The Child Manufacturing Process
~The Child Manufacturing Process~
Were modern schools set up with a hidden agenda, as a way of perpetuating class systems, suppressing innovation, fostering a "consumer" mentality and controlling how children learn to think?
In many schools around the world children are taught to obey authority, work hard, complete tasks on time and provide the "right" answers to questions. They become "consumers" of knowledge who learn to think as instructed and do as they are told.
Factory model schooling creates dependency and powerlessness, by neglecting human individuality, democracy, freedom, spirituality, creativity and community. Little emphasis is given to real-life problem solving, collaborative decision-making, individual interests, intrinsic motivation or innovative thinking.
With a focus on grades and test scores the system perpetuates social classes, with clear winners and losers. Those who comply with authority become good workers, rewarded with higher paying jobs and status once they "graduate" from the system. Those who live in poor communities, reject education's institutions or question authority can become society's outsiders and underclass.
Over the past hundred years the situation has not improved much. In many nations now there is an obsession with test scores, university rankings and career status, along with a neglect of the arts, creativity, community, self-directed learning, spirituality, compassion and wisdom.
Just as factories manufacture and process junk food, where essential nutrients and healthy ingredients are tossed aside, much the same has been happening with factory model school systems.
Millions of professional educators around the world know better, and for decades have fought against this. Knowing what we do about motivation, multiple intelligences, creativity, developmental psychology and how the brain learns many teachers have tried to shift education's paradigm.
Unfortunately, the world's governments and corporations appear to have a different agenda. Innovative self-directed learners (who think outside the box) don't make very good consumers, factory workers, voters or soldiers.
Those in power want compliance, ignorance, obedience, dependency and competition (benefiting multinational corporations)- not innovation, wisdom, democracy, independence and creative collaboration (benefiting local communities).
Einstein warned about this, as did Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Buckminister Fuller, John Taylor Gatto and many others. Schools don't need to be this way, but until students and parents stand up and speak out, loudly rejecting this kind of education, its not likely to change.
~Christopher Chase
Related, from John Taylor Gatto:
"From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, it was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political State needed, too.
At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be put to death, at least among the common population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for equipment weren't conceivably justifiable.
Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of management. Not as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as self-determined, free agents.
Only by a massive psychological campaign could the menace of overproduction in America be contained. That's what important men and academics called it. The ability of Americans to think as independent producers had to be curtailed."
Source: Extending Childhood (The Underground History of US Education)
See also:
The Real Agenda of “So-Called” Education Reform https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/.../the.../
Educational Malpractice: The Child Manufacturing Process
The Circle of Courage – Native American Model of Education https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/.../the.../
Standardising Education: Common Core's Hidden Agenda
Paradigms are Made for Shifting https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/.../paradi.../
The Perpetual Curse of Feudalism, Reinvented https://creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com/.../the.../
Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education (Ken Robinson) http://sirkenrobinson.com/creative-schools-the.../
Understanding How Our Brains Learn
Ken Robinson: Government “Standardization” Blocks Innovative Education Reform
We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. ~Chris Hedges
Book: Empire of Illusion https://amzn.to/3E2A17V [ad]
Photograph by J.R. Eyerman
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor. ~John Taylor Gatto
Book: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling https://amzn.to/3CiYKnR [ad]
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