We never even stood a chance, so make sure that the next generation is equally screwed. (Endorsed by Jesus and UNESCO)

As I keep telling my cat as no one else will listen;
Sometimes I forget how utterly stupid people are, how we are locked into conventions and traditions without question, blindly following our own expectations, handed to us by a society that is "not perfect, but the best we can manage at this point". Then at some random point in time and space, the thought "Obviously we can be anything and everything we choose to, as a society and as a race." hits me, quickly followed by "Yes, and this is what we chose."
It follows that depressed cynics are merely observant and intelligent. If the intelligent and observant are happy, it is probably because they are either rich or have a hopeless case of optimism.
So how do we manage this magic trick of such all-encompassing vastness, creating this illusion where we are both on the stage and in the audience at the same time, telling ourselves when to clap, because we are doing our best and this is it? Well, fuck me, maybe it's because we're telling the children that this is what we've always done, we're going to teach you to do it to yourselves, then you will do it to your children.

Let me clarify my thoughts in one condensed sentence without ranting incomprehensibly:

Our education-system fucking sucks. It sucks from start to finish, kinder-garden to university.
Here is the whopper - people actually agree with me on this*, but, hey, what can you do, right?
Right.
So when the topic comes up, these are the usual suspects of preferred solutions:**

1. We need better teachers, we will raise the standards and educate better teachers.
2. There are too few options, more private schools will create diversity and competition.
3. The social environment is bad, we need new social projects and to be more including.
4. Update the material, new books for everyone!
5. More tests, different tests, new tests! To measure progress and compare numbers and... stuff?
6. Let's reform everything, confuse the shit out of all the teachers for years and blame it all on     the other political party when it doesn't work.


I just wrote this list and I already hate it. I mean, holy shit, does that list look like it's brimming with the revolutionary ideas needed to change an antiquated education-system?
Never changing in any meaningful way for ages, our schools are still churning out factory workers, soldiers and young people encouraged to fit in a-one-size-fits-all-mold. That is what it's designed to to, look it up - produce a working-class, instill respect for authority and the system, thus conditioning the young for the possibility of a military career. The brightest of the lot might make it far enough to get some higher degree and specialized education, making their way to the middle-class. A happy by-product, but good on them.
Much like as in the US, Norway has adopted a "no kid left behind"(-ish) stance, on the early to middling stages of education. That means dumbing it down enough that borderline handicapped children get a chance, while making sure that they are stuck doing something they probably don't want to do, making this formulae stick to... everyone, more or less. It is an oversimplification, but then again so is the education-system.

So, let's have a look at the list again.

1. Yes, better teachers, please. Of course, the powers that be will go about this in some weird way, making demands on the education-system itself to produce better teachers, changing benchmarks and demands to grades in various fields that are often unrelated, unrealistic or just superfluous.

Possible solution:***  Pay teachers enough to make it a prestige career. Why the hell aren't we doing that already? This would in turn make demands on their education and attract more people, because that's what money do. Just don't pay them so much that it makes the job worth it even though they actually hate children.

2. Private schools are for religious crazies and the rich. Or possibly hippies. Either way I fail to see how any of the options are healthy for society as a whole. The public school should be good enough, even for the moderately rich. The religious option is not an institution for learning, but for indoctrination, make-belief and delusion. The artsy hippie alternative is whatever the hell it wants to be, and should probably be incorporated into the normal school-system to some degree. Don't really know and don't care enough to get into it. Damn hippies.

Possible solution: Get rid of 99% of private schools for various reasons.

3. Social environment. These projects tend to fall into one of three categories.
First: Let the children play, dance, hold hands and sing. In short, let children be children.
Second: There is to much bullying, we need the children to stop behaving like children.
Third: Social justice agenda! Raise the minorities to the top and ask the rest to check their privileges. 

Possible solutions: Good question. Children are cruel savages, sometimes because their parents are trash, sometimes just because they are children. I suggest an artificial Lord of the Flies scenario to pin-point the psychos early, preventing getting the chubby kid killed.
But that is for the kids. The higher echelons need to curb the SJWs  before they go amok. Possibly earlier intervention and better teachers could beat this problem to a pulp.

4. New books. Ok, I love books, they are awesome. Books = Civilization. That being said, why do we still have them at school? Information gets outdated too fast for books to stay relevant for any longer stretch of time. What do commercials for certain companies and products have in common with scifi-movies from the 80s and 90s have in common? You learn shit from computers, possibly with VR.

Possible solution: Get rid of the books, get laptops, pads and VR-headsets for everyone. You can't follow a link in a book to learn more. Books are in fact not interactive. The world today is.  Probably the most important thing we could do to reform. Case closed. 

5. Tests. Test what? What are we testing? How are we testing it? The form of written tests we use today, are still largely a leftover from a time when books were the ultimate authority of knowledge and possibly even rare or hard to come by. Thus students crammed and memorized, because they needed information readily available in their heads. THAT IS NOT THE SOCIETY WE LIVE IN TODAY! The amount of information we have at hand is staggering and freely available to the filthy masses. Sure, certain specialists need to know stuff. You don't want your surgeon to pause the operation to quickly google something. But then maybe you DO want that, because the procedure might have changed some since the surgeon read about it in a book.

Possible solution: Stop memorizing useless facts. Test a students ability to comprehend the information available and his or hers ability to use it correctly. We are not machines. Machines will give you lists of facts. People should utilize them. Fuck antiquated tests. 


6. Reform, confuse, blame. This happens all the time. Someone means well, tries to make a change, but gets caught up in bureaucracy, compromises, politics, personal agendas etc, and it ends up not changing enough to make a difference, just messing it up for everyone.
How about this? Reform, educate, take credit. You're welcome.

Possible solution: We need to have the balls and ovaries to take it far enough to make the difference.
What if learning and teaching never ends? If the teachers are continually kept up to date on new material in their fields, the students would be equally educated, thus ending the gap in knowledge between elderly teachers and well-informed students. Again, put the books away, the are old and out-dated after a couple of years.

Imagine this - A public school, more or less without books, without blackboards, but with more well-paid, well-educated and highly motivated teachers. Learning would be highly interactive with all the visual aids you could dream of, painting in as broad or narrow strokes as you'd wish. Explanations and language can be tailored to each individual's needs and level of comprehension, with an ever present possibility to go deeper or wider into the information, information that would always be current and up to date. Let the children be children, but let them be smart children, let them have general knowledge and specialized knowledge if they so wish and help them be what they want to be, not what an out-dated institution have told us to be.






Soundtrack: Paradise Lost - No hope in sight****

* Some do!
** I enjoy writing lists. Sue me.
*** Yes, I dare.
**** Is where I started. After some hours of typing, I ended up on Nirvana - Lithium