Pam G C Pinheiro

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.

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.

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.

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

In general, schools today have become places where we actively discourage thinking that is not predefined, approved, and stamped by the larger social system of the day; as such, schools reinforce a reward system based on consumption, acquisition, and status increases

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.

Do the schools that we have designed best suit the world we are entering into? Has the old industrial form of education that our current system is based upon become obsolete? How can schools be designed to prepare young people for a changing world with increased needs for circular and systems thinking along with skills for a future that will be ver... See more

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.