Saturday, February 1, 2014

Teaching conformity stifles innovation, creativity and thought

MUSKEGON, Mich. – There are dangers to teaching conformity.

teacherIt stifles innovation, creativity and the thought process itself. I was thankfully educated prior to the creation of the Department of Education and have benefited from the early system. I’m an entrepreneur and small business owner and have created or jointly created three companies. I have patents and inventions that have changed the way people interact with their world. I have been published nationally and internationally. I have hired and fired products of our education system. As a user of the product (graduates), I have witnessed first hand what has worked and what hasn’t. Trust me, as a consumer of the educational product, America is going in the wrong direction. I’ve been employed from mom & pop small companies to Fortune 100 corporations and at all levels from intern through senior management. I think I know what the consumer (business) needs when it comes to quality graduates.
Education is a free market process. There are producers (schools) and consumers (employers) and the product is the graduate. Producers are creating graduates and consumers are hiring and using graduates. The big problem today is that the product lacks quality and consumers are looking elsewhere to find a quality product. In the real world, companies that produce an inferior product do not last long but, with education, the government steps in and free market economics no longer applies. The government alters the producers rules and actually inhibits the production of quality graduates.
Today, educators are trying to force all students to be equal and, they are not. They are individuals, not a collective. We are attempting to use a one-size-fits-all mentality and that just plain won’t work. It never has and, it never will.

No comments: