Getting Learned

Every parent no matter what they think of themselves think the world of their child, and do everything in their power to help them succeed. Infact to deviate from this basic recipe of parenthood makes one a bit fucked up in the head.
Yet fundamentally it's selfish because success is not available to everyone and in some cases is purely relative.
At least wealth is relative we know that 1 1966 salary is the equivalent of 2 incomes in 2006 in terms of the real income. So now both Mum & Dad work to achieve the same quality of life as before. Infact it's harder now to be succesful in terms of wealth (purely of wealth) because not only do you have to be a success but you have to marry a success to to combine fortunes into a fortune. Really you are more successful if you just manage to marry someone who is exceptionally successful.
But kids, yeah you want your moron kid to be a big success so he can jump the class gap. Maybe even support you in later life. Furthermore your kids now want to be a success, an exceptional success - almost all kids have ambitions of being famous in either sports, music or film.
Many kids are pushed to be brilliant in all areas. Like you can just make a kid brilliant.
Chicago in an attempt to desegregate schools removed zoning laws and allowed high-school students to apply to any school in the district, to prevent total and utter chaos it was still a lottery, you could apply to change to any school but were not gaurunteed being allowed to move.
What was the outcome - they determined choice of school had no bearing on a students success. Why because it was almost a perfect empirical experiment one could observe cases where two students of near identical ability applied to change schools (a better school) and one gets through and the other stays, outcomes where the same.
It makes sense, teachers best students in most cases in my experience where already smart by the time the teacher got their hands on them, they weren't transformed from a dumb student into a smart student by the teacher.
However in Australia at least my opinion is that it isn't that clear cut. The VCE system at least from my experience is highly irregular at identifying intelligent students.
It makes education big business for private schools, which I attended. VCE is one of the education systems designed to determine a schools ENTER which tells them where they are in line for popular universities and their courses.
For those expats that don't know every subject you do in final year highschool recieves a study score out of 50 the average mark being pinned at 25. To encourage students to take more intellectually demanding subjects scaling is applied, so if you get a study score of 48 in say Cake decorating it may get scaled down to 28 as one assumes below average intelligence students take Cake decorating as a subject. Whereas of course all the genius kids take Specialist maths (scaled up 9 points) and Latin (scaled 14 points) because they are of above average intelligence.
Sounds perfect doesn't it?
But the system like any system is full of loopholes.
Some subjects aren't scaled down enough to make them unattractive to intelligent kids, one popular way for private schools to bump up its performance is to enrol all it's students who would do specialist maths into further maths - the fundamental mathematics subjects, really a no-brainer. Because mathematics holds such high esteem in academic circles it is only scaled down 2 or 3 points, yet an above average student can get a high mark with little effort or difficulty.
Public schools will tend to honor the system and enroll only average students in this subject, they have no incentive to perform well in most cases, their funding is guaranteed and enrolment for future years is usually in higher demand than they can supply.
Furthermore Private schools have fairly simple resources available to them - like photocopies of the last 10 years of exams for almost any given subject. Particularly the most reliable and ironically lucratively scaled subjects like Specialist Maths, Maths Methods, Physics, Chemistry etc. Rather than educate along lines of critical thinking and other truly valued transferable skills in a private school you learn the questions by rote.
Give or take a few panicked mistakes in an exam you cruise through with little difficulty, some numbers will be changed but effectively you have seen the entire exam paper and it's answers before (you just study it in an inefficient way by learning ten times the questions that are rotated through an exam) many of my teachers new exactly what questions would be asked plus three or for that didn't get asked because the exam papers don't vary that much, with only a few new topics swapped in and a few swapped out).
There's a simple reason for this: students have to be taught something to be tested on. Furthermore given the number of institutions this 'learning' has to occur in across the state it has to be simple enough to be delivered by a fairly consistent amount of staff and examined year after year. It also has to produce enough students to fill places in Universities, of which there are tens of thousands of places across many courses. If you mixed up the exam questions enough to test students innate grasp of physics and mathematics, pushed them back to a theoretical level you would probably discover the vast mass does exceptionally poorly, relatively few people read for their own recreation except for when the new Harry Potter book is released. It wouldn't be a surprise. I am not as smart as pythagoras, so really instead of identifying a couple of 1000 genius and then the rest relegated to a lottery the learning has to be accessible to the majority.
That is a descent teacher has to teach 'the motions' to most people. That is how to slot numbers into a formula to determine when thermal equilibrium will be reached with no understanding of what happens on a molecular level or where the fuck in real life you would apply such learning.
So a motivated student (motivated to succeed in the competitive sense rather than learn for learnings sake) at a school with a decent teacher or at least pushy principal and a decent photocopy budget can more or less guaruntee those students a score above 90 (top 10% of the state) that is I firmly believe that within VCE anyone can get a 90+ enter if they want it for maybe $100 extra photocopy budget per student you can charge that student a $2000 premium to study per year, and the only real time you have to ramp up that spending is in their final year subjects so multiply that by 6 years and that a $10k premium per student a private school charges over public. In Melbourne it would be in the $100k ball park due to demand being so high.
