Education Or Lack Thereof: Tradition and Autopilot Learning in Schools
I’m going to put two random courses from a college curriculum together: Algebra I and Western Literature I. That’s quite a bit of brainy subject matter and no one no matter how academically inclined would have an easy time getting through those classes. They’re important, right? When you invest time in one educational pursuit, you are subtracting time away from a different educational pursuit. After all, you can’t be two places at one time so you need to choose wisely in selecting an educational venture. If you want to be a math teacher, picking a phys ed course over an algebra course may provide the short term gain of an easier semester, but you’d be cheating yourself over the long term. Algebra and Phys Ed can be workable. Now what if you wanted to be an English teacher? Western Lit and Algebra? Western Lit and Phys Ed? Algebra and Phys Ed?
Algebra and Phys Ed make no sense if you want to be an English teacher, that’s easy. So what’s the difference between Western Lit and Phys Ed vs. Western Lit and Algebra?
There’s no difference. No matter how good you are at algebra it’s never going to make you a better writer. Unless, of course, algebra is something you have both skill and interest or even a lack of skill, but a strong interest. If you have a ton of skill, but no interest, algebra is going to be a waste of time that will detract from the pursuit of the development of a skill a student may really need. If a course is going to be forced down someone’s throat and the person isn’t interested, it isn’t going to result in anything of value. The student goes into an autopilot survival mode where he or she can sleepwalk through course material merely to get a passing grade, merely to acquire three credits in a necessary evil to the accumulation process of earning an advanced degree. Talk about robotic. The organic, living process of education (the person being educated) takes a total backseat to fixed pattern of the educational system.
But no matter how you explain it, there’s going to be a crowd of people who are going to insist algebra is a better choice than phys ed. Now, when these people are pressed to really provide some kind of factual basis for this, such as the compelling argument why algebra is a better replacement for phys ed, they can’t provide one. They respond algebra out of a pre-response stimulus. They’ve been programmed to see algebra as a ‘better’ subject than phys ed, even when its inclusion is irrelevant.
We invest time and energy on a subject, place penalties on underperformance in the subject to reach the goal of discarding all acquired and accumulated knowledge at the first chance. Once the class ends, it’s tossed. Forever.
That’s the screwed up value system found in education.
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