How Education is Ruining Your Life
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How Education is Ruining Your Life
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Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#2If anyone understood this, I'd be grateful for a summary...
Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#3Well, he is right. The education system I went through was designed around a myth of what the corporate landscape supposedly looks like and it's out of date in the information age. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call "anything that asks you to uproot your relationships with place and with people as evil" nor would I return to an agricultural model.
It's worth reading.
Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#4If anyone understood this, I'd be grateful for a summary...
The overall idea is that our educational system was designed for a world that no longer exists and is unsuited for what our world is becoming.
Essentially, he's saying that our educational system is designed to produce people that can operate interchangeably, and in doing so is suppressing individuality and twisting our values. He's saying that we've been conditioned to ignore the value of having roots and of being individuals.
This might have worked (and our educational system might have worked) when our economy relied on production and required "cogs", but it's crippling us now when we rely on ideas and creativity.
I'm probably missing half of what was there, but hopefully that helps. I'm not sure I agree with everything there, but that's mostly because I think this raises some excellent points/questions that bear a lot of thinking about and I haven't really had a chance to do so yet.
Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#5Well, he is right. The education system I went through was designed around a myth of what the corporate landscape supposedly looks like and it's out of date in the information age. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call "anything that asks you to uproot your relationships with place and with people as evil" nor would I return to an agricultural model. It's worth reading.
I don't think by "agricultural model" people mean "move out to the farms" or anything; I think he means more that the values of self-reliance in matters educational is what he is pushing. A bunch of city kids could adopt the "agricultural model" with no contradiction.
Personally, I think it's a bad moniker; it makes it sound like a step backward and invites misunderstanding. We need a network-age education that takes advantage of the things we had that never existed in agricultural times; it may happen to resemble the agricultural model in some ways, but it will still resemble the industrial in others, and in other ways won't resemble either.
(Incidentally, this is why I want to homeschool my kid(s). I want to give them the 21st century education they can't get anywhere else right now. Maybe their children won't find it so hard.)
Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#6If anyone understood this, I'd be grateful for a summary...
[deleted]
Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#7While I agree with most of what he's saying, I think the solution doesn't start with education.
Consider this: why did we create the education system as we know it today? Not for some altruistic desire to have an enlightened populace, but to fill the needs of our industrialized society. The change didn't come from within, it came from the corporate world.
As long as companies keep requiring a minimum GPA and a degree from a name brand university, higher education will be crippled by a constant need to establish themselves as one of those name brands, emphasis will continue to be placed on numeric performance, and admissions will be based on likelihood to achieve the all-important high gpa because those will be the people that get jobs and make the school look good. As long as this is how higher education acts, high schools around the country will continue to groom kids for a career of servitude in the same system.
Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#8If anyone understood this, I'd be grateful for a summary...
The overall idea is that our educational system was designed for a world that no longer exists and is unsuited for what our world is becoming. Essentially, he's saying that our educational system is designed to produce people that can operate interchangeably, and in doing so is suppressing individuality and twisting our values. He's saying that we've been conditioned to ignore the value of having roots and of being i…
Yeah, we all know it was broken, hackers know that. Many of us felt like misfits, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with us.
And this guy might have some idea on what to do about education and the whole institute around it, it's down there at the end of the article.
Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#9It's an interesting mishmash.
Presumes educators won't adapt to the changing economy. Perhaps they won't, but consumers of education eventually will, and will find new educators. The bigger problem to me is that the skills needed in the future are not terribly obvious to most people.
The devaluation of place argument is unusual. If I sit still what how will I be benefitting from repeated interaction with the local yokels? I must be blinded by my corporate education. Seems to me we can interact with people across time and distance using technology, but we are still learning how.
The experiencing self v. the remembering self is a nice meme. Must write a note to my remembering self.
Re: How Education is Ruining Your Life
#10Well, he is right. The education system I went through was designed around a myth of what the corporate landscape supposedly looks like and it's out of date in the information age. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call "anything that asks you to uproot your relationships with place and with people as evil" nor would I return to an agricultural model. It's worth reading.
I don't think by "agricultural model" people mean "move out to the farms" or anything; I think he means more that the values of self-reliance in matters educational is what he is pushing. A bunch of city kids could adopt the "agricultural model" with no contradiction. Personally, I think it's a bad moniker; it makes it sound like a step backward and invites misunderstanding. We need a network-age education that takes…
"agricultural" is a bad moniker for sure. Still, a model that emphasizes growing ties to your location is a poor one. David Weinberger hit the nail on the head in his philosophical arguments in "Small pieces loosely joined" that our understanding of "place" has completely changed in the information age. Perhaps the author should have focused on an education system that focuses on ties to _community_ rather than on the place their from?