I have seen some of the dumbest people, the most ignorant, lazy and selfish score in the 90's. I would have been dux at 6 other schools in my home town but ranked 15th at my cumwad school.
and it is just one of many that get by on amatuerish marketing in Victoria with buzzwords on every page like: 'driven,success,inspiration...' pick up the age Wesley, Xavier, Carey all do it. They build buildings of the utmost technological advancement, give students laptop computers, hire marquees and put on wine and cheese nights, build cafes for students to feel soffisticated in and fail to produce one student who is smart as a crazy greek dude like pythagoras. And again if they do, it's probably already been determined by the time they get to the school.
The buildings, laptops and everything are distractions of course. If you think backwards how is a laptop computer going to enhance the learning experience? educational software is not big business but textbooks are, that may change in the future. What wireless hotspots and notebooks give students access to is more distraction, if anything student learning outcomes should decline with the introduction of laptops.
Buildings sure, having a rock climbing gym or a sound stage is impressive to give young people an opportunity (and actually heading in the right direction of what educational institutions should deliver) but come exam time final year it all gets pushed aside, the facilities and innovations are somewhat cosmetic only because at the end of the day the exams must examine knowledge that can be delivered in any institution. In the start of my school year in year twelve my laptop broke down. I didn't bother repairing it because it was a heavy piece of shit, and I didn't need it.
But it was mandatory for all students to have one at my school. I had one I just couldn't use it to play games in my physics class anymore. I finished in the top 15 students of 100 in a year level. and top 5% in the state. It more than got me where I wanted/needed to go. More of a hamper to my score would have been my decision not to do the pathetically downscaled further maths subject.
At the end of the day it came down to experienced teachers ( a good thing in any system) and extra photocopy money (a bad thing in any system). For sure VCE in the days of take home CAT assignments used to be worse, restricting all examination to class time observed assignments sure did take a lot of pressure off students but possibly made private schools less attractive.
I'm not saying private schools are evil by the way, I would definitely send my kid to one, and recommend it to everybody. I'm merely highlighting how poorly designed VCE is and don't automatically accord any respect to 90+ students, they probably aren't as good as they think they are/or much better than they think they are, judge by their character.
But surprisingly whenever I pick up the Age education supplement there aren't may letters by students condemming the general system by which their next couple of years are determined. Maybe rightly they realise university isn't all that important. And it obviously isn't...
While I say private schools are easy money (and one asks if it's so easy why don't I go and do it?) it isn't easy to get into, it requires a fuckload of capital to buy school premisis and decades to build up a brand name within the community to attract high school fees and teachers who know the system in and out. Frankly I got better things to do.
Public schools don't implement (relatively) anywhere near the number of easy loopholes in VCE to get a better outcome from their learning. As my friend Bryce said of his school (a very good public high school) 'It's like they don't even care'
and they don't, put simply there is no incentive for them to get the best result for their students. Most major public schools that could compete with private schools have no board members to please with record enrollments and profitability. They can't put up their fees and charge more. They can't charge any fees at all legally. They can't take students from all over the state, offering them scholarships and accommodation. They don't want to. They don't have to do any recruiting drives for prospective parents. They have no incentive to get results to flash up on a projector in front of some obsessive parents who's kid is entering kindergarten to bring in more money.
Private schools do.
University doesn't matter.
Why? Whilst a high school may wish to put in it's magazine a former student who has achieved some level of fame and accomplishment, most private schools mention very few of their alumni past their enter score statistics because frankly too many of them perform poorly post high school.
Surprisingly parents get short sighted on this point too. Most likely because for them so long as you had a uni degree you had a free meal ticket. Or they assume their child is that smart.
But if you take an average kid and spoon feed them into uni then take it away when the knowledge becomes specialized, and simultaneously introduce them to more sex, drugs and gambling of which they have all just reached legal age to consume
this tends to be the most overlooked period for a young smart student to go off the rails, get sexually harassed, get problems, get arrested or more commonly just fail and drop out of uni.
But a highschool isn't responsible for that, they can't send a teacher out with every student to guide them through university and shit.
Which wouldn't be necessary if a student knew how to learn.
So the problem I pose to society is that uni graduates, high school graduates are actually a russian roulette flooded with people who on paper look the same but range from brilliant to incompetent, simply because we test the wrong things.
It would be wrong to test say genetics, or go by demographics. But more or less that's what we already have anyway, wealthier people can get into university either, explicitly (full fee paying positions) or implicitly (private schools).
An MBA used to say you were a pretty smart person, now it says you are a person with an MBA. A doctrate and even Bachelors degree where the same, now they are necessary but almost meaningless.
And I'll end by tying back to my leadership pyramid of doom. Why do so many people want to go to university? Why do so many people want good jobs? What are their dreams? Some people the answer to the last questions makes the first two obvious, they dream big, have ambitions, want to change the world, contribute to human development and make the world a better place, they want more resources to use, they want a lever by which to move the very earth. Good on them, that is precisely why you should, not just want to go to Uni, but want to learn constantly. Some people I know never completed Uni but in my estimation are so far by no means impeaded in their dream of changing the globe.
But some people just don't want to be left behind, or want to be rich. Have a nice house. They infact are really just mindless consumers. People who will later want a promotion for more money whether they like the job or not, would be good at it or not and unfortunately too often get the job for sheer brutal lack of dreamers.
Most people want to jump on the bandwagon but don't know why, or don't care where it is headed. Simply because people, love to be on the bandwagon.