Here's a topic I don't often hear Libertarians talk about much, but having grown up in a public education system and survived it, I can be sure to say that most of it was a big fucking waste of time mostly spend enduring abuse from my peers that the teachers and authority figures ignored.
Perhaps the most useful time I spent was during the elementary years (excluding mandatory pledge recital, of course), but between that time and college, I felt that I really learned hardly anything at all. College laid a good foundation for my career, but it wasn't until I went to a professional school and began to work as a professional that I really learned what I needed to know. So why was I forced to go through all that bullshit and torment back in junior high and high school? I could have been working at a low level job or been given the opportunity for individualized study so that I could teach myself to learn on my own buy learning about the things that interested me the most.
But even more advanced classes have the same problem of teaching irrelevant junk. I'm a medical technologist who works in a laboratory that tests people's serum and plasma for various metabolites, yet I've never once used that citrate (Kreb's) cycle in my entire career. If I'm not going to work with it, why learn about it? If my Biochemistry class actually did experiments involving the Citrate Cycle, I could see some reason in its memorization, but otherwise what would be the point? It might also be useful if I became a pharmaceutical researcher, but then I'd be working with lots of different pathways all the time, and would have no trouble memorizing them since they would be relevant to what I was doing.
This very basic principle of relevance being important to learning is totally lost in our education system. It seems clear to me that the education system isn't about teaching us to be citizens, but useful drones frequently called "consumers", beating into submission to authority figures, sometimes literally. It would seem that the eleite members of society see us as nothing more then monkeys that are only useful when well trained.
From what I've been reading, it would appear that our system of forced public schooling dates back the 1800's in Prussian Germany, making it antiquated. It would, in fact, seem that this German connection provides a common ancestor between the Pledge of Allegiance and the Hitler Salute. Prior to World War 2, students extended their arm to the flag, rather then hold their hand over their heart, often palm down just like when Germans said "Sieg Heil!" Hum... Maybe it was the Republicans who would extend their hand palm down because they want to control everybody, and the Democrats extended their hand palm up because they wanted a hand out... Or maybe not.
Anyway, the whole point of the Prussian system was apparently to create a obedient citizens with a strong sense of nationalism and a broken will so that they could be more easily controlled. If anybody ever wondered why the average citizen seems like an idiot who is easily swayed by emotional appeals, this is largely the reason why.
Their is one very informative man I have found on YouTube named "John Taylor Gatto", who seems to have a very knowledgeable understanding of this entire education disaster. He doesn't have his own channel as far as I can tell, but videos of him have been posted on YouTube all over the place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz9_o76zYQ8
I also found a documentary called Century of the Self, which is about how psychologists, large corporations and the government had worked together to effectively control representative democracy through marketing. In other words, the elites figured out how to use mass media to tell us what to vote for by appealing to our fears and inner most desires. Once again, they figured out we were nothing more then monkeys and used that knowledge against us.
Happiness Machines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dA89CBBOC0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awO2gvQSJRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGwjI73Fmg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3f0FMlLkh0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUeJjhNi4bk
The Engineering of Consent
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9RfanOEpA0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cAOwhb33tM (Here is where Anna Freud's influence takes hold of children.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCIg0I4AoPE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI3CZcRpog8 (Bernays actually made fake news agencies to make press releases. This is also more proof that we are nothing but an empire that topples governments we don't like. That's a younger Nixon at 7:35 in Guatamala in 1955.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVjL-GMp8WY (Use of LSD and shock therapy to deprogram people, and then attempt to reprogram them. Memory loss was successful, but the reprogramming was a failure.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRUy0hNlVXY
There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzE9ocIGVlQ (Book Burning by court order.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2VtKHIYKPM (Try blue, it's the new "red".) (Note the US solders looking remarkably like those from Crysis or Jin-Roh. Nobody ever talks about Kent State or the 1968 Democratic National Convetion.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdnyY2xNcA8 (Apparently telling nuns they are free to be themselves turns them into lesbians or individuals who reject religious life.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPFFSRoBqhc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNBXfo8TFGs (How to make money on the new individual with lifestyle marketing. In other words, get people to express themselves with superficial vanity rather than expressing themselves intellectually or artistically. In other words, we have been trained by business to express ourselves with what they sell us, not by what we create ourselves. Its empty and soulless. No wonder so many people are depressed. It's an artificial self expression that anybody can buy. This is not how the human brain or its psychology evolved. That is why it fails to satisfy anybody.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3dqvg1T1L8 (Using lifestyle marketing to win votes.)
Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1VJrp0IvPs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cuG_Dp2Gqk (The 80's and 90's individual was so superficial as portrayed in this segment. It also mentions how corporations control the media.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBQ0rlKrVvk (And so the individual consumer had learned to demand from government the same things they learned to demand from corporations in return for their taxes.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtbY3xzRkRc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNxq4OZXUVM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Tdwg9YHTlw (And so ends the journey of reason's mass destruction. Oh, the irony of the elite quietly managing society because it is a construct of irrational humans, when they themselves are irrational humans!)
It is "There is" not "Their is".
Or was that just another way of pointing out how public schools suck? :-*
You have no idea.
Check out Stefan Molyneux's youtube videos on "The Death of the West" the one on the 19th century (should be the second one in the series).
He points out that, in the 1800s before the state starting taking control of education, not only was it world class, but a year of primary school only cost $45 (in 1999 dollars!), and it only took about 5 years of it, as opposed to 13+ years to get functionally literate students.
Or that a degree at Yale (tuition) would only cost you about $1680/year -- in today's dollars according to Peter Schiff.
And yes, what you're talking about is definitely the Prussian model of education.
It was implemented to improve their military. And it worked. Then many other states starting using it, and got improved militaries too, offsetting the benefits (obviously they still use it).
Also, I imagine those folks are only able to control the media because of government.
Take away the government cartel of the media (with inflated profits of 46% and more; source: ShaneDK), e.g. FCC, and others and that might help.
Also, abolishing the state in education would make people far less susceptible to that crap latter in life.
Be sure to also remember that corporations are a legal entity created by the state.
And yes, Libertarians do not talk about this enough, hell, I hardly hear a fucking PEEP out of anyone besides the anarchists and Peter Schiff when it comes to college education.
Also, what you said about your experience reminds me of when I asked one of my engineering professors why do we need to go through a bunch of hoops learning stuff we'll probably never ever use on the job, and why not just let us work our way up.
His response?
That people don't want to hire anyone who isn't "responsible enough" to go through the training of 4 years of education.
Now where have we heard THIS before?
"Well, the reason we need to give doctors 10+ years of training they'll never need to because no one in their right mind would EVER want to have a doctor with anything less"...
Right...
I don't know about you, but I smell bullshit.
That thing with the doctors reminds of those people with a doctor's practice that never got a diploma from a med school and only were found out after 10 years when someone checked if they were registerd. Of course they went to jail because of fraud ignoring the fact that nobody they treat actually got harmed by them.