Another Reason Why Public Schools Suck

Every time I hear somebody talking up the importance of public education in the United States I scoff. It's not that I believe education isn't important, I do. But education and propaganda are different things. Our public school systems in the United States focus too much on propaganda and not enough on education. Take this example:

Listen up children: Cheating on your homework or cribbing notes from another student is bad, but not as bad as sharing a music track with a friend, or otherwise depriving the content-industry of its well-earned profits.

That’s one of the messages in a new-school curriculum being developed with the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the nation’s top ISPs, in a pilot project to be tested in California elementary schools later this year.

A near-final draft of the curriculum, obtained by WIRED, shows that it comes in different flavors for every grade from kindergarten through sixth, to keep pace with your developing child’s ability to understand that copying is theft, period.

Let me get this straight. Schools can't find time to fit in classes on computer security, which is valuable knowledge now that computers are so pervasive. But schools can find time to shove intellectual property propaganda written by the Movie Picture Association of America (MPAA) down the throats of our children. It would be one thing if the program involved teaching students what intellectual property is and debating the finer points of those laws. Reading through the material posted in the article, specifically the propaganda aimed at sixth-graders [PDF], it's easy to see that critical thinking isn't part of this curriculum. Instead teachers are supposed to equate violating intellectual property to cheating on a test and students are supposed to just accept that.

Public schools primarily revolve around authority. Teachers tell students what to believe and students are graded on what they're supposed to believe. Critical thinking it's the primary consideration. In fact critical thinking is more often stomped down than not. This is one of the many reasons I don't support public schools. I want students to learn not regurgitate whatever information was dictated to them by an authority figure.