VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 7
The Root Sickness: The System Designers Got the Number One Job Wrong
The previous sections built a solid footing for what education was meant to be. A school's number one job is to hold people safely, to settle them, and to raise their character. The teachers and the real masters of every trade are the ones who hand this down. And character is the one medicine for the sickness of torment. Starting with this section, I turn around to tell you how the education of today was wrecked, and by whom, and how.
Hold one sentence in your mind first. Education was not wrecked by the teachers, not by the students, not by the parents. The great majority of teachers want to teach well and raise their students right. The students are driven forward by force. The parents are forced to keep pace against their will. All these people are the ones being ground half to death by a wrecked system. They are the victims. They are not the ones who wrecked it.
So who wrecked it? It was the people sitting up top, the ones who designed the education system. Does that seat sound familiar to you? You heard about a seat just like it earlier in the book, the law-blind official who handed out licenses for AI compute. He sat in the seat of the law, yet he did not understand that the law exists to protect people. He casually put a tool into a human seat, and wrecked the foundation of the whole law. The people who designed the education system sit in that exact same kind of seat. They sit in the seat of education with the power to set the rules, yet they got one most basic thing wrong.
What did they get wrong? Exactly what the last few sections kept laying down. What is a school's number one job? A school's number one job is to be a prison, to settle people, to raise their character. Grades are the thing that comes after, the secondary thing. But these system designers turned it upside down. In their eyes, a school's number one job became turning out grades. Test scores, rankings, college admission rates. Whether a school is good or bad, they judge only by how many high scores it turned out, how many kids it shipped into elite schools. As for whether the school settled the kids well, whether it raised them into people of character who do not torment, they do not look, and they do not care. They took the secondary thing for the number one thing, and dropped the real number one thing entirely. This inversion looks like a small mistake, but it is the root sickness of all education.
Why is it the root sickness? Because the wrong note set at the top rings down through the entire system, layer by layer, dragging everyone down with it. The top demands grades as number one, so the schools below have no choice but to fight over grades. The schools fight over grades, so the teachers have no choice but to race through curriculum, drill exam papers, and squeeze out test scores. Where is the time or heart left for the most important work, raising character, handing down truth, and living as a real person that kids want to follow? The teacher is forced into a machine for turning out grades. The schools fight over grades, so the parents have no choice but to be dragged into the scramble. Other families pay for extra tutoring, so if my kid does not do it, he falls behind. So the whole family throws in money and time, burning away a dozen years of a child's youth drilling questions that an AI can answer in seconds. And the student? From age six, the student is strapped to this grade-producing machine, ranked, labeled high or low, and told that if you fail this score, your life is over. He has no time to learn how to be a human being. All his energy goes into scoring two points higher than the classmate sitting next to him.
Look at that. One wrong note set at the top, and the teachers, the parents, the students below are all dragged underwater, all ground out of shape. Yet the root of it all lies not in the people being ground, but in the ones sitting up top who got the number one job of a school wrong.
There is a deeper point here that I must drive home to you. The people who wrecked education are not necessarily bad people. Even a clever person, full of virtue, capability, and good intentions, so long as he gets the number one job wrong, so long as he thinks education means ranking blindly and leveling blindly, forgetting that the number one job is to settle people safely near their homes, will wreck the whole thing just the same. The root sickness is not whether a person is bad. It is whether the number one job was gotten right or wrong. A good-hearted person in the wrong seat, getting the number one thing wrong, only wrecks things more thoroughly the harder he works. So what we must watch is never whether a specific person is good or bad. It is that mistaken job, that inverted number one thing. It has to be turned right side up again.
What do we do with these people up top? The same principle applies. We do not drag them out, curse them, or settle scores. This book, from beginning to end, has none of that. It is about setting that mistaken seat right. It is about making these people see clearly that a school's number one job is to settle people and raise their character, not to turn out grades. For those who cannot see it, who cannot turn around, then just like before, invite them into that courtyard too. Let them patch up that medicine called character, that medicine of holding children and the public in their hearts. A person who wrecked education is usually someone whose own dose of that medicine was never enough back then. Patch him up. If he truly comes to understand what a school is for, he can come back and design the system right. A person who once wrecked a thing and then truly saw the light often knows better than anyone how to build it right.
Now let me take you to a real city, to see how this root sickness turned everything into a chaotic mess, and how one right person set it right again, bit by bit. San Francisco. This was witnessed with my own eyes, from beginning to end.
