Instapundit: Consider Alternative Schooling

Writing in USA Today, Glenn
Reynolds, the Instapundit, sounds a call for alternative
education:

School was practice for working in the factory. Thus, the
traditional public school: like a factory, it runs by the bell.
Like machines in a factory, desks and students are lined up in
orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again,
and students go on to the next class. And within each class, the
subjects are the same, the assignments are the same, and the
examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of
individual students.

This had its advantages back during
the Industrial
Revolution, an assembly-line era where uniformity was more
important than anything else, when Henry Ford was
happy to sell you a car in any color you wanted, so long as it
was black. But this is the
21st century, and now times have changed. You can buy a thousand
different kinds of shampoo, so why should your kid have only one
kind of education?

Read the whole thing.

And check out his new book
The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American
Education from Itself. I don’t fully agree with his
arguments in The New School, but nobody has been more persistent
and perceptive in calling attention to the higher-education bubble.
Totally worth a read.

Reynolds and I – along with a half-dozen other folks – discussed
“Where Higher Education Went Wrong” last February in Reason.

Read that here.