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

Progressive education reform has accomplished many things. It has made school a lot more pleasant, and a lot more interesting. But it’s also brought with it costs for us as individuals and as citizens. Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture.

isn’t that, more or less, what we should be aiming for? The cultivation of students who care about what’s going on in the world and are willing to take a stand for it? Students who understand their own power, their own interest, and their own responsibility in shaping the world? Schools that discuss, debate and act on ideas the students care about?

‘One of the purposes of modern education is to destroy people’s imaginations’, he told me. He argues that while the Western model of education that has been adopted by India may have helped it to better fit into the global economy, it has been at the expense of many peoples’ connection to their culture, their community and their ecosystem. ‘Not onl