Education is a necessary part of one’s life. When a child turns about four years old he is admitted to school in order to learn different things that he does not view in everyday life. Till the age of eighteen he finishes his higher education and gets rewarded with a degree. One cannot deny the mere fact that education is important. But the problem is, since it is so important no one has ever bothered to realize that the system does not fit in the mindset of children today.
It was wisely pointed out by Wendy Priesnitz that:
“Our rapidly moving, information-based society badly needs people who know how to find facts rather than memorize them, and who know how to cope with change in creative ways. You don’t learn those things in school.”
Factory System
If we take a look at the system of education that was created 200 years ago, we come to realize that in those times this type of system was based on military training. It was a factory system. The knowledge fed into the child’s mind could not and as they say “should not” be altered in any way. From this we come to realize that schools do not have the capacity to polish creative minds, rather now they are set on making robotic mindsets incapable of being creative. Those who tend to be creative are thus labelled as rebellious and their repute is destroyed.
R.D. Laing had criticized it as:
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.”
Modern Era:
The modern era is filled with innovations and technology. So even after calculators have been invented, children are not allowed to take calculators with them to exams. So what is the point of making calculators in the first place? What the higher ups fail to see is that we are not living in the Stone Age. And even during the medieval times, such inventions had not been created thus the people were already mentally strong enough to grasp things in seconds. The mind set and brain power has already shifted towards technology. Now there is easy access to any information one wants in the world and yet our education system has not upgraded for 2 centuries.
Noam Chomsky had wisely said:
“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.”
Different IQ's:
The education system is run by test scores. Every child is tested with the same question paper, without even realizing that every child has a different IQ and a different set of ideas. This system only promotes those who have become robotic, and the flexible children are labelled failures. Not everyone is supposed to be good at math. If a child is strong in his literature skills society would judge him on the basis of the marks he had scored on his physics test.
John Taylor Gatto had pointed out that:
“I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
Conclusion:
In the end, it is merely foolish to believe that we can still use this age-old education system. We are averting our eyes from this major crisis, we fail to realize that this system has failed and a new system needs to be introduced. We force children to learn things they do not know, instead of polishing the talents that they had already been born with. Thus we need to change this frenetic education system before it topples upon us. The system needs to be upgraded to secure a better, healthier and more promising future for the generations to come.
Even Albert Einstein had once said:
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”