Yup. You guessed it. I am going to link to a TED talk then talk about education.

This is a particularly wonderful speaker named Sir Ken Robinson, and he calls for a revolution.

Isn’t he delightful? Charming, funny, self-effacing, and adorably British.

Oh, and wise. Very very wise.

And I agree with him. A revolution in education is needed. I have resisted the word revolution for a long time due to my inherent bias towards the moderate, and instead have called myself a reformer.

But there comes a time when you have to take a good hard look at your plans for the world and realize that, whether or not you think of them as revolutionary, everybody else will.

There is only so far you can reform something before it becomes, and requires, a de facto revolution. So be it. Call me a reluctant revolutionary.

Before I get into the meat of what I plan to discuss tonight, I just have to note that amazing quote about the folly of linear education : “A three year old is not half of a six year old”.

When I heard that, it felt like the top of my skull flew off, that’s how much it blew my mind. That is such a perfect way of putting it that I feel like it should be written above the doors of every school and across the ceiling of every schoolroom.

But what I really want to talk about tonight stems from his story about the fireman who was humiliated by his teacher for wanting to be a fireman, and told that it would be “throwing his life away” to pursue that choice of career.

When I heard that, I suddenly realized that the entire school system is geared towards creating and catering to exactly one kind of person, those proficient in the forms of abstract reasoning that we have chosen to call “intelligence”.

Everything else is given short shrift. The teachers are all academically gifted people who went to college and got degrees, and they rather myopically think that this is the only truly worthy path, and that anything else is, as best, a consolation prize for those who are not quite good enough, and at worse, suitable only for worthless people with poor grades doomed to the horrors of working in “the trades”.

The firefighter story illustrates this perfectly. There are few more noble callings in the world than that of the firefighter, but purely because it does not require a college education, that evil-minded teacher told a young person full of hope that this was just plain not good enough.

And how do teachers rate themselves? And how do schools rate teachers? By how many of their students go on to college. That is the ultimate goal of all education, it seems. Feeding students into the college system as fast as we can.

This despite the fact that everybody knows that degrees are increasingly worst than worthless, because they do not get you a job but they do get you into a massive amount of debt.

That is bad enough, but what is worse is the way the whole system turns up its nose at anything that does not lead to or require a college degree.

The sort of abstract reasoning abilities that I and others possess that makes us, in the current system “academically gifted” is just one form of intelligence. There are many others, and they are all just as valid and just as meaningful to society, if not more so.

After all, it could be argued that a full trained and licensed plumber is of more use to society than yet another minimum wage worker with a Bachelor of Arts in English.

Clearly, there is intense snobbery of an aristocratic (almost Platonic) mien embedded very deeply in the education system widely used in the modern world today. Careers that involve working with your mind are encouraged. Ones that involve working with your hands are frowned upon.

The result : a system that tells the (at least) two-thirds of its student who are not blessed with a natural flair for memory and abstract reasoning that people like me possess that they are worthless and unimportant and not worth spending time and effort on.

And I have seen this in action. Teachers like dealing with the gifted kids because we are more like them and they can relate to us. Fine. But we are not the only ones getting the message. One heavy sigh before dealing with a struggling student can crush a child’s spirit for life. One look of apprehension and fear in a teacher’s eyes when she looks upon the rougher looking students tells them all they need to know about how society views them.

And don’t think the average and struggling kids do not notice how the teacher lights right up when they are dealing with the bright kids. Suddenly it’s all smiles, kindness, and patience. What do the other kids get? Frowns, defensiveness, and dismissiveness.

We fool ourselves into thinking that we are a classless society because the classes are no longer enforced by law or custom.

But the real lesson in class happens in the classroom. That is when kids are told what they are worth, and where they belong. Where they sit in the pecking order of life.

And all because we are all caught up in this antiquated idea that getting into college for a child is success and all else is failure.

As Sir Ken says, college is not for everyone. For many people, like I said, college turns out to be worse than useless, and it can truly be said that they would have been far better off going to a vocational school that taught them exactly what they needed to know for the career they have chosen, and saved a lot of time, energy, and money.

Part of our revolution in education has to be a concentrated and serious effort to wipe this kind of snobbery out of the education system.

A teacher should be just as happy that a student went on to be a plumber (or a firefighter) or even just manager of a 7-11, if that is what makes them happy.

That should be the only metric for educational success : happiness.

Now isn’t that a revolutionary thought?