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My Theory of Education
Back in the day, kids learned all the skills and lessons of life from their parents, and from other adults and other kids in the troop or village or clan.
If you were a girl, you learned everything you needed in life from your mother and maybe the skilled seamstresses and weavers nearby.
But then, experts agreed, that wasn’t enough. Young people needed to learn stuff that their parents or neighbors couldn’t teach them.
Grok says that:
Formal schooling began as training for scribes, not as education for everyone. Learning itself is far older: families, apprenticeships, and oral tradition taught skills long before anyone sat in a classroom. What was new was an institution whose job was to teach reading, writing, and the knowledge needed to run a state.
It all got started in Mesopotamia in about 3,000 BC.
Students copied signs, word lists, math, model letters and contracts, then literary texts. Graduates became the administrators of the first complex states.
Modern compulsory schooling started in Prussia in 1717 under Frederick William IV and then Frederick the Great.
That model—graded classes, trained teachers, a set curriculum, attendance enforced by the state—spread through Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century and became the template for modern public education.
As far as I know, I learned to read and write at a private “nursery school” in England, starting at age 4. But my mother read books to me and my sister from an early age, in particular the railway books immortalized as Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s possible I learned rudimentary reading before I went to school.
I suppose that in the early modern period, rich kids were schooled by “governesses” and “tutors,” and lower class kids in “dame schools.” It was about what parents could afford. Those that could afford it sent their kids to private schools. In England the “public schools” were set up by medieval guilds. I went to Oundle School that was set up by the Worshipful Company of Grocers by 1556. Then there was religion. The Irish in the US set up the Catholic school system because the public school system set up by Horace Mann was New England Protestant and Unitarian.
But why send kids to school instead of to work? In the old days, most kids went to work. Grok:
In agrarian societies that was often on the family farm; in early industrial cities it was mills, mines, street trades, and domestic service.
But why send kids to school instead of to work? Return on investment.
As factories, offices, and technical trades spread, the return to literacy, numeracy, and general cognitive skill rose, while the relative value of a 10-year-old’s manual output fell.
…
Education is human-capital investment. A year of schooling, in a wide range of countries and eras, raises later earnings on the order of roughly 8–10 percent, with larger gains where baseline schooling is low. Those gains compound: literate workers learn new tasks faster, make fewer costly errors, and can move into jobs that did not exist when they were children.
Presumably that 8-10 percent earnings gain assumes a school that actually teaches kids useful stuff.
It’s interesting to me that schools have always seemed to have a single-teacher many-students model. Obviously that is partly affordability, and partly discipline. In my day, textbooks were owned by the school and were recycled for reuse by the next year’s students. Today, especially in college, textbooks are a revenue stream for academics.
Today we have home schools and micro schools. And it’s interesting that if you go to a Barnes & Noble bookstore they have a whole section devoted to homeschooling. Are micro schools and homeschooling competitive with government schools?
But now we come to the inflection point. From The Wall Street Journal:
AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning.
According to Grok that comes from “Kestin, Miller, Klales, Milbourne, and Ponti, “AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning: an RCT introducing a novel research-based design in an authentic educational setting,” Scientific Reports 15, 17458 (3 June 2025).”
Look, I know enough about technological revolutions to know that, at this stage of the AI revolution, we don’t have a clue what is coming.
But obviously, if researchers are telling us that “AI tutoring outperforms in-class active learning” then the only thing we know is that “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”
In the last year I have started using Grok to either confirm what I already knew or research a subject for me. In this piece I did both. I did not know, for instance, that education is needed for any children not growing up to work on the family farm, and there is a return on investment in schooling (except for the kind of in-city government school where Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter).
Was I cheating? Or is this just the Way We Do Things?
Anyway, it is clear that all teachers, pre-K thru grad school, should be researching the experience of the buggy-whip makers after the invention of the automobile.
| Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:43:03 GMT |
The US Owns the Future
I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff on Rod Martin’s Substack and he’s got some pretty radical stuff, as in
China is toast. “China will lose 75 percent of its population over the next 75 years: it will actually be smaller than the United States.”
Russia is a mess. “Russia has lost the war in Ukraine”. How yer doin’ Vlad?
Of course then there is Europe. Shall we just say that Europe has lost the plot, as the Brits say. Their Muslim immigration is way bigger than ours, and their rulers just don’t seem to get it. Just like our Deep State.
I keep getting election-related X-posts from the Warrens and the Jayapals of the world.
TODAY: New SNAP cuts are kicking in because of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
5 million people have already lost food assistance, including 1.5 million+ kids since the bill was enacted.
No kid deserves to go hungry so Trump can give his billionaire buddies another tax handout.
The horror!
I just released my framework for a new comprehensive way we can regulate AI and rein in Big Tech.
Here’s how it would work.
Jayapal is pushing a National AI Charter Act.
Know what, Rep. Jayapal? I don’t want you within a country mile of regulating AI. You know The Science, of course, developed by Scientist George Stigler in 1971:
public regulatory agencies eventually serve the private commercial or political interests of the industries they oversee rather than the public interest.
Experts call it “regulatory capture.” You do know The Science, Congresswoman? Aides and Staffers? Bueller? Anyone?
Know what I want, Rep. Jayapal? I want the AI companies to be totally liable for any damage done by AI. And maybe they should get insurance. Or maybe Peter Thiel should get all the tech lords together and make their fortunes available to help ordinary people in case AI goes west.
Back to Rod Martin. He has a piece out today, “The Future is Underpriced”, predicting the future being built for us by Elon Musk.
Thousands of Starships mean ubiquitous, cheap, regular travel between continents in less than an hour. They’ll also enable the deployment of whole armies around the world in that same short time.
Not to mention emergency supplies in case of earthquakes.
Starship lowers the cost of Starlink and increases [SpaceX] profits. Orbital data centers create enormous demand for launch, power, communications, and maintenance. Lunar infrastructure supplies mass and materials. In-space manufacturing creates more valuable things in space. Mars settlement—not bases, cities—becomes just the inevitable next step in a rapidly expanding economy.
Don’t forget that we make be talking about transport costs of $5 per pound from Starship.
Then there is Tesla and its Optimus robot. If you combined Tesla and SpaceX and X-AI, well,
A combined company would not merely own pieces of the future. It would own the stack: launch, satellites, autonomy, robotics, batteries, solar, AI, communications, vehicles, orbital infrastructure, and eventually the infrastructure of off-world mining, manufacturing, and settlement. That’s not a conglomerate: It’s the operating system for the next era.
Yep. I get the opposition of our lefty and Democratic friends. Their dominatory and hegemonic power is based on taxing and regulating the products of the last five technological revolutions, from machine textiles to electricity to media to the internet. Imagine if they lose control! Oh, the Horror!
And by the way, how does religion and culture and politics and power work when humans get off-planet. Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does either, any better than all the sci-fi writers of the last century.
But I do think this. Our liberal friends got to dominate the post-agricultural world: not, I suggest, from exellence, but just from being in the right place at the right time. The time for feudal lords and absolute monarchs was over, and the era of top-down hegemony took its place. And despite all the politicians and dictators and administrators and activists, we still got to live in suburbs and See the USA in a Chevrolet and do free video calls with relatives on the other side of the world.
What will the future be like? Best thing is to admit that we don’t have a clue.
| Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:27:30 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Rules of Engagement: The enemy must be destroyed — William Hall
There is no such thing as justice, only injustice.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic:
