Categories: uncategorized
Date: 15 August 2005 12:34:37
....is a book I picked up a few years ago. It's a pretty simple book, just filled with lots of quotes about education. Now, I don't know how you got on with education, I guess if you're reading this then some of it stuck. Me? Thank you for asking, I got on with education like a school on fire (George Bernard Shaw if I remember rightly). Why? Because the subtext of the whole of the educational universe is "obey", not "learn, explore, experiment, think, create, grow, consider, observe, imagine and discover", but "obey". I'd figured this much out by the age of 7, yet it still seems to be beyond the understanding of the great and the good of the educational hierarchy. Essentially, compulsory education fulfills this role: It indoctrinates you into believing only those orthodoxies accepted by your teachers and makes heresies out of those ways of thinking and being which do not conform to the accepted ways. In a History "lesson" about the holocaust once the teacher explained to us how important it was to constantly be aware of those things we are giving tacit approval to by our in/actions. So I got up to leave and was told not to be so stupid and to sit down at once. That taught me an important lesson - deconstruct history and you're an academic, deconstruct the present and you're a bloody nuisance. All this wouldn't be so bad if your chances in life weren't so affected by the petty-mindedness of the educational establishment and its obsession with exams. Here's an equation for you to go and revise: Those who get the highest marks in exams are those who are most incapable of thinking for themselves because after being squeezed through the educational machinery you don't have a self left to think for. And then we wonder why so many people suffer mental health / relationship / substance abuse problems. Well, what do you expect after 11 years of having to finish writing your poem NOW because an arbitrary bell is ringing telling you that it's now time to go and learn another completely arbitrary lesson? Unfortunately almost all employers seem to feel that GCSE maths is a more important thing for a prospective employee to possess than a self. The world is truly upside-down.
More on this tomorrow I think, it's a biggie.