The first thing I’ll write about is the focus of authoritan demand on students rather than on the students’ own interests.
The basic premise of school is quite simple: arm people for getting jobs or prepare them to go through more schooling to get a job. It pays to be accurate, so here we can surmise that this isn’t a bad thing in itself since in our current stage of civilisation we rely on jobs for society to function. Job issues will have to be handled separately.
School does this by a logical process of learning which is based on demands upon students. You don’t go to school to learn what subjects might interest you and then to pursue them – the curriculum makes that decision instead of you. This is the most fundamental problem. Consider the way a child learns, either by asking a question of interest such as why the sky is blue or by observing something it wants to do – reach a destination, learn to play a game or instrument and other such examples. This in fact remains true for life beyond childhood as well, people learn when they themselves are interested in what they are learning for the sake of learning it.
But modern day schooling is not based on this, the natural process of learning – a process which is interesting, fun and creative, not rigidly defined, measured and authoritan. Where the human is naturally concerned by what it wants to learn, the student is concerned with what curriculum tells it to learn and the manner in which it is to be learned. Poor learning is simply the mind’s natural reaction to information which is not perceived as relevant, a basic fact which has somehow eluded schooling. Students who are taught that it is not they but the curriculum’s goals for them that are important will not value their own learning but that of the curriculum’s goals as that is considered to hold value over intrinsic learning.
Consider the typical task for anything that isn’t deliberately open-ended. The student, instead of being encouraged to engage its natural curiosity, is instead given a task that must be completed in a specified manner and handed to an authority that has already defined the correct answer. How can the student be curious about something which is already asked and answered for them; an already finished process for them to just take in. What interest can there be in simply accumulating facts and pre-determined conclusions? How could anyone be humanely accused to be something so inconsiderately accusing as a poor learner when that is perhaps mankind’s greatest natural drive and ability simply being mistreated and misdirected?
Routinely recognized yourself here during your school days? think about this and the difference you enjoyed while you were still learning outside of this environment.
This subject is complex due to its abstractness; I personally prefer concrete examples and will strive to build this blog on such in the future so that the concepts I discuss can easily be explained and summarized. I’ve only toed on the surface of what I believe is one of the greatest ills of modern society and more will come.
Thank you for reading the first installment, hope you learned something
