[powellc]

Subsistance farming is not obsolete, indeed it can't be. Not to shift topics dramatically, but industrial farming is not a perfect substitute for diversified subsistance farms and we will reap what we sow, if not now then 10, 25 or 50 years from now.

Back to the subject at hand, the industrial revolution led to a dearth of skilled positions and the growth of unskilled positions. What happens when China's middle class starts needing inexpensive labor to feed it's needs? India? Eastern Europe? Africa? Labor markets, like our global ecology, are not infinite resources and if we do not engender a sense of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness all we become are slaves of our slaves.

At the heart of all of this is the fact that schools have adopted a factory model of production. Inputs go in, outputs come out. And much like our industrial factory model, school factory models are fundamentally flawed as you begin to assume you can reduce all inputs to simple boolean logic. Teacher certified? Yes. Lunch served? Yes. Pre-K program offered? Yes. Children motivated to become productive members of society with a sense of ownership of their community and environment. Consistently and unequivocally, maybe, it depends on their parents and the few members of the school and town community who actually take an active interest in developing their character.

But none of that math works at bureaucratic level. If results can't be measured and studied in groups of fewer than 1,000 students it wont gain traction except amongst local administrators. But local administrators almost always come up through the system themselves. It's a feedback loop.