31–40 of 41 posts
To see the roots of many of the pernicious practices: "Democracy and Education" by Dewey (http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/...)
It's unpleasant how many of his points just ring true in my mind instantly. I connected it with PG's essay, too, where he asks why students should have to ask to go to the bathroom. But my theory is that a school system cannot be designed in a one-size-fits-all sort of way. There are students who will take advantage of lenient teachers, instead of learning. It is because of them that the rest of the students cannot p…
It can be, and was for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the practice of the assembly line was forced on education that the breakdown began. The justification, though obfuscated, was something like this: "We can't have thinkers in a world in which we need lever pullers. Well educated people (in a classical sense) won't ever be content working on an assembly line (or other modern equivalents), so we must make them functionally literate, and not actually literate. Then they can be happy pulling levers and pushing buttons, and society can flourish." It's no wonder that the school day is 'assembled', so similar to the factory that we even have bells moving people in shifts governed by a bell.
I think schools need to be more economically focused. Teach kids about the realistic options in their future and what they can do to give themselves more choices (avoid premature optimization). also: I hate when people whine about how hard "the poor" have it. I'm technically living below the poverty line and I live the way an emperor might have lived in ages past. I have my own personal transportation to take me wher…
I wish I could give 10 points.
It occurred to me some time ago that many things are confusing because they are improperly named. For example, the label "Education System" is confusing because it implies that the system in question is primarily about education. Having accepted the premise, you now have many paradoxes to explain. But if you change the label to, say, "Child Processing Factories", most of the paradoxes disappear. Edit: I originally wr…
A really interesting exploration of those sorts of ideas is reading Huxley's Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited and Island as a trilogy. I've read Gato's book that this essay is taken from, and he does a good job of stating the problem, but doesn't step far enough into it to look at how you restructure society to live in a freer way. Brave New World sets up a completely systemized dystopia, Island a communal utopia and BNW Revisited (collection of essays) puts down in more explicit terms much of what he thinks is the core of modern societies.