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Before we started school a lot of our learning came from natural curiosity and from playing games, which are a type of creative imitation of ‘real life’. Indeed, curiosity and playfulness are observed in many young mammals such as puppies, kittens, lion cubs and bear cubs. This is the natural way to be – curious, questioning, playful, creative and spontaneous. Then we went to school, a very abstract and alien environment, and got all that knocked out of us to some extent or another.
We got schooled!
Schooling society
Today’s schools were designed to solve yesterdays problems. Schools in some form or another have been around since at least the time of classical Greece 2500 years ago and probably much longer. However, our current industrial model of schooling society has only been around for about 200 years and hasn’t changed much in that time. Compulsory, universal schooling was instituted in Prussia in the early 1800s. The idea at the time was to put 25-30 children of the same age in a largish room with a teacher. The students would all be instructed to a standard curriculum and examined to make sure they had learned it. This all sounds very familiar.
Modern-day schools are stuck in this 19th century industrial mindset of conformism and obedience that crushes curiosity and creativity. If anything it has become more industrialised. For instance, new information technologies have simply been added as tools to do the same thing more efficiently. Teachers roles have become increasingly more bureaucratic.
In 1971, the social commentator criticised the education ‘industry’ in his book Deschooling Society, he had this to say:
“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being ‘with it,’ yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.” – Ivan Illich
For most schools in the western world curriculum is standardised and is suited to the ‘average’ student. Of course, there is no such thing as an actual average student and yet curriculum gets standardised because that’s the easiest way to set and monitor achievement. No-one is naturally standard; every person has a different mix of personality, values, interests, intentions, learning ability, attention span, cognitive ability, upbringing, circumstances, and so on.
Efficiency in education is counter-productive. Using an industrial model for education makes it like any sort of industrial production line – creating exact replicas and throwing ‘faulty seconds’ onto the rubbish heap.
Specialist education
Another negative aspect of modern education is that schools and universities are increasingly focused on vocational education and training. Courses and curricula are designed to churn out specialised and conformist employees, not well-rounded citizens with a love of learning and a critical sense. Curricula are standardised and people who aren’t up to standard, drop out. The factory model of education necessitates the denial of creativity and individuality.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions. – Noam Chomsky
In summary, the facts are:
- Schools, especially secondary/high schools, are based around systemic competition. They might be called colleges but they are not very collegial.
- More and more of a teacher’s time is spent performing bureaucratic functions and less time on teaching.
- Children are being ‘baby-sat’ while their parents are hard at work holding up a system that the children need to be trained for.
- Subjects and curricula are becoming more focussed on vocational training rather than a broad-based general education.
- The teaching of subjects that relate to or enhance naturally sustainable societies, such as arts and culture, social studies, and home economics have increasingly been sidelined.
- Curriculum is standardised so that achievement standards can be set and tested. This benefits the government watchdogs and unimaginative employers who need a scoring system to know who is a ‘winner’ and who is a ‘loser’.
Teach children how to learn
As Ivan Illich said, the unrecognised fact is that real learning does not come from instruction. Learning comes from “unhampered participation in a meaningful setting”.
The object of education should to prepare young people to educate themselves. In other words, don’t teach children what to learn, teach them how to learn.
Children at a young age intuitively know what they are interested in. The more things they are interested in the better. We should encourage them, and everyone else, to follow their nose, and hopefully they will never stop. An important goal of learning is more than the acquisition of knowledge, it is the attainment of understanding and, ultimately, wisdom. Understanding and wisdom come from having an ever wider view of reality, or what is often called the ‘big picture’.
Holistic education
This means learning should be holistic; learning is about the whole person in the context of the ‘big-picture’. The whole person has interests, motivations and abilities that are intellectual, artistic, and practical. A well-rounded person continues to develop their critical thinking and understanding, imagination and creativity, communication and social skills, numeracy and literacy, and general knowledge, in addition to their specific range of interests.
Having a wide-ranging general knowledge will help people understand others and thereby be more tolerant, respectful and considerate of them. One of the drivers of prejudice and discrimination is ignorance.
Also, keeping certain groups in society, women for example, ignorant is a way to subjugate and control – this is inhuman and beyond contempt.
De-schooling society
Education is crucial to well-being. Ivan Illich realised the importance of ‘deconstructing’ education – making it more flexible, diverse, unstructured, self-directed, cooperative, holistic and much less compromised by institutional goals and metrics.
Instead of being schooled we need to be free to choose our own way. Read about this in ‘Learning Self-sufficiency’ here »