Maggie's Farm

I know I'm late to the party, but just to re-iterate what others have said, the sub-title of the book is "Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money". It's the system known as "education" that the author is condemning as far too expensive, too bureaucratized, too focused on credentialism over actual learning, and pushed on far too many kids that don't really benefit from a real education.

Of course, many of us have been pointing out for years that the standard - and sole - proposed fix for education is to throw more money at the schools when obviously that solution doesn't work. The real problem is the innumerates running things that insist we can all be above average and refuse to admit that some people have gotten all the book-learning they're capable of absorbing by about the fifth grade or the eighth grade and need to be turned toward learning a useful trade.

Just as an example, when I was in school you had to pass Math 101 to meet your math requirement for your degree but the college offered both Math 099 (12th grade math) and Math 098 (9th grade math) as non-credit remedial courses. There was some discussion about adding a Math 097 but the faculty apparently had some standards and bucked at the idea that the school might be admitting as college students kids who couldn't even pass an eighth-grade proficiency exam.

An appalling number of college students these days need remedial classes, in all sorts of subjects, indicating that they're not really college material. But the colleges need the tuition money to pay the horde of administrators they've got running the place and it should be obvious that colleges exist to provide good-paying jobs for bureaucrats and educating children is at best a secondary purpose.