This is a subject I'm very opinionated on. First of all, I don't mean to be elitist but we have to go into the debate bearing in mind that the majority of the country is ignorant and conformist.The current education system is called the factory system of education. In the 1920s people thought "wow, factories are working really well, lets use a factory style environment to get children to learn".The problem with this is that in the nineteen twenties the administration's official position was that eighth grade was all the education somebody needed to succeed in life. So the people who actually graduated high school were the type with drive and initiative. So they could teach more or less the same things to all the students. Like an assembly line.Eighty years later, kids are expected to graduate high school and take the same classes. Because of this, the factory method fails. It is like trying to build a bicycle when the stuff that comes to you on the conveyor belt is anything from a piece of scrap metal to a quad core processor. You have to improvise on how to make a bicycle out of it and the results are often unsatisfactory. The factory system had too much invested in it to end, so it had to have another use found in it.The vast majority of the people who vote are ill-informed and ignorant. Both parties want to keep it that way. So they thought the way to keep people ill-informed was to start trying to fit everybody through a round hole, if they're a square beg sobeit. The education system became a machine designed to walk the thin line ofA) Teaching proficiency on a range of subjectswhileB) Keeping the middle class conformingC) Keeping the lower class off the streetsD) Keeping the upper class as the upper classHow did they do this? They made standards that were unachievable for schools as a whole. This was so the teachers were always playing catchup. Even the best teachers would at times have to say "all of you go home, read this chapter and do these questions" without teaching anything just to get through what they were supposed to get through.This made teachers and the system not very amenable to kids who were outside the norm. John Lennon once said "They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool" and it is so true. As a result, the kids who did think for themselves would often be discouraged and get worse grades, attempting to influence the kids due to peer pressure.This leads one to the inevitable conclusion that school is designed to fill the mind while dulling the wits.Agh, I practically just rewrote the pedagogy of the oppressed. I'm out.
