Is Education Part of the Problem?

"Critical" views of education often assume that the expertise involved in education is flawless and that the only problem is one of equalizing access to it between different groups of people who can be readily distinguished by physical features or bank balances. Enquiry would be pointless unless "knowledge" is something in constant need of re-evaluation, and yet supposedly we already possess a fixed, flawless, ready-made knowledge of how to rank people's intelligence and ability, and the only problem is one of ejecting traditional privileges and turning education into a meritocratic nirvana wherein underachievers can be vilified with a clean conscience since they're obviously lazy or stupid (probably both).





Science, philosophy and anything that seeks to discover the truth about the most interesting matters would be pointless if those truths were simple and already fully established. Uncertainty, not certainty, is the stimulus for earnest enquiry. Good enquirers, as distinguished from those who pander to commercial and political forces (and funding sources), talk about "truths" with much more caution than the politically, ideologically and commercially motivated.





Is the point of "education" to discover the truth - or are political and business interests more important driving forces? Is the point of it to make people more intelligent, more skeptical and discerning, more critical in thought, more independent in judgement, more creative and innovative with no restrictions on perspective, or is the point of it to make them more "employable", more serviceable to the political, ideological and commercial forces that compete to dominate the world from the off?





Was "education" invented just for the sake of letting people think about and investigate whatever precise matters they wished - or was it designed to make them think within artificially dislocated niches demarcated by the powers that be, and to make them investigate matters and interpret results within a framework subconsciously imposed by the net impact of those powers?





If the latter is the case, "education" can never be purely about "merit". There's always the matter of enthusiasm about working within the implicit rules and regulations. Yet surely the greatest peaks of thought should always involve some sort of heresy, some questioning and mockery of the perspective taken by conventional and authoritative wisdom, some scornful declaration of independence from the rules and regulations unthinkingly obeyed by mere normal people?





Does pressure placed on institutions to obtain "results" and to be "standardized" translate into more stringent and narrow definitions of "right" questions and answers in advance, in more non-subtle emphasis of those answers from teachers to students, in more passive, uncritical absorption of "facts" by students, and in a more "educated" but more stupid, docile, zombie-esque population?|||When Qin Shi Huang Di unified China with an Iron Fist, he did it by hammering the people into a cohesive whole. New ideas that did not directly make the state run more efficiently were banned as heresy.





The word "heresy" comes from the Greek word-haireisthai: "to choose". To choose a way of life that did not directly benefit the powers that be, whether they are Emperors said to be from Heaven, or the Industrialists turned Corporations who fund the board of Education, is to invite the scorn of those still trapped in the illusion of freedom.





What our children learn is ultimately not really decided by us. The economic necessity of both parents working is a huge factor here. Now there is little choice but to have children go to public school, where they are hammered into a form beneficial to the powers that be, who as I stated above, are responsible for our school system as we see it today.





Our school system will not put forth any one like Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu or Davinci and in it's current form actually stifles such individuals. Such men shake up the world, wake it from it's slumber from time to time, but always there are men like Paul to Jesus who corrupt and dogmatize the workings of these brilliant individuals. They say that yesterdays heresy is today's convention.





When the focus is more on education and standardization, learning is stifled. To the vast majority, learning is something they HAD to do as opposed to chose to do. Because of this, the goal of making large numbers of expendable people-all with more or less the same training-can be implemented. The goal of education therefore, is to make us just skilled enough to benefit those in power, but not skilled enough to actually challenge them.|||Our modern education system, in virtually all public schools, is based on theories of the mind achieved by assuming that man is an animal and needs "conditioning." Since those words are not very politically correct, they are now suppressed, but that is still the philosophical basis for American education -- and most other countries around the world.





Zombies indeed.|||real education is only for the elite...





all other models are petit bourgeois myths...





the powers that be do not want a highly educated populace...|||Education is the problem...|||Sounds like an attempt to find "easy answers"; philosophy or science could be used in creative ways, as we're seeing with computer programing soon entertainment will involve parsing variables.





Although there isn't hope for everything, some say "time is money" etc.





There are systems that integrate education with reality, vis. game mentality.





Education doesn't have to be part of the problem, but then again education is solving some difficult problems, like Sex and Criminalism.





You wouldn't propose a sex fantasy to solve problems, nor would you always say that criminal reform is a form of education. But sometimes it looks brilliant with the right contrast; e.g. Epicureanism is an interesting lifestyle of taste, comfort, and charity or efficiency as a paradigm, also the following may solve criminalism and be integrated in EDUCATION:





1. Comfort


2. Judgment


3. Regularity


4. Emotion





For example, in terms of point levels or basic provisions for adequacy, the old question, Why Not Write Haiku, if genius is stimulation?|||The point of education should be to make society a working system, a system that benefits the people. Learning history for five years, is worthless, compared to learning what it takes to gather and manufacture resources to satisfy needs. If children are taught fairy tales, they will think in fairy tales. If children are taught about themselves, and the world, they will be more realistic, and this teaching would result in a world lacking corruption, as we know it to be today.|||Gee, if that block of text of yours weren't something I'm very interested in, I'd have readily dismissed it as tl;dr. But since it is...



Many people today think that the primary purpose of education is providing the labor market with employable individuals. In my country at least, public school curriculum is dictated by the government, and your typical teacher won't do a thing besides what is required of him, officially. When I was in school, I would ask science teachers to perform this and that experiment in front of the class, so we could see the correspondence between formulas and what was happening in the real world, and they would refuse because the experiment "was not included in the curriculum".



However, asking teachers to perform experiments is something very uncommon. Students of today lack curiosity; to be honest, judging by the way the school system was designed, curiosity was never supposed to be encouraged in them. Do you know what classes are all about today? Students pretending they care about the subject at hand so they can get a big shiny A+ and later wave their diploma in front of the employer, and teachers also pretending they care about the subject so they can get through the day and receive their miserable wage at the end of the month. Education is not, and never was within recent times, about learning more in fields you're interested in.



Let's not forget the evaluation system - oh, the dreaded evaluation system! -, that rewards the obedient and the hard-working over the intelligent. In my country, at the end of each semester, you're graded for "behavior", that weighs as a grade just as much as mathematics or biology when calculating the mean grade for the semester. 10 missed classes during the semester and the "behavior" grade is lowered by 1 point. Valuable contributions in class often go unnoticed, but loads of poor grades are awarded for not doing one's homework. Contradicting the teacher in class is discouraged, often by other poor grades because "the teacher is always right". So much for rational, critical enquiry.