American education system: Critical infrastructure, ignorant adults

By John Stanton 

In times of rapid change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."  Eric Hoffer

"Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are."  Neils Bohr

A good case can be made for ending initial education (more of which could be obtained in the home through electronic devices) somewhere around the age of eighteen. This formal initial period could be followed by two years of service in a socially desirable cause; then by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area; and finally by regular periods of one and eventually even two years of broadening, integrative study at the beginning of every decade of one's life, somewhere up to the age of sixty. Zibignew Brezezinski 1970

There is an illuminating briefing produced by the Center for Digital Education titled Education Market Forecast, 2012. One page, in particular, displays where select US K-12 schools and universities would rank in the Fortune 500. The New York City K-12 school system, with US $18.5 billion in revenue, would be ranked number 136 far ahead of Marriot International and Yahoo, Inc. At the college level, the University of Michigan with US $5.8 billion in revenue ranks ahead of MasterCard and the Washington Post.

There are approximately 4,493 colleges and universities in the USA with some 35 million or so students. At the K-12 level there are roughly 49 million students in 98,708 public school facilities in 14,000 districts. Private schools (parochial, charter, etc.) have nearly 6 million students under their care in as many as 33,000 facilities. States of the United States spent (all sources) nearly US $2 trillion on education. K-12 and college/university systems employ 11.1 million people. Only 50 percent of the 11.1 million are teachers with the other 50 percent being administrators, ground and maintenance personnel, technology advisors, etc. It is worth noting that public and private spending (all sources) on the K-12 through the college and university levels in the United States exceeds that spent on social security and national defense combined.

 "Colleges and universities are important regional economic engines for their communities and are multifaceted in that they provide education, workforce training, employment, research activity, and health care," according to Moody's Education Outlook 2012. It is becoming the case that colleges and universities are employers of last resort in places like Detroit, Michigan or Up State New York. This is likely to change for the worse as in January 2013 Moody's indicated in its US Higher Education Outlook Negative for 2013 that "the US higher education sector has hit a critical juncture in the evolution of its business model."

Education Factories

Mark Twain, Thoreau, Shakespeare, Diversity and Sustainability notwithstanding, the American education system (K-12, college/university) is a profit making industry (despite the org/edu claims) that is in the business of manufacturing, and warehousing, American human capital. Any nation-state that hopes for longevity must design an education system that ensures a secure life and continuity for its people. That means teaching national/social uniformity in living and purpose.

The US education system is the backbone, the spinal column of the nation.

A key function of the education industry is to develop and produce taxpayers that will have skillsets useful in maintaining and increasing the nation's productivity levels whether in a research laboratory or the bedroom (nation's fertility rate). Critical in the manufacturing process is designing individual and collective minds to agree to the covenant, a sort of the secular religion, between "we the people" and the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the ideals contained in the Declaration of Independence. Those same minds are manufactured to generally accept the worldviews of American business, education and government leaders flowing through corporate media.

Another critical function of the US education industry is to produce minds that are numb to the contradictions in the capitalist, globalist mode of living and thinking. Certainly not numb to asking questions of the system (to a point); but produced with an inability to think with depth and breadth about the globalized world, about life and one's place in it, about connections. In 1950 Dean Acheson once remarked that higher order Americans spend about 10 minutes a day thinking about what goes on outside the borders of the USA. Even with the Internet and WWW, that 10 minute mark probably still holds.