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

Mass schooling attempts a systematization of skill and knowledge transfer. The results are predictably mediocre—systems at scale must function with and cater to the lowest common denominator, and the process of standardization loses all sensitivity to context. Since everyone must do the same things, it is difficult for any student to do exceptiona

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Schools were built for a static industrial age. The education system assumed that the outcomes you wanted to produce were clear and you could harness massive scale to train students, factory style.

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.

Now consider our current situation. Despite all the language professing otherwise, in general the education system of the United States is based entirely on genetic determinism. A child is born assumed to have innate traits, including, for example, a preference as to what they want to be when they grow up (somehow just waiting fully-formed inside o... See more

De nombreux symptômes témoignent du malaise actuel dans l’éducation, et ils ne disparaîtront pas à moins que nous prenions conscience des problèmes sous-jacents qui les entraînent, tel que le caractère industriel de l’éducation publique. En effet, bien avant le milieu du XIXe siècle, la plupart des pays développés n’avaient pas de systèmes d’instru

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"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