Stuck in the middle with you: Lessons in the mediocrity of school

In Finland, school grades are the epitome of intelligence signalling since the ability to remember what is already known is far more valuable than the skills necessary to find out what is yet to be known. Note the sarcastic tone.

Actually, school can be important if you look at it from the standpoint that learning basic skills is a necessary foundation to learning advanced skills. School itself is not the issue but the institutionalised, centralised nature of school is an issue.

There are several fundamental problems with institutionalised learning.

1: Slow to change
2: Location Dependant
3: Quality variation
4: Drive for average
5: Insensitive to the individual

1. Obviously, when there is a centralised system evaluated by standardized indicators of success, the ability for any one school or teacher within to affect change is also diminished. This drives for the maintenance of status quo attitudes and even though people think 'things have changed', the changes have not kept pace with the environmental requirements. This makes institutionalised learning more irrelevant with each passing day.

2. Location dependence seems to be somewhat mitigated by the internet yet, under observation, the impact of technology to decentralise the locational restrictions has been mediocre at best. Children still have to go to school. If the institutions had better managed technology, this would be much less the case. There is of course the social aspect but, there are much better places and ways to socialise than at school.

3. Quality variation affects all things because when humans are involved, there is always going to be a plethora of intentional and non-intentional shifts from the standards. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing because when it comes to standardising humans, it is largely an act of violence (I will get to later).

4. Schools are an exercise in average where they are evaluated on how much they can change the overall position of the group. As you can imagine, the easiest ways to improve the average of a large group is to improve the majority, not the minority groups of very poor learners or, those who are brilliant. This has some perhaps obvious ramifications for the future of students.

5. Lastly (in this short list), is that the lessons themselves are standardised for the averages across core groups and are insensitive to those who have talents that lay outside of the core fields. Lately, this includes much of the creative pursuits, you know, the ones that have a chance at problem solving what hasn't yet been solved.

People may argue how much schools have improved but as an example, I use graduating students in year 12 maths class in 1997 who are not significantly better than graduating classes 20 years earlier or 20 years later but, they still take the same time to complete the studies. There is not a lot of improvement to be seen considering that funding has gone up significantly in many places.

But these things aside, the fundamental flaws in institutionalised learning is the squashing of talent into a narrow box of importance and the brainwashing of those contained into thinking it is so.

The people who are outliers are chopped to size to fit and essentially their uniqueness (their competitive advantages in the marketplace) are framed as weaknesses. It is not a free market environment where skills based on requirements thrive but rather an engineered scaffolding where what is valuable is dictated by the centralised authorities with their own agendas in mind.

When looking at market values, scarcity and supply and demand matter, where things that are scarce and have utility are much more valuable than those that are ubiquitous, even with utility. I spoke yesterday of the talent economy that will hopefully take increasing share from the consumptive attention economy of entertainment. Rare talent has value.

But, this is the issue with the school system, they are not developing the individual rare talents that many may have a predilection for, they are teaching everyone to be the same. And when everyone is the same, there is no competitive advantage, no value. People seem to even applaud this as a success in equality when in actual fact, it is a case of oppression.

Imagine having something you are good at being degraded and minimised as if it is not important whereas someone who happens to have talents in a core curriculum field gets supported and, it is the state that is doing this, the one you pay taxes to to manage such things. Again, there is a free market issue here and even if one wants to home school children, it is not easy, not always legal and, not always possible for the parents.

But, here is something I find laughable with the entire societal view of school. It is schools job (granted by the state) to educate a populace to get them working so they can pay taxes to support the requirements of the state at all associated levels. Yet, they have outdated, poorly trained, technologically incapable teachers (not all, some are brilliant) using even older tools, teaching lessons from the past to children who will face challenges that are largely unknown now. It is bound to fail.

The next laughable thing is that parents say, go to school so you can get a good job when the school systems are failing in this area and have been, even for their generation. What is the definition of a good education and a 'good job' anyway? If it is one where a person is able to have a decent relative life and be debt free, it is failing miserably as personal debt continues to climb across the globe.

Now, one can argue that it isn't the school's fault that people can't get jobs, make bad investment decisions or have no impulse control but, they definitely aren't helping the situation by not even touching upon the personal skillsets required to approach these areas. They will not even go near the ideas of self-reflection and self-training. Why?

Well, control of a population is relatively easy and if you get the balance right, no army is required. All one needs is enough entertainment and a drive for a little bit more, and a debt cycle that allows people to increase purchases but never get out of debt. Anyone who does manage to get out of debt becomes a threat for they are no longer under the yoke of lenders. They are free.

If everyone is free, who is left to be governed? Now, that would be anarchy.

The future of education will slowly be pushed towards a decentralised approach where access to almost any form of education in any field will be available to anyone. Can you imagine the role that a community like Steemit and Steem could play in this tearing apart and restructuring of institutional education into a decentralised platform of self-funded learning?

Not only could people be able to find and practice their diverse mix of talents, but they will have a place to utilise them in a free-market environment that will reward them for their effort. They will literally have the chance to employ themselves by doing what they love and earn enough that they need not be in debt whilst supporting others to do the same at a global level.

Talk about threats to the establishment, do you think it won't meet resistance?

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]