Will slick sophistries never cease!?! One of the big ones now is that our public schools are exactly like factories. Relentless and robotic, they move kids along conveyor belts, stuffing them with esoteric facts, pasting labels on them, ruthlessly packing them in metal drums for shipment to profit-crazy corporations across the country.

There is only one problem with this feverish technicolor nightmare. The kids in our public schools hardly know any facts, esoteric or otherwise.

The Education Establishment hates content and knowledge. They have always been ingenious at finding elaborate excuses for kicking these reviled intruders from the classroom. Out, damned facts! So the last thing you\’ll find in our public schools is kids burdened by too much knowledge. What average students do all day is hazy, but we can rule out learning as that term was once understood.

So the education bosses would now seem to be engaged in preemptive warfare. Terrified that somebody might sneak in a fact now and then, they\’ve launched a massive counteroffensive against a fantasy–Schools Are Exactly Like Factories. There\’s an endless lamentation against the factorization that is said to be destroying our young and turning them into soulless automatons devoid of creativity.

Indeed, CREATIVITY is the battle cry, the wedge word, the sophistry supremo in this wailing. According to the propaganda, creativity is the true reason kids go to school (really? since when?); our schools aren\’t good at making kids creative (says who?); therefore our schools are evil and need to be overhauled.

What in the heck are these people talking about? We don\’t have enough poets, painters, guitar players, and short story writers?!?

This phony propaganda campaign is floating on two deep pools of verbal sludge. First, catching the phantom bird of creativity is said to justify ANY expense or surgery. If we have to completely destroy what\’s left of the traditional school, that\’s a good deal! Hurry! Get on with it!

Second, there\’s the completely unproved claim that traditional education reduces creativity, when the exact opposite seems to be the case. This propaganda argues that letting kids chase butterflies all day will release their inner Picasso. (Meanwhile, we know that Picasso himself, even as a ten-year-old, was slaving away at the easel, methodically learning every painting technique known to Europe.)

If you like sophistry, you have to love this hodgepodge of cunning and nonsense. The elite educators start with a threat that isn\’t real and use it to bludgeon to death something we desperately need–academic pursuits.

The phony premises throughout are 1) that creativity is in decline (anybody look at the internet lately?) and 2) the reason for this decline is the factual content brutally taught in our schools, plus the testing used to measure it. Yes, the testing! See, the top educators want two thing here. No more teaching of basic knowledge AND no more testing of basic knowledge. Testing reveals that kids know very little. Can\’t have that. So in a very cynical ploy, the educators attack tests as a threat to creativity, when what those test are a threat to is the jobs these incompetents hold despite decades of failure.

Students of the higher bull, take note. This is beautiful stuff.

Surely, you\’ve heard the 150-decibel campaign against testing and in favor of creativity. It\’s the biggest cliche in the universe now. Our kids lack creativity, unlike 50 years ago when all young Americans spoke in free verse, whistled new symphonies, and solved complex design problems on a napkin at lunch. Did this inane litany of lies snooker you? Were you going with the flimsy logic? Oh, pity those poor victims we call students. They just want to write a limerick before they die but schools cruelly foreclose this option. How? By making them learn something. Oh, the horror.

1000 hours of school each year and somehow our students know close to nothing; but you can plainly see that the Education Establishment won\’t be satisfied until kids know zero. In fact, these future citizens and voters should be learning, learning, learning, especially if you want creativity!

Yes, that\’s the bizarre truth and it\’s exactly opposite what the so-called experts are telling us now. Virtually every greatly creative person who ever lived had a solid foundation of basics and knowledge, intensely studied and learned from the ages of 5 to 25, give or take. At that point they might start producing good creative work. Every educated person knows this, but that\’s the beauty of creating a zero-fact world. The Education Establishment can tell its lies and feel confident that nobody will dispute them.

So here\’s what we have now: millions of students who have almost no foundational knowledge and can\’t have an intelligent conversation about anything more demanding than the weather, never mind a deep thought. You have to know stuff in order to have fresh thoughts about that stuff. Our kids can\’t find Japan on a map, don\’t know what 7 x 8 is, and think the Amazon is a book store.

Here\’s what is really funny. Are you ready for the weird truth? The school should be a factory. If only! Children should move along in an orderly way, acquiring information and mastery and sophistication as they go. That\’s precisely how they\’ll learn to be \”college-ready\” and \”career-ready.\” That\’s the only way.

Think for a minute about how actual schools work. Consider a bar-tending school, flying school, beautician school, art school, taxidermy school, driving school, accounting schools, sailing school, any kind of real-world school. They have one function. They exist to teach something.

In every single case, you walk through the door as an ignorant person who knows nothing about the subject being taught. Then, months or years later, you graduate with a title and a diploma because you now know a lot of stuff. That is the way schools are supposed to work. You also learn about keeping to a schedule and finishing assignments; you learn discipline. That\’s what public schools used to do until John Dewey and his progressive educators took schools out of the school business.

Imagine a wannabe pilot or accountant trying to be \”creative\” before going to school. The thought is absurd. Imagine the accountant\’s clients going to jail for unintended tax fraud. Imagine that pilot crashing on take-off due to an absence of training.

(See related article \”23: The Creativity Question\” on Improve-Education.org.)

Author Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of http://www.Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see \”42: Reading Resources.\” Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.\”

Category: Education
Keywords: K-12, education, public schools, knowledge, intelligence, propaganda, ken robinson,