. However, at the age of 14, I already had no doubt that self-directed learning is vastly superior to learning imposed by a teacher.

This gave me a hint to formulate the Soviet 5-year-plan metaphor of modern schooling. Metaphors in my texts are no proof. They are just a different way of illustrating my reasoning:

Schooling is like Soviet Economy

Metaphor. Why use metaphors?

Each learning decision made by a child in self-directed learning can be compared to an economic decision made by an enterpreneur in a free market. Similarly, national curricula, often written in a hurry to meet contingent needs, must be imposed from above like a Soviet 5-year economic plan that used to be imposed on the proletariat.

Child should self-direct and obtain minor nudges to its trajectory from the whole village of his social circle. The prime trajectory corrector should always be the parent. Usually, this is the only mature adult brain that should be able to keep an accurate model of where the child is and make the most accurate prediction of where the child is going.

Skeptics reply that parents can be biased or backward, while teachers follow the curriculum which is a result of a national consensus. Using the economic metaphor, one might claim that the communist system is superior because the government is best to set the production parameters for a factory. After all, the government is armed with the expert consensus, while a factory owner might be uneducated or drunk. National curricula can indeed provide a good guidance for parents and teachers, but reliance on individual choices is superior. I support Common Core as an inspiration, and nothing more than an inspiration.

5-year-plan metaphor of compulsory learning

All great economic and educational plans start with priming the populus with some high-flying propaganda. Stalin would promise to industrialize the union. Caregivers at pre-school level keep extolling the virtues of schooling and how it transforms societies.

The 5-year-plan begins with a God-like figure in the like of Stalin. Schooling plans begin with a God-like minister of education who can move schools and millions of people in directions of her choice with a stroke of a pen. The God-like figure got its army of executioners: party bosses, and teachers. Primed by propaganda, dazzled workers and first grade students get down to the plan with great enthusiasm.

Then the actual work and suffering begin. The torment and injustice affects those who take the greatest burden in executing the plan or those who stand in the way. The suffering extends to workers, peasants, school directors, teachers, and students.

There is always a temptation to go for better targets: more productivity, more corn, more revenue, more graduates, better test scores, better school rank, etc. Educators lament that the country dropped by a number of positions on international test score lists. As a result, global goals get cranked up, and the country's position improves. But then some other country drops and engages in the similar zero-game strategy. Global goals get cranked up again. However, the goals are not matched by local resources and capacities. Many investments were reported as completed, while in reality they stood half-done unused wasteful or abandoned. Many student projects end with a credit, while in reality there is little applicability, or little knowledge, or little understanding, or just little to show. All failures and shortcomings end with more regulations and more red tape. Bureaucracy tends to take over economies and young lives.

As much as statistical fudging and lying was part of Soviet 5-year-plans, cheating and lying is a norm at school. It is proportional to the pressure exerted in the quest to meet curriculum goals. It is proportional to the volume of the imposed material. Both produce great results in statistics and poor results in actual measures of well-being or learning. Targets are often met, but global success does not translate to the satisfaction at the local level.

Communist economies and school systems also suffer their major injustices and disasters. Stalin hushed up the Great Famine. Schooling comes with global epidemics in bullying, ADHD, drug abuse, sleep disorders, obesity, suicide, and more.

State paternalism can results in inefficiency or harm. The end result is that in the communist economy, and in the modern education system, most of the participants end up unhappy.

Contrast it with the thriving free market spirit of Silicon Valley, or happy faces of homeschoolers who never lost their joy of learning.

Perfect competition vs. perfect learning machines

Someone can question my Soviet economy metaphor saying that kids have immature brains while an entrepreneur is guided by a rational mature mind.

I would say the opposite is true. It is the kid who has been designed by millions of years of evolution to be a mathematically optimized perfect learning machine. They have an innate program for optimally structuring the semantic network of knowledge in their brains. I mention elsewhere that a kid is also a perfectly forgetting machine. I need to add that forgetting is a vital component of the neural generalization and abstraction program that is part of that perfect learning machine. This makes for a system that is smarter than your best AI learning machines yet. This biological system can get you from a blob of living matter to an intelligent human robot that takes on goals and zeros in on its target along an efficient trajectory. In terms of decision-making, what happens automatically in a baby brain is more efficient than what happens in a thinking brain of an entrepreneur. This is because the automatic and autonomous control of the learn drive emergent in neural networks is more suited for detecting quality learnable knowledge than the "rational" control employed by a businessman in his market analysis. The latter needs to work under the constraints of imperfect knowledge and set targets, independent of how realistic they are. Kids are free from this constraint and will soak in new knowledge at optimum speed set by the capacity of their brain and their experiential exposure. Their brains automatically detect quality.

