1.  "Why Johnny Is A Bored Ignoramus"
by William Stone, III 
Exclusive to TLE

It's late May. The kids are out of school, the last spring soccer games
have been played, and it's time for the highly-anticipated (and
simultaneously dreaded) event of the season: the annual dance recital.

As long as my seven-year-old daughter can remember, she's wanted to be a
dancer. The first time my family attended a Sioux City Explorers
http://www.xsbaseball.com> game, one of the between-inning
entertainers was a tap-dancer from Sandy Keene's School of Dance. Having
visited Disney World http://www.disneyworld.com>, my daughter (three
at the time) was conditioned to believe that a performer in a costume was a
celebrity. Following the performance, she nearly tackled the hapless
teenager, smothered her in a hug, and left the bemused dancer to wonder
what in the world she'd done to deserve it. A year later, my daughter was
attending dance school, and the teenager was one of Sandy's assistants.

My daughter's gone from a single class (pre-ballet), to four classes next
year: ballet, tap, drill team, and baton. She attends dance competitions
and wins awards with her drill team.

Last Saturday night, Sandy Keene celebrated her thirtieth year as a dance
teacher. Sandy has a large number of students around the Sioux City, Iowa
metro area. Consequently, the venue is a large auditorium at a local
college, the dress rehearsal lasts all day, and the recital itself is
around four hours long.

Nor does she make it easy on parents: most dancers are in more than one
class, and the numbers are staggered to make it virtually impossible to
leave early. If they weren't, there'd be no audience by the end of the
show. Parents are a selfish lot: we'll gush at our own children as they
stumble around the stage, but watching others do it is stultifyingly
boring.

My daughter has some innate talent for dance. You can spot the talented
kids pretty easily: they're the ones who don't have to be looking at the
other dancers out of the corners of their eyes in order to get the steps
right. If you put them onstage alone, they could perform unassisted.

In all of Sandy's student body, there's one child you can point to and say,
"There's a born performer." He's around ten and reminds you of a
young (white) Michael Jackson: very talented, obviously enjoying himself,
and has a natural rapport with the audience. He's clearly the next Fred
Astaire or Mikhail Baryshnikov, depending on which direction he happens to
want to go.

By comparison, my daughter's goals are simple: she wants to take over
Sandy's studio when Sandy retires. She plans to remain with Sandy
indefinitely, get hired as one of the assistant teachers (something she can
do as early as 12 or 13), go to college to major in Dance (and at my
insistence minor in Business so she doesn't go broke her first year), and
then return to take over Sandy's school.

For my part, I think this is a wonderful idea. One of the fascinating
things I've noticed is that the kids who stay with Sandy the entirety of
their pre-college years are achievers. They are without exception the
Valedictorians, 4.0 GPA-earners, and scholarship-winners. The girl my
daughter hugged at Lewis and Clarke Park went on the be her Class
Valedictorian, ice skated competitively, and win a scholarship to a
reputable university. To top it all off, the summer after she graduated,
she was teaching my daughters to swim at Morningside College
http://www.morningside.edu>.

Nothing succeeds like success. Even if my daughter ultimately changes her
career plans, being exposed to individuals with such high standards can
only be good for her.

I've known for years that the current educational paradigm in America is
hideously flawed. If you take even a brief look at the achievement of
America's children in modern, age-segregated schools and compare it with
the general education of the average one-room schoolhouse of a century ago,
it's clear that the one-room schoolhouse was more successful.

My grandparents are retired cattle ranchers who never went farther than
high school. The largest school they ever attended was the High School in
Wasta, South Dakota with a student body of less than a hundred.

My grandparents' general education -- earned almost seventy years ago --
far exceeds that of the average post-millennial high school graduate.

My grandparents' five children also attended school in a one-room building
prior to government forcing them to make the long trip to town for high
school. I've seen the school: it now resides on my grandmother's property
near Pedro, South Dakota. The building is essentially a small, one-room
trailer house (vintage 1940). If you've seen the movie _The Long, Long
Trailer_ VHS:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/6301972279/qid%3D1054729442/sr
%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-2594789-3476928>, DVD :<
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005JLN1/qid%3D1054729384/sr%
3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-2594789-3476928> and then gutted the
trailer of most of its living arrangements, you'd have the schoolhouse. The
interior is divided by a bookshelf about fifteen feet from the front of the
trailer: this demarcates the teacher's living quarters from the classroom.
There is no indoor plumbing, air conditioning, or other amenities.

