Roughly speaking we spend 10K per student per year, which varies from a low of 7k in Utah to a high of 20k in NY, plus an additional 2k per student at the federal level’s department of education. I don’t know the state overhead numbers.
As far as I can tell there is zero value provided by every single individual above the practicing teacher. As far as I can tell the entire academic establishment teaches pseudoscience in order to justify greater expenditures and higher salaries – since teaching is a pretty simple interpersonal craft more dependent upon the individual teacher’s character and abilities than any particular methodology. Teaching no subject is difficult if taught in the context of the historical narrative, and applied through repetition with natural language.
My suggestion would be to do away with all administration in the country entirely, require teachers to form sub-s corporations holding any physical plant (school) as an asset, and require each of them to carry insurance-of-performance like lawyers and accountants, series seven holders, and bonded professionals.
Deliver purchasing power parity vouchers to each student depending upon his region. Allow students and parents to shop for schools and entrepreneurs to form new ones.
This will drive students into schools that offer different teaching environments for different temperaments and in combination will restore normative behavior to the population and commons.
An homogenous germanic protestant middle class population is far different from a diverse population from different gene pools that mature at different rates to different depths. Humans do not ‘grow’ a the same rate in all senses. Nor are we endowed with equal abilities and challenges. And each must be taught as his biology allows.
REALLOCATION OF TIME TO HOME AND COMMONS
There is no evidence that education of more than two to three hours a day produces any value whatsoever. There is substantial evidence that education produces infantilization and ignorance. And that a few hours a day in the late morning, and then continuous exposure to life, family, friends, commons, business and industry provides higher returns in maturity and abilities. Returning children to the labor force is more important than adding mothers to it.
We have to understand that vast numbers of women entering the workplace was not a net add. It merely reduced replacment rates, pushed men in to higher risk jobs at lower pay, forced the west to import underclasses, and force us to lie about equality of people in traits and abilities, and the only net gain was letting one generation retire early, instead of maintaining part time, light burdent work that kept them mobile, healthy, and engaged in life.
CURRICULUM
I’ve written elsewhere on cirriculum extensively, largely to eliminate pseudoscience, pseudorationalism, propaganda, and outright lies, and to return to evidentiary knoweldge.
The net is that we teach people poorly and pseudoscientifically, when the process of education is actually quite trivial.
Needless to say teachiung is a craft and teachers have talents for it or they don’t. But the process is very simple: narrative for context, basic operations, higher explanations and patterns, and repetition of all using natural lanaguage. In the enlightenment and especially after 1920 there appears to have been a rapid expansion of the ‘crafts’ claiming academic pretenses, and incorporating pseudoscientific language into all the ‘crafts’. Many of these ‘crafts’ are in the ‘liberal arts’ and ‘social sciences’ including education. But tehy are mere crafts consisting of a very small number of basic operations, the most important of which is subjective analysis of mental states, and the attempt to communicate how to extend that mental state.
This is not a science. It is a hand-craft that can be raised to an art.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine