During our second segment of GrokTALK! this morning, we talked with Robin Eubanks: “author of Credentialed to Destroy — Robin S. Eubanks — calls in to update us on state and globally directed education”reform,” what they call competency based education.” We discussed how the impending curriculum of Common Core and newest iteration of CBE really stems from the philosophy of Progressive John Dewey back around 1890s/1900s. That people existed to be “cogs in the machine of society” and education was should to be designed to turn out compliant worker-bees.
Robin, and Grokster Mike, emphasized that such “education” will cut out the heart of the American economy – that “creative destruction” via innovation by those relative few that have the “bright ideas” that drive new products and industries (which history has shown has created a vastly higher standard of living than ever contemplated under planned economies). The question that must be faced from the “new education” is this: if people are trained to be “compliant,” where will the striving be that is such a large component of innovation? What happens to the “few strivers” when striving and risk taking is bred out of us? The discussion of “the few” immediately brought this Robert Heinlein quote to mind (as GraniteGrok is, in part, named from a word from Heinlein best seller “Stranger in a Strange Land” – Grok):
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
