Education Doesn't Work 2.0 - Freddie deBoer

"We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly... See more

Yet at first sight a combined meritocracy (economic and educational) seems very appealing and easy to sell. Equal opportunities for all, the greatest rewards for those who make the greatest effort — who could object to that? Experience shows, however, that discrepancies at the start strongly influence the final result. In the case of an educational

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These liberal education reformers were attempting to reconcile what the historian of education David Labaree has called the three competing ideals in American education, each corresponding to a different end goal and a different model of the student subject. The goal of “democratic equality” sees students as citizens, with the role of schools being

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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

Notwithstanding the belief in education, though, there has been an accumulating body of evidence to show that in fact there is no simple equation relating benefits such as economic growth or individuals’ life prospects to schooling. In reality, school seems to do little to transform people’s opportunities or social mobility in general. As early as

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education has largely stopped serving its primary purpose, preparing young people to thrive and giving them the skills and the hunger to continue a lifelong journey of learning.