"But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment?"
I didn't care about education until i was in my 20s. I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager.
"The problem is that half of people are not smart enough"
That sounds like a number you pulled out of your butt. Do you have any real statistics on that?
"The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. "
I'm not sure I understand, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Our schools are becoming more federalized, but that hasn't always been the case. States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems.
"The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools."
This isn't true. She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her. Think about it. Have you ever watched infomercials with absurd assertions that have graphs and numbers on them? You and I realize they are absurd, but most people don't. Think about it.
I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager.
What I mean is if you were chained to a desk and forced to study something, would your mind have automatically picked out relationships and meanings, even if they were not explicitly drilled? Most people in the upper third of intelligence do this almost automatically. For them, the curriculum is not the education.
"The problem is that half of people are not smart enough."
The studies of IQ and life outcome suggest that people of below-average intelligence do not spontaneously deduce general principles when given many specific examples. If you teach them to read by word recognition training, they will not figure out the rules of phonics on their own. It will be difficult or impossible for them to read a word that was not trained into them in childhood. (Whereas even really thick people trained in phonics can read words like "platen" or "vellus" that they have never seen before, and they can make themselves understood at writing down words they know but have never seen spelled.)
States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems.
I was thinking of decentralization even at a lower level. If all the schools in a city are captured by a stupid fad, it may take decades for the city to escape. If individual schools are left to run themselves, the ones that pick dumb ideas will lose students/money to schools that pick good ideas.
She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her.
She wouldn't be able to understand "the students here get the worst scores in town"? And she would keep not understanding it for 13 years? And you would never figure it out and ask to go somewhere else? There may be some students in that situation, but there are many families with some degree of awareness and ambition, and their ambitions will promptly show up in budget cuts.
I didn't care about education until i was in my 20s. I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager.
"The problem is that half of people are not smart enough"
That sounds like a number you pulled out of your butt. Do you have any real statistics on that?
"The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. "
I'm not sure I understand, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Our schools are becoming more federalized, but that hasn't always been the case. States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems.
"The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools."
This isn't true. She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her. Think about it. Have you ever watched infomercials with absurd assertions that have graphs and numbers on them? You and I realize they are absurd, but most people don't. Think about it.