In a sense, this could be the beginning of a major treatise. The subject has been a source of fascination and deep thought for several decades. Its not been something easy to write about because these feelings have grown and clarified and matured over time, based on thought, experience and listening to others on the same subject.
I think that "education" is in trouble. We have stopped thinking about education and we have settled into a state of what has become "normalcy" in our consideration of education. One of the biggest problems with our consideration of education has been that it has come to be considered a democratic right, which in turn stumbled into it being a standardised, homogenised package which should be universally delivered, to being a means by which we evaluate and categorise futures. This is all wrong, all wrong.
The moral imperative to make education universally available is in a sense admirable, but the thought behind it must necessarily go way beyond that simple notion. Education has to be about something and it must be useful to those being educated in it. Somehow we have come to believe that all kids should be taught a basic syllabus covering everything. The reasoning is obvious I suppose, if you choose to buy into it.
First, when you are dealing with a blank slate with an unknown capacity, you sling mud at it and see what sticks. You have to throw samples of a little bit of everything until you see what really sticks and by the time a child has undergone post graduate studies and a possible total of 20+ years of education, they are equipped to start into their life, when their real education begins. I choose to see this differently and yes, I want to be provactive.
Step back, take a look at that recent post-graduate degree earning individual. Look back at the 20 years of their life they have given up to get to where they are today. Look at all the courses they have taken and elected to forget all about because of boredom, lack of interest, bad teachers and a greater desire to having had some memorable experiences and a childhood. Take a look at the resources wasted putting them through this, and realise that this system prepared them for one thing and one thing only: to get a JOB.
These days we almost require our kids to take up this much education in order to have a chance of getting a job which in theory pays enough to have what we in the western world have assumed is our right to a minimum proper lifestyle.
Looking back 60-70 years, my father's generation could leave school at 16, get a starting position in a formal employment and work their way up to senior management over a lifetime, go to war for 5 years and still come home, buy a house, have a wife who didn't go to work, except with their kids in their home, and could afford family holidays, local perhaps and not in Bora Bora, but quality time out, non-the-less. That notion today is as distant as can be. It seems to be a part of some unknown folk history. And yet that generation achieved some amazing things. They had an education but it was developed during the course of life and experience. They were not expected to have all that capability the day they started out working. Today any child leaving school at 16 is probably condemned to be slotted into a menial manual labour task to which a "minimum wage" assignment has been made. The direction of their life is largely locked in because with a "minimal education" there will be no way for them to advance in formal academics as even those with elevated marks in advanced formal education are not guaranteed a placement in University, despite the fact that Universities are popping up like mushrooms in every crevice.
This insane urge for every child to be pushed through a mill and expected to pick up a measured amount of learning as fed to them so that they can be pidgeon-holed by the system is a huge disservice to the well-being of the individual and to our society as a whole. Not all kids grow and learn at the same pace or in the same way.
It used to be that kids were "streamed" according to their ability to learn at the time. This was judged by the democratic do-gooders as being bad for them and streaming was taken away, kids of all abilities mixed together in the same class so that (in theory) those less able would rise to the level of performance of the rest. Finally it sunk in that what was happening was the brighter ones were being slowed down to the pace of the slowest, class sizes increased and overloaded teachers struggled to serve any student well. Next came standardised performance criteria and tests which in turn gave evidence to the lie that all could perfom like machines in exact unison. Why have to test them so if the instructional theory was aimed at producing a more predictable and uniform result? Everyone knows it just didn't happen that way.
To be fair to the dream that was such a failure (yet we persist in applying it uniformly), its important to say that both kids who were streamed and did or did not do well enough within their stream and kids who were forced into the equalising mill of a democratic education and didn't do so well, many have, in the end, equalised themselves. It seems that there is some sort of post education "education", which we may wish to call life-long learning, which seems to bring everyone to a reasonably balanced level. Yes, some learn differently and things come to a level of comprehensibility at different times, in different ways, because we are not machines.
