Let’s talk about education.
In most western countries school is compulsory, and state enforced. Truancy can result in fines and even jail time for parents. This isn’t just a result of state coercion, on a cultural level education holds a sacred status much like religion. This is an institution that most never question, and that’s a problem.
Did you ever wonder how it is that kids spend 13 years from kindergarten to high school supposedly being prepared for life, yet when they get out they don’t have any real skills.
Thirteen years and kids aren’t taught how to grow a garden, how to build a house, how to fix a car, how to balance a checkbook, or cook a healthy meal. Thirteen years and kids come out without even rudimentary concepts of how to organize or lead groups of people, without even a glimmer of understanding of how to resolve conflicts non-violently, and we call this an education?
Yes we get taught to read and write and perform some basic math, but we aren’t taught how to think for ourselves, we aren’t taught the principles of logic, or how to question an ideology. What we are taught is how to sit at a desk and listen obediently as the world is packaged up into a neat little box that we are to accept without question, we’re taught to regurgitate that information for tests, to give the answer that those in authority demand, but most of all we’re conditioned to conform, and the reward for faithfully jumping through all of these hoops for 13 years is a worthless piece of paper that no employer even asks to see. Kids exit high school barely qualified to flip burgers at McDonalds and even for that they have to be trained.
Thirteen years is a long time. It’s most of our childhood. To have this much time taken by force with such pathetic results is unacceptable.
The problem here isn’t a lack of funding, the problem here isn’t poorly trained teachers, lax regulations, or low quality curriculum, the problem is our entire educational paradigm.
The system isn’t designed to prepare children for the real world. It’s designed to format their minds and condition them for a life of subservience. It’s designed to create a population of individuals just smart enough to fill out paperwork and punch a time card, but too stupid to question the system itself or the authority of those running it.
If we want to change course we cannot ignore this aspect of our enslavement. There is no point laboring to wake up other adults in our lives if we send our children to be programmed by the state.
The revolution of the mind must include a revolution in education.
Maine Republic Email Alert 