Forty-six U.S. states have announced that they will design a unified child education program, spanning from kindergarten through high school. The goal is to work out a unified standard suitable for institutions of higher education the world over. The main indicator of success will be “competitiveness at the international level.”
My Comment: This program might, in the end, completely stifle a child’s ingenuity. Why are our schools so unsuccessful?
With the emergence of mass in-line production at the turn of the 19th century, wherein man and machine supplemented and replaced one another, its creator, American engineer Frederick Taylor, placed the organization of machine and human labor on the same footing.
The factory workers necessarily became replaceable machine parts.
After the invention of the conveyor belt by Henry Ford, there arose a need to train factory workers faster, as though on a human conveyor belt.
This need fueled the formation of the modern school system: separate stages called “grades,” where children are grouped strictly by age. The children are expected to climb from grade to grade in the allotted time. Every class has an overseer, a “teacher,” precise divisions in time, bells, breaks, and so on.
The result are schools that are isolated from life, created with the purpose of churning out factory workers akin to the interchangeable soldiers for the army of Friedrich the Great. The principle of education has remained the same to this day. School provides very little knowledge (graduates leave school retaining only about 5% of what they had been taught), but in no way does it make a child into a person.
This is the core of all of society’s problems: the upbringing we give our children determines the society we create.
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