There is something called an ‘elimination diet,’ which people use to find out what foods their bodies have trouble processing. You start by cutting out everything but one food — typically beef, because you can stay healthy indefinitely eating just beef. It’s boring but sustainable.
If a problem is diet-related, it should clear up. (If it doesn’t clear up, either you have a problem with beef, which is unusual, or your problem isn’t caused by your diet.)
At this point, you slowly start adding other foods to your diet, watching for the effects they have on you.
If a problem occurs when you add a food — for example, if adding gluten leads to bloating or joint pain — you know to stay away from that food.
What makes this work is that you don’t approach your problems by trying to cut things from your diet. There’s too much going on in a typical diet to figure out which foods might be causing which reactions.
You have to start at the ground and build up. It’s essentially a variation on the scientific method. You vary one thing at a time over here and see what variations result over there.
This is exactly what we should be doing with schools.
How would that look?
We would start by teaching reading and only reading. That’s because reading is the educational equivalent of beef.
That is, if you’ve learned to read, you can read about how to learn anything else — including how to read better and how to write. Reading is, in that sense, a complete skill in the same sense that beef is a complete food.
Once we get close to 100% of the kids reading at grade level, then we would start adding in other things — but only so long as we see improvements in the things that we have designated as ‘essential.’
And by essential — as opposed to elective — I mean reading, writing, reasoning (logical, mathematical, scientific, and statistical), and whatever else is important enough that everybody needs to learn it.
(Does everyone need to learn calculus, or French, or welding, or forestry? If not, then they aren’t essential, are they?)
Of course, there’s a slight head fake going on here. In a system in which all the students can read, ‘adding in’ a new academic subject merely requires (1) providing suggestions about what the students should be reading, and (2) testing to see that they’ve actually learned what they’re supposed to.
Without the need to hire teachers to read the textbooks to the students, the marginal cost of adding an academic subject to such a system is close to zero.
If we add an academic subject (Elizabethan literature or Excel), or an extra-curricular activity (football or band), and there’s no improvement in the things we’re tracking (literacy, numeracy, reasoning), then we take them back out again.
They are the public school equivalents of high-fructose corn syrup, making budgets fatter without making education any better.
Of course, there is a simpler way to accomplish the same thing, which is just to prohibit a school from offering electives (non-literacy classes, sports, other extra-curricular activities) unless 95% of its students are reading at or above grade level. That could be done with a one-line addition to the rules at the Department of Education.
This would, however, punish students who are reading at proficiency.
Fortunately, there’s a way around that, which is to allow schools to offer electives but only as self-study courses. The school’s only responsibility would be to assign graduation credit to a student who passes a particular test. The students themselves would be responsible for learning the material — which they’ll only be able to do if they’ve learned to read with fluency and comprehension.
Another head fake. See how, when you teach kids to read, so many things that seem like problems just take care of themselves? (And how, when you don’t, everything else spirals out of control?)
One final benefit of putting schools on an elimination diet is that as students take charge of their own learning, they can learn anywhere, at any time. So there’s no reason to keep them locked up during normal business hours.
Which would be an excellent first step towards disentangling ‘education’ from ‘daycare.’
One way to think about the Elimination Diet for Schools™ is that it implements Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s observation that perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Which is what we should be aiming for with any institution that is funded by taking money away from people who would prefer to use it for something else.