Likewise even within the notionally streamed classes and the homogenised classes, there were still finer graduations of abilities. Myself I started out at the top of a streamed class in high school and quickly devolved to the bottom end of the class in MOST of my subjects because I found the teaching system so utterly boring and stultifying, learning by rote, by memorisation. I was in a rather "elevated" school where I suppose I did in fact get a good education, but I found much of the learning to be utterly uninteresting and the teachers to be uninspiring. Those classes taught by bright and interesting teachers using example and by doing, even in highly academic subjects, always seemed more fascinating and easy to learn and to get good marks in. I swear that the desired result in both the school's mind and my parent's minds was high marks, never mind if I had learned something that excited me.
The marks trick really apalled me in school. I think my favourite example came from one very serious mistake I made in following French literature instead of French language to the highest level. I had a good grasp of French and developed a very useful level of correct French. However when it came to literature I was asked to read books and learn what the establishment got from those books. Oddly I found that what I was being told about those books (what they meant and how they should be interpreted) was not what I saw in them. I thought that education was about recognising situations and being able to explain and back up what you saw and why, rather than mindlessly accepting the status quo. My marks and the commentary of the examiners told me that this clearly was not so! When a teacher/examiner cannot be bothered to read another view and automatically dismisses it, then it is the teacher who has failed, not the student.
I believe that education is about teaching the mind a discipline as much as learning "facts". Facts are subjective and now that I understand the reality of a volitional reality, I believe still more that homogenised and rote-filled education is a wrongful thing to subject kids to. In fact the entire notion of a set syllabus is wrong once a child starts to define for themselves what interests them. In my own education I had a compulsory 5 years of learning Latin, five days a week, only because the English education system at that time required Latin for University entrance. It was regarded as a marker for the ability to study at an elevated level. It was infuriating to me at the time, as I was not Catholic, was highly unlikely to persue a career in medicine or biology, an eclesiastical career was not my bent and although I liked languages, I could see little point in using a long dead langauge to study Roman history. How much more would I have learned from Roman history by spending some of that time stepping out of the classroom and examining more closely the Roman origins of my town? What did I get from those 5 years apart from a lot of headaches? I can read old tombstones in English churches (well some of the time!) and I remember Hic, Haec, Hoc and Mensa, Mensae, Mensam, but have not yet figured out exactly why one may be addressing a table (an inside joke for anyone who also suffered Latin as I did).
So much time was spent in my education learning all the stuff that I wanted to know nothing about and so little time was spent being fascinated. Looking back on it, I am (dare I say it?) happy that I had such a broad education because it did in fact broaden my outlook on life, but if I am asked to evaluate its contribution to not only the quality of my own life but also to my ability to contribute back to life, then I have to say that a lot of it was a total waste, as is the structure which is put in place and expensively maintained in order to be able to perpetuate this thing we have called education.
The same applies to my understanding of post secondary education, which I ignorantly subjected myself to too much of, somehow believing that was it was a provider, a key to greater things. It wasn't. It was a key to being eventually less and less useful in the context of a greater world.
The world sold us on the lie that the more we knew the more useful we would be to the world. "Go out and get an "education" young man!". Well a lot of young men and women did that and for a time were useful to the system in which they believed that they would have perpetual employment until the day they retired with a nice pension and started to enjoy what was left of their fading days. Except the system found it needed to slim down and bizarely the system came to realise that the ones they needed to shed were the fat ones, the ones with the most knowledge and experience and education who strangely seemed to think that they needed fatter salaries as a reward for their considerable abilities. Still more bizarrely the employers, in order to maintain their self perception, felt the need to have cheaper, less argumentative, less imaginative and probably a lot more scared junior employees, and the ones with hard earned experience found it very hard to even find work, let alone find work that respected their ability and paid an income which made all of their sacrifice of their life worthwhile.
How many PhD's are driving taxis around the world? There are many, some of whom never found work suitable for their education, rendering them unemployable and some of whom find greater pleasure driving taxi than they ever did in their years of work.
In my view, education is a mindless mill and needs a radical rethink, a new plan. More to come on this!
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