I hear you. Unfortunately, you can not give back your education or the foundational skills it helped you develop on top of which you have independently or otherwise built secondary skills that now form a basis for your livelihood and then give you room to philosophize and condemn the structures that have helped you come thus far.
And for those who share the same beliefs without the experience of a school, I feel sorry and can only conclude that you have evidence you would like to share with us one day that formed the basis of your theory/belief.
Whenever a conversation devolves into “…it is my opinion and I have a right to it” or variations of such, I recognise and respect the speakers’ low tolerance for debate, exploration and possibly facts. Opinions have been unnecessarily given if only informally the same level of respect/attention as other fundamental human rights, except of course all the fundamental rights rests on facts, and conversely, opinions rests mostly (depending on the author) on emotions.
Misleading people in the name of opinion is unethical and should be avoided at all cost. If you feel strongly about an opinion, test it out within safety and ethical boundaries.
Education is paramount. Schools are the tools used to distribute standardised education at scale – even the most well-intentioned EdTech initiatives fundamentally function as schools, strip away the many marketing layers and we may come to an agreement on this point.
That said, all things standardised may not meet in absolute terms all needs at all times. And that only provides additional opportunities for entrepreneurs, governments and societies to cater for niches/fringes.
That the current models of education needs to be revisited for many reasons, is not in contention. I feel there is a need for opportunities for parents and teachers and their kids (at the foundational level at least) to be able to customise the child’s learnings and based on the outcomes of small experiments run by these stakeholders, the learning opportunities provided to the child should be tweaked for the child’s maximum benefit. But I do not know a way for this to be done at scale.
When people cite Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and their likes as evidence that school is a scam, I laugh in multiple languages as it is clear those who make these assertions do not understand the circumstances in which these examples were raised in:
…environments that are tough to create at scale, thus leaving us with standardised educational systems and tools as we still have today. And they also forget (or have never learnt) about outliers…people who are just plain lucky enough to beat the odds and win the lottery tickets of life and not squander away their winnings. There will always be very few of those people.
Good morning.
Written on the 14th of April, 2020 and first posted to facebook, here.
