It appears to me that our educational system has, in its efforts for efficiency, created some serious problems. Our drive for efficiency has denigrated the natural human faculties of curiosity and imagination while creating a universal and undeviating conformity of mind as to the matter as important as education.
The lose of imagination and curiosity seems obvious. However, the universal uniformity of experience regarding the nature of education makes it extremely difficult to engage any mental examination of other forms of education.
It seems to me that we learn primarily by association, by metaphor. If we all experience exactly one and only one education then anything alien to that form is very difficult to comprehend even though the matter is simple and without any complexity.
I have been trying to acquaint members with a different form of education and I find that very few people seem to understand my suggestion. It is not because the suggestion is complex it is because everyone immediately makes the only metaphor available in the matter of education and thus assumes they understand what I am saying and mentally walk away without any further thought.
When I suggest that the reader does not understand my meaning the reader is immediately offended because of an assumed insult to their IQ and the reader feels the necessity to ignore the matter or to fight to the death against the idea that is insulting their intelligence.
Because imagination and curiosity has been so decimated by our system it is difficult for people to seek understanding by engaging these two human faculties.
I am not a teacher or any kind of expert on these matters but this is my conclusion after many months of attempting to promote an idea. If it were possible I would like to engage a dialogue here and now about this subject.
The common community school constantly potrays the picture of pig gardens in my mind. Surely I can draw a milder comparision: schools to children is as philosophy to adults - a cheap place for mass brainwashing - for the preservation of mainstream society. This is historically uniform and the same for all cultures. I don’t know why shouldn’t rich parents send their children to Etonian schools. I don’t know why should highly intellectually able parents send their children to any school. The most desirable scenario for me is to educate your own children according to the prominet 19th century German educator, whose son he educated himself became an utter knowitall. This father wrote a book about his educating experience. The key is to start early. Schools start at seven, obviously too late for him.
Before we can talk about whether education is good we need to talk about what we value in education.
Since education is provided by the state, clearly education ought serve the ends of the state to some degree. As pointed out earlier, this has always been the case – that education serves the needs of the institution providing it.
So, what should we value and how should we evaluate that value?
Imagination and curiosity are surely right up there in terms of what we value about education… I would question, though, whether there has been any “decimation” of these values as such. Was 1950s education the wellspring of curiosity? Perhaps, rather, there is a vastly broader forum of value on the table now, and the disconcertion this causes to more rigid value-system perspectives creates misapperceptions about what the contemporary creativity actually is… The melting-pot of values is white hot, in my estimation, and we are in fact, rather, in the midst of witnessing whole new alloys.
Whether an educational system is good or bad must be assessed by how successful it is in the criteria that we deem most valuable. For example, in Asian countries, textbook knowledge is deemed the most valuable asset of education and by that standard, their system is one of the best in the world. I believe in the United States, we value critical thinking skills, and our educational system is one of the best (though not the best, but we are up there.)
However, I believe that before our brains enter into formal operations (in our early teens,) most of us are not ready to take on challenging critical thinking tasks. This is the reason that our educational system is set up the way that it is. Generally speaking, early childhood education as well as junior high tend to focus on rote memorization and the development of new skills (reading, writing, typing, multiplication, division, geographical awareness, etc.) In late junior high and high school, we begin to apply these skills to more critical tasks with classes that teach government, literature, theatre, etc. It is certainly important (in my opinion, most important) to impart these critical analysis skills in newer generations, because this type of mindset allows people to view the world they live in as more than a bunch of other people. It’s a thriving environment that shapes and creates us, with an equal mixture (though often uneven) of good and bad. It’s this type of mindset that allowed the slaves to realize their oppression and fight back.
