Schools as we know them are growing obsolete.

I am an old man and wanted to find a few things out about the Panama Canal. I went straight to the laptop and Googled around and inside of a few minutes I found out what I wanted to know.

Bingo! The information was there and I had it in a couple of minutes.

It occurred to me that had I not had the laptop I would have spend days searching through the library and I likely would not have gotten half of the information I got on line.

It's a new world out there and I admit I am late in discovering it.

As I sit here as an old man looking back on twelve long years spent in a thing called school I figure that the only thing I really needed from it was to learn to read and write. Once I grasped that I could have self-taught myself everything I needed to know.

Actually most of what I need to know did come from self teaching but I somewhat digress.

Fact remains that if you take a reasonably intelligent kid, teach him to read, write and learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide and his necessary education is complete with one exception. You teach the kid how to log on to a computer and turn him or her loose.

A while ago I saw a kid that never finished high school go on line and figure out what dimension of lumber he needed to use for joisting in his home remodel. If I recall he told me that the table said that he could safely use 2x8s and that in the interest of overkill he has opted to use 2x10s which made sense to me. It will make his floor a bit stiffer and that's a good thing.

Still, even though this is a simple example, the young man became his own engineer which probably would have taken him hours to figure out in an old fashioned library.

I can actually see a young person with a computer getting into medicine as an MD with a minimum of classroom time. I will admit that there is a lot of hands on stuff one needs to know to practice medicine but the necessary classroom time could be dropped to an awful lot less than it is now. One could enter the hands on schooling easily with the basic academic stuff already under his belt.

Schools as we know them are getting to be pretty obsolete. A kid really doesn't need a full twelve years of boring classroom bull$hit under his belt to be able to embark on a career. It is a case of not having to have the answers as opposed to knowing where to find them in short order.

Over the years I have taken a couple of on-line courses of varying types. My ham radio license course was a case of simply learning how to pass a reasonably simple test. Actually the course was more of a 'cheat sheet' that simply gave me the answers and grilled me until I could easily pass the tests. After I was licensed it was my responsibility to behave myself on the air and obey the FCC rules and regulations.

On the other hand I took a pretty good computer course that lead me to getting an upgrade on my document. It wasn't a cheat sheet but an actual learning experience that actually taught me what I needed to know to pass a test administered by the Coast Guard.

I entered that test not knowing what the questions were going to be and had the knowledge under my belt to answer the questions about the rules and regulations and to be able to figure out the answers to the hands on part. I did well but had I not studied I'm sure I would have failed. In short I actually learned something.

I admit I do have a real craw in my throat as far as school teachers go. Most of them are useless and even back in my day most of the teachers I had were useless. There is a liberal classmate I had that I agree with when he describes the education we got in high school as a travesty. It really was. We graduated and had the ability to do nothing except go on to college where we would be given more of a dubious education my leftists with an agenda.

I sometimes think the only one that got out of school able to do anything was the guy that (intentionally) got kicked out of school and got shipped off to the local Vo-Tech which was then looked down upon. 

I didn't like the kid much back in the day but he sure fooled me. A few years back I heard he had a body and fender shop near my nephews so I wandered in with a curious attitude. I wanted to see how the kid that got kicked out was doing. I suppose it was a small bit of arrogance on my part.

The arrogance left as soon as I parked in the driveway and when I wandered in I was surprised to find a fairly state of the art small business run by a highly skilled tradesman that knew what he was doing. My attitude changed instantly and now he's a pretty good well respected friend of mine. He damned well knew what he was doing when he got booted out of school. At the Vo-tech he settled down and learned a solid trade and actually opened the business three years after graduation!

While many of his former classmates were still in college he was out in the real world standing up at the plate and duking it out in the business world and battling with the car insurance companies that were (and probably still are) constantly trying to screw him. There's a lot to be said for the education he received at the Vo-Tech.

The educational system needs a lot of change and I do believe the first step is to rid itself of a lot of piss poor educators out there that are only interested in pay raises, pensions and the like and bringing a lot of it down to flat basics. This probably means most of them.

Ya gotta love the military. They take the kids, many of which can barely read or write that have spent twelve years wasting away learning little or nothing and they teach those same semi-literate kids an entry level trade in about three months. Actually they take six months or so and turn the kid into a soldier, sailor, airman or marine in about three months and additionally give him a trade in another three.

