it seems to be the conservative political groups that are pushing for online schooling, and it's easy enough to figure out that it's mostly about getting rid of teachers. we know liberals wouldn't like something like that. what would socialists think about that?

at the end of the day, teaching is a shitty job - it's why i avoided it. you spend half of your time babysitting kids with useless parents that should probably be placed in foster homes and half of your time teaching them the most trivial, basic, boring bullshit - how to count, how to read. as you move to higher grades, it gets a little more interesting, but the necessity of ensuring that a teacher is advanced enough in a topic to teach it requires that they resign themselves to teaching trivialities, from the first grade all the way to graduate school. it's only researchers teaching post-graduate topics that have some opportunity to engage in something interesting to them, as a teacher.

so, teaching is a shitty job, any way you look at it - and most teachers are miserable, which is why most teachers are terrible. you'll find the odd one that really loves it, but the university is truly a sad place, full of people that settled for existences they didn't truly want. again: i got out for a reason. i saw myself in a bleak future, there - wealthy, perhaps, but horribly unhappy, helplessly in debt and with no escape mechanism. they're all enslaved to the institutions they exist within.

socialists are supposed to be about eliminating shitty jobs, and they should support anything that leads to the abolition of teaching, for that reason. so, if what they were doing would create less teaching jobs, that's something socialists ought to support. but, it's not clear that that's really the case - it seems more like they're getting ahead of themselves.

as an anarchist, i also always disliked the classroom/grade/group-learning model, where you stick a bunch of random kids in a group and expect them to advance at the same speed. most of the emphasis has always been on trying to help the slowest kids keep up to the group, as though they're going to end up astronauts if they just get enough attention, but i'm really more concerned about stopping the system from preventing the smartest kids from moving ahead. to me, that's the more functional part of removing the teacher from the process - you eliminate the group learning, and let kids move at their own pace, whatever it is. so, some kids that love sitting on the computer and reading ahead (ahem.) may get through the schooling at a much faster pace, whereas other kids would rather tune out and play video games - and i don't think that's a bad thing, or something that society should seek to prevent. to me, trying to smarten up the dumb kids at the expense of the smart kids is just an inefficient use of resources. let the smart kids run ahead, and let the dumb kids die young. that's fine.

but, they don't seem to really be doing that, either.

the existing models clearly aren't very good - both canada and the united states have terrible test scores for kids across the board, on science, on reading and on math. something needs to be done about this, clearly. most of it is about bad parenting, which is primarily a social problem. but, it's a cyclical one with few really good solutions besides letting the dumb kill themselves off, in whatever way they'd most prefer to. and, we really need to let the smart kids get out of the catastrophe, and maximize their potential as young as they can.

this is the biggest problem i had with school in the grades 5-10 years - i just got bored with it. i probably would  have finished high school well before i was 15 if they would have let me, and i probably would have approached the school system from an entirely different perspective, when i did. instead, the system restricted my development in order to push a concept of conformity, which slowed me down, tuned me out and left me looking towards music, instead. so, you ended up with a really smart kid with a ton of potential that was totally turned off by the groupthink in the school system, and couldn't be bothered with carrying through with it.

some people like the group learning. good for them. they shouldn't be discouraged.

but, as there should be a way for adults to escape the market, there should be a way for kids to escape the classroom, as well.

i'm consequently tentatively in favour of exploring options around the elimination of teaching, but i realize that these right-wing governments are more likely to just screw the whole thing up.