Kids will learn to walk even if we disrupt their efforts with various accelerations efforts (e.g. walking machines that interfere with the natural motor skill development program). Kids will learn to speak on their own. No targeted tutoring needed. All they need is speech on input and the drive to accomplish goals via speech communication. Check your two neighbors, one is going out of his way to make his kid speak fast, and count fast, and perhaps read early. The other does nothing and his kid can still surprise and win that developmental race. Smart kids may develop slowly. On the other hand, accelerated kids can slow down due to the interference with their natural learning program. The problem with inept acceleration is that it may leave a permanent mark on the ultimate outcome.

Businesses and kids often chose their paths using semi-rational criteria. They will follow their natural preferences and interests. A capitalist may want to turn his hobby into a job. A child may prefer reading Pinocchio over studying math. Every great CEO, inventor or a billionaire will tell you that you need to love what you do. Otherwise the results will be as bad as the productivity in the Soviet economy known for its worker's adage: "if you toil or if you sleep, 50 rubles you will reap".

Robinson's fast food metaphor

Schooling and centrally-governed economies use a similar inefficient control system. Control theory is not popularly understood in general population, however, most of people know the power of free markets. This is what led me to proposing the above Soviet economy metaphor.

Ken Robinson is one of the briskiest minds involved in the criticism of current educational models. He proposed a better metaphor of schooling. Instead of control theory, he evoked optimization strategies. Schooling goes for high volumes at low costs. The same happens in food industry. The harm done by industrialization of schooling is not yet fully understood, however, we all know the health harm caused by the fast food industry. For fast food metaphor of schooling see: Ken Robinson's "Bring on the learning revolution!" on YouTube.

Robinson says:

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish

Finnish paradox

Compulsory schooling must end. This should be obvious with a bit of understanding of the theory of learning. However, the entire western world seems to be trying to optimize a wrong design. In Finnish paradox, I show how Finnish schools lead the world in being open to new ideas. However, they also may keep optimizing the dead end of school that is not fully committed to free learning. In that sense, Finland is a bit like Soviet Union 1957. Everyone was in awe with Sputnik. Many people had doubts about the superiority of free markets over the command economy. However, the proletariat of the communist empire did not fully subscribe to the ideology. Many people in the East could see the richest of the West and wondered why they cannot freely vote for parties that might perhaps change a thing or two. Many students can perfectly see the harm of coercion, but they have no vote. Parents, teachers and politicians are too busy with their lives and do not fully appreciate the pain of schooling. They live with the myth that "school is good". Finnish students are obedient and compliant. This is reminiscent to the well-indoctrinated population (I was one of those compliant souls: I stopped being a patriot). As much as we needed Lech Walesa and other rebels, we need now young rebels who would help change the school system. It will be hard to find such rebels in Finland. Finnish system is too good. I bet on Eastern Europe (perhaps Poland?). Our students are smart, rebellious, unhappy, and the system is almost as bad as the Soviet Union in the days leading to its collapse.

Compulsory schooling may need a bloodless rebellion for its complete eradication

Compulsory SuperMemo

SuperMemo insert. What is SuperMemo?

I often hear the opinion: "double teacher salary, you will quadruple the efficiency of the system". Unfortunately, few areas of government investment bring such nice returns. If it was all so easy, we should invest in governments, not in stocks.

Imagine what would happen, if governments decided to make SuperMemo compulsory at schools! 1-2% of kids might catch that hook. The rest of the students would turn into lifelong SuperMemo haters. Done wrongly, SuperMemo could do more damage than good. Badly formulated unwanted knowledge is comparable to information garbage. With bad knowledge, SuperMemo would be turned into a perfect schooling torture machine. Perfect tool for efficient time-wasting and suppression of the learn drive. It would result in cramming and reviewing garbage!

In the optimum education system, all learning must come from the heart. Good learning must be governed by the pleasures generated by the learn drive.

Bad employment of SuperMemo might suppress the learn drive!

Modern schooling is like Soviet economy

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