An even more fundamental problem is that education doesn't teach how to think, how to freely express oneself and how to support the expression by others, while still maintaining one's own beliefs. It fact, it seems to do just the opposite. If you want to explore this idea more I highly suggest looking up John Taylor Gatto who was a brilliant and awake educator, and reading what he has to say. He influenced millions of people to think clearly about education, via his teaching, book-writing, and activism. He died in October 2018. Gatto had the most disadvantaged and written-off inner city middle school kids doing college level calculus and reading Moby Dick, all because he fueled their natural desires to learn, instead of shutting down this impulse, which seems to be the true purpose of modern K-12 public education.
He argues similarly to Alan Watts that that our way of education is very confusing to students, bombarding them with an "incoherent ensemble of information" that must be memorized, and takes up a large portion of their daily lives. Information gained from this steady programming has a tendency to be quickly forgotten, while also reinforcing class identity and fostering indifference and dependence, both emotionally and intellectually. He also draws conclusions that point to the control mechanisms in place behind these systems, reinforcing and demanding the need for supervision and confirmation by recognized authorities,
This is an interesting thought from The Naked Capitalist writer Lambert Strether:
"It wasn't the “dunces” who lost two wars, butchered the health care system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to — only some, to be fair — college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the “dunces”; they didn't have the political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale."
I’ve enjoyed your posts about the problems with education. It really is troubling that the system is so broken. Insightful educators like Gatto and Watts are all too rare.
There’s an old cynical saying that says the point of (American) education is to produce people who are smart enough to work and pay taxes but not smart enough to realize that they are brainwashed.
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I hadn't heard that, but I believe it!
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A reason critical thinking is being pushed in schools more in the US is to teach kids to actually think. Unfortunately its upsetting some parents when they have to help their kids with homework that is written in a way they werent taught to understand or when they are forced to help their kids without calculators and have to show paper. Perhaps there should be catch up classes offered to parents.
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Unfortunately, for some governments, societies, schools or teachers, it is not in their interest for the student to be critical, to have an opinion, to be able to discern and argue. A critical person is a citizen who is difficult to handle, to manipulate. That is why in some schools, as you say, more memorization is promoted, repetition like parrots talking or scratched disc. A person who questions his reality is a person who is able to transform his world, to do it better. Well, we should also see what kind of teachers are training our young people. Maybe they're not critical either and they're just memorizers. The snake that bites its tail!
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