The walls of the schoolhouse are still lined with books. There are
mathematics texts dating from the 1950s that would be appropriate to teach
anything through beginning Calculus. The history and political science
books are complete through the same time period. The literature is
extremely eclectic: during one particularly successful "archaeological
expedition" to the schoolhouse, I obtained a first-print hardback
edition of _Tarzan The
Untamedhttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345217497/ref=p
d_sim_books_5/102-2594789-3476928?v=glance&s=books> in reasonably
good condition. I suspect that if one were to spend a week cataloging the
items in the schoolhouse, there would be a small fortune to be made on
E-Bay http://www.ebay.com>.

My father and his siblings, along with the children of one or two other
families, obtained an extraordinary education in this room. Anyone with
whom I've spoken says that it was so good that when they went to Wall
http://www.walldrug.com> for high school, they were well ahead of 
town-educated students. They essentially spent their Freshman and Junior
years goofing off while the other students caught up to them.

So what does this have to do with Sandy Keene's annual recital?

As I watched the dress rehearsal, I was struck that the reason so many
children do so well at Sandy Keene's is that she employs the "one-room
schoolhouse" paradigm of education.

Children at Sandy Keene's are only roughly grouped by age: the pre-ballet
class can be populated by girls anywhere from three to six years of age.
More important than age is maturity and experience: if a three-year-old
took pre-ballet, then she can be five when she attends second-year ballet,
tap, jazz, drill team, or baton. She might be alongside a seven- or
eight-year-old who took pre-ballet at an older age.

At about age twelve or thirteen, girls with a particular aptitude or
interest may be hired by Sandy to assist teaching the younger children.
"Assist" is probably a misnomer: I've spent enough time in
Sandy's lobby to know that the older girls often teach the class: Sandy
pops in every ten or fifteen minutes to offer words of advice or criticism.

Furthermore, Sandy's hiring practices are entirely merit-based: age and
particularly physique is not an issue. I've seen a skinny thirteen-year-old
and an overweight sixteen-year-old teaching side-by-side.

The "one-room schoolhouse" teaching paradigm is extremely
apparent at the recital's dress rehearsal. The older girls are
instrumental: not only do they dance their own numbers, they're scurrying
around the classes they teach, directing the younger children where to go
-- in some cases literally carrying a stage-frightened child on and
offstage. Their own experience makes them perfect for this job, as they can
empathize with the perspective of children only a few years younger than
they are.

The advantage of the one-room schoolhouse is easy to understand when you
see it in action at Sandy Keene's recital. Both the academically-gifted and
-challenged are given a first-class education. The gifted children finish
their schoolwork well before everyone else and then -- like Sandy Keene's
13-year-old dance staff -- are assigned to the younger or less-gifted
children. This is advantageous for the child being tutored because he or
she has a near-peer who can empathize with the child's difficulties and
embarrassment. For the gifted child, their mind is being stretched: if they
teach three younger children long division, they'll have to be senile
before they forget how to do it themselves.

I'm lucky: my own children are very bright (probably owing to the genetics
of their grandparents). They consistently come home complaining that school
is boring. I estimate that they're intellectually challenged perhaps three
hours a week. Were they in a one-room schoolhouse, assisting the teacher
with younger classmates, they'd be challenged constantly. Struggling
children would similarly be more likely to succeed.

If American education is to survive, it must completely abandon its current
paradigm of enormous, age-segregated schools controlled by Federal monies
and the NEA. A return to the one-room school house -- even in large
metropolitan areas -- would be a massive improvement.

The barriers to this are simple: the FedGov will never willingly give up
its centralized control of education. Nor, for that matter, are the State
and LocalGovs. As long as we allow any government body to control education
through funding, our children will continue to be either ignorami or bored
stiff all day long.

The only way to cause the current paradigm to disappear is via collapse.
Every individual must be made aware that no matter how good they think
their local government school is, their child will be only one of two
things on Graduation Day: an ignoramus or bored out of their mind.

Maybe both.

To hasten the collapse, it's imperative that individuals not participate in
government schools. Home-school your children. Send them to non-government
schools. Do whatever you must to keep them out of the doors of a government
school. When the Local, State, and FedGov whine to you about how it's all
about money, don't listen. I could take my children to the schoolhouse at
Pedro today, and using the books still on its shelves impart all the
knowledge they could glean through a modern High School.

The current system doesn't work. It can't be tweaked, tuned, or
better-funded. The entire CONCEPT of regimented super-schools is flawed.
The best American education is to be had from one-room schoolhouses. The
sooner we cause the current system to collapse, the sooner your child will
cease to be a bored ignoramus.

William Stone, III is a computer nerd (RHCE, CCNP, CISSP) and Executive
Director of the Zero Aggression Institute http://www.0ap.org>. He
seeks the Libertarian Party's nomination for the 2004 Senate race in South
Dakota.

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