Thoughts To Provoke Your Thoughts

The Sick Problems with our Sick System of Education

I talk a lot about my problems with how our current education system is run today. The rigid guidelines it imposes on students, the killing of creativity and individualism, the lack of teaching in practical relevant areas of life, and the grading system that motivates students to learn and then subsequently forget information in order to receive proverbial gold stars, are a few among many issues I have with the system and the way it operates. Here is a list of quotes by people who speak much more eloquently than I can on the problems with our education system. This is simply me sharing these quotes so they can reach a larger audience and I take no credit for any of the information presented from here on out.

1."Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags." – Ivan Illich 

2. "Our rapidly moving, information-based society badly needs people who know how to find facts rather than memorize them, and who know how to cope with change in creative ways. You don't learn those things in school." – Wendy Priesnitz

3. "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. " – Albert Einstein

4. We destroy the disinterested (I do not mean uninterested) love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards — gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards... in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.... We kill, not only their curiosity, but their feeling that it is a good and admirable thing to be curious, so that by the age of ten most of them will not ask questions, and will show a good deal of scorn for the few who do. – John Holt, How Children Fail

5. "There were no sex classes. No friendship classes. No classes on how to navigate a bureaucracy, build an organization, raise money, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what was important to me. Not knowing how to do these things is what messes people up in life, not whether they know algebra or can analyze literature." – William Upski Wimsatt

6. Believe nothing merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is tradition, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings – that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide. – Gautama Buddha

7. "Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities." – Seymour Papert

8. "The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal." – R.D. Laing

9. "The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness." – Jules Henry