It should be carefully noted that their teachers for the most part entered the service with a high school education and in some cases a GED. Yet they manage to teach them more in three months than many of them learned in twelve years. Ain't no teaching degree required in the service to run a classroom. These are experienced NCOs that the service simply tells then that they are now teachers and are assigned to teach their area of expertise. It's incredible how well the system works.

Yet meanwhile back at Suburbia High, the teachers there are telling everyone how special they are because they teach as they threaten to go out on strike even though they graduate students that can barely read and write if they are lucky.

Of course at Fort Sill the NCOs there are taking the piss poor product of out high schools and are teaching these youngsters to become artillery surveyors which includes geometry, spherical trig and the basics of celestial navigation. Other young people are in the Fire Direction Control section learning the incredible pile of math required to score a first round hit on an enemy target.

Others that are not as mathematically talented learn the mechanical skills of running a howitzer and taking the required information given to them in order to score a first round hit. That covers a lot more ground than most people think. It includes air density, the rate of twist of the cannon and even the number of previous rounds fired from the specific cannon because of tube wear. 

The math required to fire accurately would floor most people. Yet the services can teach a youngster that in a pretty short time. I do know that back in my day trainees were required to do most of this in longhand. Please to refresh your memory that I said earlier that the teachers in service schools are for the most part simple HS grads.

Still, all in all a person that can read, write and basically cipher can go a long way without sitting in a classroom if said person is willing to apply themselves in front of a computer or otherwise self study or learn on the job.

The educational system as we know it is carrying an awful lot of junk with it. Most of it ought to be scrapped and replaced.

They ought to take a youngster and teach him the basics in grades one through six or maybe eight and after that give the kid the option of independent study with periodic reviews.

If it becomes clear that the person is incapable if independent study it's back to the Old School classroom and the usual sad, sorry crap of trying to instill an education into him or her.

Of course with that as a motivator it's a fairly safe bet that the number of kids in the classroom is going to be pretty small except for a number of youngsters that will probably are too lazy or unmotivated to be able to self-study.

Also the shops, wood and metal should be open in order to teach those interested in the trades and should be open to those that just want to drop in to learn something specific or just even tinker with something. 

When I keep saying that schools ought to teach people to do things there should also be courses that teach real life skills. Some of this could be on line but another part of it should be hands on.

There is no reason a kid should leave high school without being able to cook a meal, change a tire, balance a checkbook or keep track of a credit card's expenses and be taught to responsibly use credit. These are practical life skills and should be taught.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The quote above is from Robert A. Heinlein and says an awful lot. Incidentally I just programmed this computer. I installed Windows 10 into it. Pretty neat, huh?

Of course schools don't teach a lot of this these days. I suppose there really isn't a need to teach a kid how to invade Estemenia but the point is that they should be capable individuals instead of the ignoramuses they have produced for so long. Even in my day they did a poor job of teaching a whole lot.

Even Driver's Ed is weak. They don't even teach a student how to change a tire and driving a manual transmission is out of the question. It was like that in my day and likely hasn't changed in the past fifty years.  

As for so-called 'guidance counselors'? Another joke. About once or twice a year they used to call me in and give me a short lecture about how I should try a little harder to get better grades so I could get into college.

THAT was a waste of time. She was simply trying to steer me to college. No ands, ifs or buts. Straight to college.

What they SHOULD be doing is taking a look at the person's talents and interests and helping them plot or at least consider a sensible course. I will admit here that the parents get in the way with their 'My kid's going to COLLEGE' attitude. Still, that is what guidance counselors should be doing.

Incidentally even back then I never mentioned my dad was teaching me celestial navigation at the kitchen table to my guidance counselor. I was afraid even then that she'd say something to dad and that would put the kibosh on things. Teachers HATE competition.

One thing nobody in education should be doing is getting involved in a student's sexuality. Any educator that even hints at suggesting that a kid transgenders should be take in out and branded with a big 'P' on their forehead for pervert. Let nature run its course and let the kid figure it out on their own. When I found myself checking out the rack of a precocious classmate I knew which direction I was headed. Nature ran its own course. It'll generally run its own course for everyone else, too if you let it.

Granted, many career choices need various degrees. Many do not. Schools should recognize that instead of steering kids straight to college. 

Still, I feel the entire educational system needs a serious overhaul and the teacher's unions should be told to either be told to start producing competent people or simply be locked out permanently.

We used to have the best educational system in the world. We have sent people to the moon and back and there's no reason we can't be number one again.

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY