Christopher Chase on Education
“Asking kids to meet target on standardized tests is like making them meet a sales quota. Our kids are not commodities.” ~K.L. Nielsen
Over the last decades, research in education and learning indicates that the "standardized" model of schooling is based on several faulty assumptions. It assumes that learning can be measured by standardized tests, and that all children will learn at the same rate and in the same manner. This is just not true. The fact that children learn best when something is meaningful, enjoyable and interesting for them is ignored. The importance of learning in groups and from slightly older children is also not considered relevant.
As Ken Robinson described in his TED talk “Changing Education Paradigms“ the industrial model of education is a form of social engineering that does not fit with the natural way children actually learn. It does not reward creativity, innovation, independence, compassion, intuition, confidence, cooperation and many other essential character strengths, instead fostering social dysfunction, alienation and (for countless people over the last hundred years) a sense of personal failure and incompetence.
In a somewhat subversive way, the love of learning and natural curiosity that children bring into this world is being re-programmed, so that they can be taught to work hard in order to please others, and to do things for utilitarian reasons, to obtain external rewards and status, rather than intrinsic happiness.
Factory schools are designed to divide children into the categories of winners and losers, thereby creating a social “underclass” of potentially bright learners, who become unmotivated and unskilled. Those with low skills, status and self-esteem are then drawn toward harmful activities, such as gangs, crime and illegal drugs. Just as troublesome, “approved” drugs are now being given to children to force compliance and attentiveness in schools, the future consequences of which are unknown.
It’s a model of education that seems straight out of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, designed to produce obedient workers for the modern industrial economy of the last century. In effect, its more like a method for manufacturing future robot workers then for nurturing true creativity, independence, skillfulness and learning.
~Christopher Chase
Educational Malpractice: The Child Manufacturing Process https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/.../educat.../
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