Providing an adequate education for all Americans

Pondering the focus on education for everybody, perhaps education's purpose is to standardize the skill-knowledge base of all people so they can communicate, particularly on the job, as well with the larger community such as in making decisions for voting, and even with one's immediate family. This, for starters, is analogous to the lowest common denominator in the process of determining ratios of dissimilar things; and then including specialty arenas of skill-knowledge that fit both the aptitudes of the individual as well as the multiple type needs of the nation including family life.

Yet knowledge gained through formal education is not intrinsically the only way to acquire knowledge; there are other ways to learn and some of them are better than sitting in the classroom. An adequately skilled private tutor is one such way; learning from material prepared and distributed and interacted with on the internet on one's home computer or at work is another; and from watching dramatic movies in which the mirror cells of the viewer are copying over the learning by watching another actually experiencing doing in real life.

There is the purpose I have hypothesized in the beginning here, that of standardizing the knowledge set of all people (of the nation, anyway) so they can communicate and be able to expect competent use of a common set of knowledge in their interactions; so how is it to be determined that each individual has indeed acquired the same basic knowledge and skill set? And similarly the expanded set of some specialty, or of several specialties? Is it by each individual displaying the consistent ability to jump through the specific hoop, thus proving the achievement of the mix of native ability and repetitious practice until indeed the person can consistently jump through the hoop?

Employers depend on the educational "degree" to imply this common skill set; yet also implies the ability to learn new things, because each job involves its unique set of requirements to be fulfilled as part of doing the job, and those must be learned on the job; these include such things as finding out how to get to the workplace and on time; who to interact with and in what way; and how to do the particular tasks that are assigned to the employee at the time. So one type of the "hoops to jump through for proof" needs to be the ability to learn these types of things in a new workplace-type environment.

So I would suggest that the focus on "providing an adequate education" for all Americans, would be best provided by supplying the mix of at least the three modes of a private tutor, via the internet-connected computer as prepared for learning, and by using the mirror cells in audio-visual movie portrayal of someone doing something that is to be learned by the student; and then an adequate means to evaluate that the hoop-jumping skills have been acquired by the individual and will be available for use on a job as well as in the wider practice of life.

Beyond the basic skill-knowledge set, there would be modules of specialization as needed in some arenas of life and on the job, such as dental surgeon, integrated circuit design engineer, biochemist, lawyer, housewife, high-rise steelworker, or interstate big-rig driver.

Also there is another very important factor, that of the intrinsic temperament or Jungian typology by which the individual perceives and interacts with the world optimally; we are not all the same but we are of a fairly small group of perceiving-interacting types, researched to indicate there are four basic ways of perceiving the world and expanded to sixteen types when including the individual ways of interacting with the world. To optimize each individual student's rate of accumulation of knowledge so as to accentuate the positives in each individual (as compared to merely settling for the common knowledge-skill amount that can be acquired by any of the sixteen types) the learning mode needs to be selected for each individual's type, with side practice in communicating with the approaches that other types of people use; otherwise we would end up with a nation of uniformly low competent people, the lowest common denominator, a rather frustrating and unresponsive people. These sixteen types would also early show the aptitudes for specific arenas of endeavor, ultimately pointing to optimum areas of employment and other forms of life endeavors, thus showing the optimum learning paths for each individual that lead to the ability to consistently jump through the hoops designed for each of those skill sets.

Thus through this expanded form of educational system, hopefully optimization of the functionality of the people of the nation will be enabled, which is a major resource of any nation; and will enable optimum responsiveness to the flow of fulfilling the needs of the nation, as also existing in the larger in the world.