Chad, that’s a very deep story with an overall positive message on a challenging subject. You affected my perceptions, my perspective, & I’m sure I’m not alone.
It will be hard to change education without changing ourselves — not sure how we could, absent the necessary inner change. Some of the dots humanity is not yet connecting on a large scale have to do with the underlying union, the oneness of all life, including us. External life is a mirror for what we’ve got going on, within. It’s internal change that brings external results, otherwise we’re trying to force ourselves into structures that just don’t fit.
Regarding education, how humanity views its children is on display. We don’t put them first, don’t work with them, but rather make all the decisions around how they should be handled & “educated.”
We’re perhaps too subject to fads, such as protecting their feelings at all costs, not letting anyone feel like a loser. It doesn’t work, doesn’t even make good “evolutionary” sense. Life is hard & it’s not going to protect their delicate feelings. They’re not given a chance to deal with challenges, being overprotected, instead. As a result, they’ll have a harder time, later on.
Education did well for most of its life as a state responsibility, without federal mandates & curricula. We’d do well to give it back to the states & lose the bloated bureaucracy that always arises on the federal level.
There’s a movement called Unschooling that neither home-schools nor sends children to public or private schools, allowing them, instead, to follow their interests & learn more or less self-directed, with parental support. Testing has indicated that these children are none the worse for it, many of them performing quite well on GED & other tests.
Until the children are placed first regarding education, I doubt anything will work. We aren’t born tabla rasa, the blank slate — we aren’t dumb or stupid until we’re taught in class. Children are over-regimented & under appreciated in education, today. I suggest they need mentors rather than teachers, which would happen if we truly respected & listened to them.
It’s not always possible to fix what’s broken. Sometimes things are so flawed that they deserve to be scrapped. We honor neither children nor teachers, who would receive far greater pay if their profession — & the children — were highly honored by our society. They are not, & I speak as one with a M.Ed. in Early Childhood Special Education.
Your ideas are good. I hope they are heard. Meanwhile, I’d still point to the internal changes as those likely to generate the finest results. Our value systems are currently out of whack — that’s what could use some work.
Right now we put technology first. That makes no sense, as you pointed out in several instances. If we don’t back away from the tech sufficiently to reconsider where we’re going with it, things don’t look good.
Overall USA IQ is currently 98 or 99, depending on which study you consult. That’s not good. It says to me that education isn’t working, & the USA is falling behind. If we took this “remake of education” to the children, themselves, my bet is that they’d have some fantastic improvements to offer, along with many unique perspectives from which we could all learn.
~♥~
