Are we medicating and educating our solutions away?

Posted by JMG (Guest Contributor) at 12:09 PM on 02 Jun 2008

Read more about: education | parenting | green living

Best talk on education ever, from Sir Ken Robinson:

For story: Are we medicating and educating our solutions away?
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This was excellent.

The basic attack on the souldead instrumentalism of modern education has of course been done many times. If true education, as a humanist would define it, is to expand the horizons of the student, to be his guide out through the expanses of his potentialites, especially to unsuspected gardens and waterfalls, to be a midwife for the student's own thoughts which rise from the core of who he is, as Socrates expressed it, then modern "education" is as far from this as can be conceived.

On the contrary, this system's goal is REDUCTIVE. Its goal is to systematically destroy any human capacities the student may have, and especially any capacity for original thought or creativity. The trees and flowers are to be ripped up, the hill raked and dumped into the stream, which is now just a gutter, to get to the vein of filthy, serviceable "energy".
That's what it is - to take a person who had the potential to become a human being, destroy that potential, and instead render him a serviceable cog in the machine.
(If along the way they can also train the next generation's cadre of government and business fascists by enthroning the jockocracy and promocracy and approving and assisting the terrorism of bullying, that's also part of the plan.)

And what is the curriculum? Like Robinson said, it's purely functional, instrumental, meant to render the student a fungible spare part, ready to take a "job" in the "growth" machine, whose ideology and its indoctrination has been so much the overriding focus of all those years of education that they come off the assembly line as perfect talking dolls. Pull the string and they regurgitate: money! capitalism! growth! money! Hummer! property! money! shopping! shopping!..

In thinking about what kind of movement I'd love to try to get off the ground if I had the money and land to seed it, a kind of Noah's Ark permaculture movement to learn to live sustainably, spiritually, as human beings and not as appendages of machines spending a lifetime in the ICU, and in this way to weather the storm of Peak Fossil Fuel, climate change, and energy descent, I envision a home schooling movement, where our children could be educated holistically and humanistically, where creativity and spiritual literacy are indeed as important as the more normal functional literacy Robinson compared it with. Imagine enough people coming together that they could hire their own teachers and assemble their own schools, work in the fields in the morning while the kids are in class, and then in the afternoon the children come to the fields as well. (Marx called for farm work as a standard part of the curriculum, something I've long thought an excellent idea.)

Oh well, that's just a few thoughts I had on listening to this.

by Russ at 1:28 PM on 02 Jun 2008

It Can't Happen Here

Schooling is just a result of what the ruling class wants the kids to learn. In order to transform the schools in the manner you envision, which would be exponentially if not infinitely better than what now exists for the reasons you cite, the entire society would have to change from one based on greed, materialism, and individualism, to one based on mental and spiritual evolution and ecological morality. There are tiny examples of this, such as some Buddhist monasteries and hunter-gatherer cultures. While they only represent a fraction of a percent of human culture, those are the societies and cultures the rest of humanity should be emulating.

by Wolverine at 3:27 PM on 02 Jun 2008

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