Educating the normal people

I think of people as being either smart, normal, or dumb. If you buy that idea, then read on.

I for one used to think I was “smart” until I got into advanced mathematics at GaTech. Then I realized I was normal, albeit a hard worker in the mathematics area.

Now that I am older, I think about how to give my kids and grandkids every advantage in life they can have. And I depend on educators to help in this effort. Obviously this makes sense given the long historical human record of having schools to educate our young humans.

Now there is much disgust with the present education “system” in America. I am sure the people who work in the system are well educated, and also mostly hard workers. Yet the “output” is poor, it seems. When a cash register clerk in an Atlanta McDonalds drive through can’t make change, that is pretty bad. That kid got screwed. And along the way, the perception is that things are worse now, not better.

Now one light bulb went on, recently.

Suppose the smart educators who devise so many initiatives are doing the “classic” “for lack of knowing what to do, they do what they know”? In plain English, perhaps they are just poorly led in focusing on the smart people, or treating normal people like smart people.

Now I have delved into generalizing, which is a poor way to go. There are so many people in the USA, that a decentralized approach supervised by local school boards and local governments is probably best. The alternatives like federal and state government education supervision naturally suffer when it comes to “our” kids.

In all cases, what’s the focus? Is it the smart kids, or the dumb kids, or the majority normal kids?

And, depending on where you live, there are other problems, like the out-of-wedlock birth rates…that is future kids needing an education that come from a home with a mother and no father around.

Back to the “normal” kids. Perhaps “they” must be the focus of education to benefit them. Now here ideas abound, and I have mine, too. The key point is to educate them to be successful in the basic skills, like the 3R’s, or making a home budget, etc. In the old days it was called the 3R’s, and even today ideas like a home budget and balancing a check book and doing basic home maintenance should be taught as a priority. If there are not enough hours, then priorities should predominate to educate our majority “normal” kids.

There are only so many hours in the school year to teach. Setting priorities is fundamental to enhancing our kid’s potential to be good workers and satisfied citizens. And this is a local decision, depending on local situations I think.

Bottom line. How do we educate the majority normal kids? My suggestion is to recognize that most of us are “normal”, and to give these kids a priority in all local education decisions about how to do this. Said another way, if we can’t do it all right now, just do the basics, like educating our normal kids.

PS
Anybody who has had a baby knows much of the basic and beginning parenting skills, like changing diapers and feeding babies, is simply not taught in school. There are things we learn out of school, and taught by family members. My suggestion is that this still should be taught out of school. But we still need to be taught, helped if you will. Nobody I know is born knowing how to raise a baby.