The roots of the problem

We established that in general, humanity's ability to educate its young is not impressive. The discussion is of the mainstream education. There may exist a school, or even a small network of schools that actually knows how to educate kids. Some say KIPP is just that. It seems that here and there, some wonderfully charismatic and talented people were able to go well beyond what we normally allow ourselves to expect. This is a great source of inspiration, and a way to fight the assumption that the standard schooling system is all we can aspire for. Still, why is the standard so low?

In real life, that is - outside articles and blogs - answers are seldom simple and unambiguous. We can find many reasons: Kids are spoiled; Parents are weak; Teachers are unmotivated; Politicians are shortsighted; Voters have short memory; Public Servants forgot they are; and many more. One common denominator of these explanations is that they point a finger at a supposed culprit, and that the culprit is never the speaker. So it is a good way to ventilate the frustration and convert it to anger. It is not a very good way to get ahead. Also, where there are many separate reasons, it may be a good idea to look elsewhere for one or two underlying reasons. Following is a theory I find useful:

Up until 10,000 years ago - an evolutionary eye-blink - humans were organized in tribes. "Theoretical" knowledge was transferred using oral stories. Some to be retold by all tribe members, some to be retold by the apprentice storyteller of the tribe, when the old storyteller dies. Common practical know-how was transferred from parent to child, by example and by apprenticeship. Special knowledge, such as medicine, was transferred from specialist to apprentice. The whole set of knowledge was manageable and maintainable within a group of a few dozen - or a few hundred - people. Every member of the tribe could be a teacher or a tutor. Teaching was a long one-on-one affair.
In the last 10,000 years, we invented writing, which allowed the total knowledge to be retained over millennia, creating an explosion of knowledge. We started living in cities, which are much more like swarms than tribes: There is an explosion of people, knowledge specialties and know-how specialties. It has been a few hundred years since the time any one human - no matter how intelligent - could be said to have command of all of human knowledge. And I doubt Leonardo Da-Vinci was a great cook, so even he didn't quite know everything. To make life more interesting, a couple hundred years ago we had a nice industrial revolution, with the side effect of many more specialties. Now we say we are having an information revolution, and the explosion of knowledge accelerates. Now it is much less clear what profession (= knowledge domain) a child should acquire, so we try to give them a taste of everything. Very few people are in charge of teaching all the children, so instead of a one-on-one or one-on-few teacher/student ratio, we have a 1/20 or 1/40.
At the same 10,000 years, how much have humans evolved?
Reading early human scripts from the past 5,000 years - in Sumerian, Sanskrit, Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, etc. - the people it described seem just like 21st century people. So, 5000 years with no perceivable change. I would bet there was not much change in the previous few thousand years either.

So, 10,000 years; dramatic change in society; dramatic change in knowledge; no visible change is us. We can expect some problems here. All the individual problems listed at the beginning of this post can be seen as reflections of the basic issue of explosive development we haven't caught up with.

This theory doesn't indicate a clear path to a solution, but it is useful in that it gives a framework for thinking about the problem without accusing each other. This way we can work together towards catching up, without worrying about blame.
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