It started with a yardstick. For a few years, California's statewide standardized test had been paused and broken off. Then, in 1998, that yardstick was set back up. Every school in the state was pulled back under the same test, and on top of that, the scores of every single school were made public. Think about what that public posting did. Schools had been running their own way, but now, all at once, they were measured by the exact same stick. Once measured, the scores were printed in black and white and lined up in a row. This school scored high, that school scored low. Who was high and who was low, the neighbors and every household could see at a glance. Just like that, schools were sorted into ranks.
Parents looked at the rank, and their hearts moved. Who wants their child stuck in a school ranked at the bottom? So families with means and money began to move. Some moved houses, leaving their district for places with higher test scores. Some pulled their children out of public schools entirely and put them into private ones. One year, then another. From 1998 to 2000, in just those few short years, a massive wave of students left San Francisco public schools. The schools grew emptier year by year. Once a school empties, a bigger crisis follows. School funding follows the student. More students, more money. Students leave, money shrinks. People leave, money shrinks, and the school runs worse. It runs worse, so its scores look worse on the board. Worse on the board, and more families leave. Down and down in a spiral. By that point, public education in San Francisco was a scalding, ruined mess that no one dared touch.
Right at that moment, a person arrived. A female superintendent, coming from out of town, taking up this ruined mess that no one wanted in a moment of crisis. Speaking of the word superintendent, let me make a joke with you here, but this joke holds the most critical truth from the last section. The last section laid down that a school's number one job is to be a prison, to settle people, to hold them steadily. Then what about the highest person running that prison, called the superintendent? Weigh those words in your mind. The one who runs a prison, is that not the warden? The superintendent is the warden.
Do not laugh yet. Calling her a warden is not an insult at all. Quite the opposite. Since a school is a prison meant to hold and settle people safely, then the warden who can run that prison well, who can settle people right, who can fix a broken system and bring back the ones who ran away, that warden is the finest educator under heaven. And this female superintendent was precisely such a warden, the finest kind.
When she took over, the prison was already in chaos. People were running away, money was shrinking, and the scoreboards had everyone panicked. Earlier on, San Francisco had used an even worse old method, assigning students to schools by race. Many kids, with a school right at their front door, were forced to study far away. That number one job of settling people close to home had been stirred into a total shambles. All these bad debts were piled right in front of her. She did not go looking for anyone to drag out. She did not go settling scores. What she did was the plainest, most skillful thing possible. She set out to run this prison right again.
She brought out a method. The cleverest thing about her method was that it stopped leveling blindly, stopped assigning by race blindly, and instead set out to identify one thing honestly and clearly: was this family rich, or was it poor? How to identify it? By real, hard facts. If you could produce a property tax bill from a wealthy neighborhood or insurance papers for a luxury car, good, the system recognized you as a wealthy family. For families who could not produce these, the ones who were genuinely poor, the system recognized them just as clearly. Once identified, resources were allocated and school assignments were made based on reality. The rich were recognized as rich, the poor as poor, each put in their proper place, and those who needed care received care. This method was plain, exact, and effective. It took that tangled mess of settling people and straightened it out, bit by bit. The panicked hearts of the people steadied. The poor kids who needed care got cared for. And the families who were planning to leave saw that this prison was being run with order again, and were willing to send their kids back. This method held, and it remains in use today, still highly effective. The results she produced were solid and real. Under her leadership, San Francisco, a school district that had been stirred into a pot of confusion, saw its test scores improve year after year, eventually becoming the highest-scoring urban school district in all of California.
You see, this is the exact principle that the last section and the sections before it kept laying down, played out live in a real city. Education was wrecked at the root by arrangements that got a school's number one job wrong, ranking blindly, leveling blindly, assigning by race blindly, throwing the number one job of settling people to the back of their minds. To turn it around relied on someone who understood how this prison ought to be run, the finest of wardens, taking charge in a crisis, settling people correctly, and bringing them back inside. She did not do anything earth-shattering. What she did was take the school for what it is, a prison, and manage it honestly and well. She got the plainest thing right, settling people safely, and the whole district came back to life. This is what it looks like to put the number one job back where it belongs, a model set by the finest warden for everyone to see.
Remember two things from this section. First, the school is a prison, and the superintendent is the warden. This is not name-calling. It is stating the school's number one job plainly. Second, whether this prison is run well or badly depends entirely on whether the warden puts the number one job, settling people safely, in the number one spot. Put it there, and she is the finest educator. Put it wrong, and no length of scoreboard in her hands can save a school that empties out year after year. The next section goes on to tell you how that yardstick set up in 1998, the standardized test, besides sorting schools into ranks, quietly helped the rich and harmed the poor.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.