Education
Jean Piaget, one of the greatest minds to study child development and learning, stated that ‘[t]he goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things.’(1)
While education may have many goals, this serves as a good foundation. Despite this clear and honest directive, modern institutions are fundamentally confused about what this is supposed to look like. Or worse, they may not be confused at all.
Conformity and guidelines for learning may be actively discouraged in some settings, but even when these are present, they are not entirely unconstrained. This is important because nothing in reality is boundless, but it can be misconstrued and abused like all good intentions. High quality learning should be active and exploratory, but what is included and excluded within these bounds? What are the rules of engagement? Who is participating? These are all ripe for abuse - it all depends on the TEACHER.
We often do not choose the schools our children attend, and we do not choose their teachers or the curriculum either. And while these are not unique in any respect to most public institutions we are generally compelled to utilize, none have the capacity to completely screw up our children as much as poor schooling. Teachers and schools can compromise and damage our children for good.
Most teachers do not pose a threat to our children. But it has increasingly become the occupation of choice for ACTIVISTS, intent on transforming both education and our children into tools for an agenda. It is in this way, when the individual or special interests of teachers or institutions are used to serve a perverse incentive, that our children, and by extension society, suffers. It appears as though using children as a captive audience for proselytization is trending beyond religion these days.
The foundation of Piagetian education and its desire to make learning active and exploratory is no longer being used in any traditional sense. Currently, young children are actively being exposed to mature themes such as sex and sexual ideologies, politics, racism, social justice, and a host of other concepts they do not understand. Often, the teachers themselves do not understand the subject either.
This often occurs because they have a childless activist teacher who does not understand, nor cares to understand, that children generally prefer to just play innocent games and eat snacks. You would think that this knowledge would be a mandatory part of becoming a teacher.
What is interesting is that while Piagetian exploratory learning is present in some corrupt sense, it is swiftly curtailed when teachers and institutions conclude that our children have been sufficiently schooled to hold their prescribed views and beliefs. So, the model is used to justify introducing mature themes, but it is then dismissed once the prescribed boundaries have been set. This is the opposite of education; it is SCHOOLING.
As our children grow and progress through the institutions, it does not appear anything changes. Most high school and post-secondary students, who are now adults, view the institutional narratives as sacrosanct. How could a system dedicated to exploratory learning produce prideful students that are completely possessed with ideological views if it were not compromised? The proof is in the pudding.
It is impossible to become a man or woman capable of doing new things if we have been taught to believe that we know it all, that we are owed everything, and that complaining about things is how we improve them.
(1) Benson, N., Collin, C., Ginsburg, J., Grand, V., Lazyan, M., Weeks, M. (2012) The Psychology Book, London: Dorling Kindersley Ltd.
Posted: 15 Feb 2023
