System Failures: The Education System and the Proliferation of Reductive Thinking

Some of us loved it, some loathed it, and many people around the world still fight for the right to access it — school is a universal experience that can both liberate and oppress.

For many, school was more of a prison where you are taught how to think, how to behave, and how to function within a rigid, bell-ridden system that was designed to prepare young minds for the workforce through the standard technique of memorizing and regurgitating information in a test-based environment

The more knowledge students have about the way their brain works, how society operates, and the magic of the natural world in which they live, the more creativity they will be able to exert throughout their lives, helping to evolve society into a place that works better than today.

Thus, this all begs the question, do modern schools actually build knowledge and capacity for all, or do they just reinforce old ideas of how industrial needs are met with a workforce? If schools are, at their fundamental level, designed to create the workers of the future, why are we still teaching siloed skills of the industrial age, when we have... See more

Teachers should be guides of the learning journey, not authoritative instructors ready to dish out abuse or punishment when the child expresses non-conforming behaviors.

In the 1600s, John Amos Comenius, who is often referred to as “the grandfather of modern education” called schools “the slaughterhouse of the mind,” where he saw them devoted primarily to the boring and sometimes brutally-enforced study of Latin by “stuffing and flogging”. He went on to argue for education to follow “the lead of nature. A rational ... See more

Fundamentally then, school and all educative experiences must empower the learner to think freely about the complex world around them, and thus should be a liberator of oppression, not the reinforcer of it.

Educators are there to help guide the curious mind through the moral, ethical, and socially valuable aspects of our time, not to provide a rigid and reductive framework that reinforces obedience.

In order to maintain a linear economic system of production, extraction, and waste that devalues inputs and takes limited responsibility for outputs, you have to reinforce these ‘devalues’ in society, and you do this by making young people conform through educative structures that perpetuate the linear system.