Today’s high school graduates emerge with few skills, little education and a sanitized view of the world. The Thirteen Reasons’ portrait of how a stifling, bureaucratic system progressively cuts this teenage girl to pieces, eventually driving her to death, provides a dramatized, insightful reflection on (another) emerging lost generation.
The statistics are grim: a third of 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. live at home according to the US Census Bureau. Homeserve USA finds that nearly one in three Americans can’t come up with $500 to fund an emergency. As if that were not enough, according to the US Congressional Budget Office, governments have saddled today’s young with more than $100 trillion worth of pension and healthcare debts.
- Thirteen years in jail
In Thirteen Reasons, Hannah, the bullied protagonist has no way to escape a toxic environment. Her helpless position progressively worsens and eventually drives her to suicide.
Because education is compulsory in the United States, Hannah lives in a de facto prison. She cannot change schools or classes without parental approval and undergoing a humiliating bureaucratic process.
An education system that prioritized learning would put students at the center, leaving them free to choose their schools, classes, teachers and programs.
- American kids can’t vote
- Students come last
Governments prioritize public education based on its effects on national competitiveness. Businesses focus on getting skilled workers (whose training they don’t want to pay for). Teachers’ unions focus on salaries and working conditions.
The upshot is that students’ interests come last.
- Bloated administrations
- Kids taught to worship government; shun individual responsibility
However today’s public schools offer essentially no counter arguments about individual responsibility.
High school graduates thus emerge as easy prey for politicians who claim that near-unlimited government spending and borrowing are the cure for the nation’s problems. ( See the Krugman con ).
- Public schools teach no marketable skills
If America’s kids emerged from schools able to read, write, do basic math, type, work as a team and use a half dozen common software packages, they would have something to show for their 13 years in the slammer.
- Banning Ayn Rand and Huckleberry Finn
Ayn Rand, the most important philosopher of the 20th century, is essentially banned from the public system, as is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which Hemingway cited as the root of American literature. History teaching in America, as Niall Ferguson has noted, is sanitized to the point of rendering it almost counterproductive.
- State-directed curricula: one size fits all
These differ based on whether the school in located in poorer neighborhoods where many students come from single family homes, or in upper middle-class professional communities where traditional family structures are more common.
- Kids graduate clueless about finances
This leaves them prey to America’s biggest predatory lenders: big universities, which have managed to saddle youth with $1.2 trillion worth of debts, many of whom have little to show for it .
- “Hoop jumper” worship: drives out the talented and curious
Students who challenge conventional thinking are smiled at and given a B.This wouldn’t be a problem if schools were able to correctly identify top performers. However heavy state-defined curricula force teachers to “teach to the test.”
This leads to the advancement of drone-like students who are able to recite mindless data, massaged concepts and formulas, and more dangerously: with the need to guess and kow-tow to what teachers want them to say.
Worse, in two centuries of public schooling, teachers still fall for that old trap of giving the best marks to kids with nice handwriting or to math students who get the wrong answer but manage to “show their work.” Students who challenge conventional thinking are smiled at and given a B.
The upshot is the students with drive, curiosity and creativity are quickly driven out.
The number one students - like John Maynard Keynes, the father of modern economics, who taught that the best way to get rich was to spend more than you earn - rocket through the system, and now run the nation’s central banks and university economics departments.
You get the picture.
- Powerful unions
Teachers thus need to accept the lion’s share of the blame for the disastrous state of American schools.
That blame starts with the fact that teachers’ first priority has been to band into powerful unions, which put salaries, benefits and vacation time first and students’ interests last.
- Millionaire teachers
The teachers’ unions have been hugely successful. Median compensation for US workers is $28,900. Teachers earn $58,000, almost double that amount .
The gap between teachers and those communities they teach in is exacerbated by the fact that gold-plated, state-guaranteed pensions mean that public school teachers generally retire as millionaires.
If teachers were paid at market rates, there would be more money available to fund students’ needs such as smaller class sizes, libraries and computers.
- Mediocre teachers that can’t be fired
Teachers begin their careers ranked among most socially-committed of any professionals. But as with any human beings, a change takes hold of teachers once they acquire tenure and can no longer be fired.
Office hours and volunteer activities shrink, emails from students and parents are returned slower, if at all. The upshot is that many of the best teachers decline towards mediocrity as their careers advance.