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| The secret
heart of learning |
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But in school examinations students
using the same common sense techniques for excellence would be disqualified for cheating.
We stress that we are NOT opposed to evaluations and
qualifications. Far from it. In our view, most school achievement standards are absurdly
low.
A 20 percent product failure rate in any business,
anywhere in the world, would be regarded as a financial disaster.* Schools are the only
organizations to regard that result as a success.
 More than half of America's young
people "leave school without the knowledge or foundation required to find and hold a
good job", says the SCANS** report on What Work Requires of Schools.1
If you're an American reader, please stop and read that last sentence again - and weep for
the future of half the children of the world's richest nation who can move out of a school
system unfit to find a decent job.
"These young people will pay a
very high price. They face the bleak prospects of dead-end work interrupted only by
periods of unemployment" - from the same report.
"SCANS estimates that less than
half of all young adults have achieved these (required) reading and writing minimums; even
fewer can handle the mathematics; and schools today only indirectly address listening and
speaking skills."
"Britain's workforce is
under-educated, under-trained and under-qualified," says a major similar study by Sir
Christopher Ball, entitled More Means Different.2
Forty-seven percent of potential
British employees in industry are unable to meet the skill needs required, Ball reports.
If you're a British reader, please stop and read that sentence again - and weep.
The economic results are bad enough. But even worse,
the angry human rejects of this crazy system often wear their rejection-slips as
* The only business
exception we know to this rule: the production of silicon chips. As each of these can be
mass-produced for a few cents, some companies plan fora higher reject rate as the
trade-off for speedy production. But they then test every chip to make sure that it works
perfectly as the brain of the multi-thousand-dollar computer it will operate.
** The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills,
commissioned by the U.S. Secretary of Labor under the former President Bush's America 2000
Program.
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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