The Key to Effective Education (Forbes)

Malaise of Mass Education


The trouble began when mass education was introduced. It was necessary:

--To decide what skills and knowledge everyone has to have to be a productive citizen of a developed country in the industrial age.

--To make sure the way this information is defined and standardized, to fit into the standardization required by the industrial culture.

--To develop the means of describing and communicating the standardized information (textbooks, curricula)

--To train people to comprehend the standardized material and master the means of transmitting it (teacher training, pedagogy).

--To create places where the trainees (children) and the trainers (unfortunately called teachers, which gives them a status they do not deserve) can meet--so-called schools (again, a term stolen from a much different milieu, endowing these new institutions with a dignity they also do not deserve).

--And, to provide the coercive backing necessary to carry out this major cultural and social upheaval.

In keeping with all historic attempts to revolutionize the social order, the elite leaders who formulated the strategy, and those who implemented it, perverted the language. They used terms that had attracted a great deal of respect in new ways that turned their meanings upside down, but they helped make the new order palatable to a public that didn't quite catch on. Every word-- teacher, student, school, discipline and so on -- took on meanings diametrically opposed to what they had originally meant.

Consider this one example from my recent experience. I attended a conference of school counselors, where the latest ideas in the realm of student counseling were being presented. I went to a session on the development of self-discipline and responsibility, wondering what these concepts mean to people embedded in traditional schooling. To me, self-discipline means the ability to pursue one's goals without outside coercion; responsibility means taking appropriate action on one's own initiative, without being goaded by others.

To the people presenting the session, both concepts had to do solely with the child's ability to do his or her assigned class work. They explained that a guidance counselor's proper function was to get students to understand that responsible behavior meant doing their homework in a timely and effective manner, as prescribed, and self-discipline meant the determination to get that homework done. George Orwell was winking in the back of the room.

Today, there are two worlds that use the word education with opposite meanings: One world consists of the schools and colleges (and even graduate schools) of our education complex, in which standardization prevails. In that world, an industrial training mega-structure strives to turn out identical replicas of a product called "people educated for the 21st century." The second is the world of information, knowledge and wisdom, in which the real population of the world resides when not incarcerated in schools. In that world, learning takes place like it always did, and teaching consists of imparting one's wisdom, among other things, to voluntary listeners.