Government School Mea Culpa

Alternative schools are a tacit admission by the government-run schools that they are not equipped to deal with anything beyond three sigma. For those of you who are statistically challenged, that would be three standard deviations, or about 99% of the population. It is a dishonest admission, since the government-run school are ill-equipped to handle anything outside one sigma as any cursory glance at statistics on the outcome of a "public" education will demonstrate. In layman's terms, it means the government schools must teach to the lowest common denominator.

The requirement for government-run schools to target the lowest common denominator is evidence of a conceptual error. The fact that these systems fail even at targeting the lowest common denominator and must, therefore, create an "alternative" is evidence enough of a grave error in execution. That the "public" schools cannot adequately serve the public is simply ironic.

When we mix in that the political and social entities who control the public schools have no interest in education, but in indoctrination, the requirement for those who have more individualistic tendencies to be educated outside the system is not at all surprising.

Association is not the issue, nor is it the eligibility of candidates for the alternative school mixing into the mainstream population. The issue is that public education must be all-inclusive because it is funded by the tax dollars of everyone from the highest to the lowest. It is for this reason alone that it is doomed to failure. Education occurs on an individual basis. All the education "theorists" can speculate on programs and methods to teach to the group, but in the end, they will amount to nothing more than lowering the bar to a level that three sigma can jump over it.