Some great quotes on education

I ran across an interesting post from Seth Godin, who I know nothing about, regarding our educational system, Back to (the wrong) school. It has several great quotes:

Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
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If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

I imagine that Seth is approaching this topic with a different worldview than I am but I agree with many of his points. I made a similar argument a few posts ago, Why do we still educate our kids like we did in the 50’s? I think the underlying issue is that the public education system was never really intended to create a well educated populace, it was created to produce a pliable workforce with a basic education and today the public "education" system serves a two-fold purpose: providing tax-payer funded daycare for kids so parents can work outside of the home and providing a source of union jobs for kids with education degrees.

Even if we didn't choose to homeschool our kids because of our faith, there is still a very compelling case for home education based on the nature and results of public education. Certainly lots of kids are quite successful in life after going to public schools but I would say that is in spite of public education, not because of it. With the overwhelming numbers of high school graduates continuing on to a four year degree regardless of ability or aptitude, public schools have become little more than a holding pen for kids until they can go to college. For what we spend on public schools, we certainly should expect more.