Education: Encouraging Stupidity

One of the essential problems of today's education system revolves around what to teach and how to do it. For years the world has been evolving, bringing with it new paradigms to be solved. It seems that the education system was unable to fully adapt to the new challenges we face every day. Until now, more effort has been put into what than how, and it has been thought that once we knew what the students should learn, we would see as evident the way in which they should learn it.

I am not in favour of the idea that when we ask "what" should young people learn in their respective schools, many people tend to think of knowledge-subjects that, although they may be different from those currently taught by accident, in the formal sense they still maintain the old compartmentalized structure of the current educational contents. The current educational system does not care if the mathematics class is replaced by a class of corporal expression or meditation, the only thing it does is to use different labels while it tries to continue dividing the school time and the desire of the children to know in such a gridded and unrealistic way.

At the organisational level, the subject concept is necessary at the most advanced and therefore specialised educational levels. It has to do with the organisation of spaces and the use of specific infrastructures. For example, although experimentation at a deep level is transversal to all disciplines and can be carried out in multiple contexts, it is in my opinion evident that if an adolescent wishes to be trained in a specific area, he or she will need a specific infrastructure to develop that work; therefore, if he or she is in need of advice in his or her learning, a teacher should be able to collaborate with him or her at a certain point in the day and open the said structure for that purpose. Subjects are needed as a necessary evil at a higher educational level but the artificial division that exists today, where a twelve-year-old child has a seven-hour school day with approximately ten weekly subjects, is completely unnecessary and harmful.

The current educational system is based on precisely that, a conference given to classes of 40 plus students where information is given orally without giving assistance to the individual needs of each individual child, this conference/class system has not been very successful over time, the flaws have been evident, Today, any graduate has a vague intellectual capacity and presents serious symptoms of ignorance, although it is true that not all the blame should be placed on the teachers, if they are somewhat to blame for the way in which the classes are taught in a harmful and toxic way, excluding those who deserve a different way of being taught. Let's remember that every young child is a world and every young child has different attributes and tools to be developed.

How could we organize an educational center where the subjects would have a more open, more interdisciplinary character than the current ones? It would not be as complicated organizationally as you might think if we had the right teachers for the system.
It is good that there are some teachers who break down the barriers of the current education system with conventional methods. I remember that in order to pass my drama class (a compulsory but fun subject) I had to learn history because it was essential to know what we were interpreting, not only did we learn about history but we also learned about philosophy and literature and I would even dare to think that we learned much more about literature in drama class than we did in literature class with conventional education systems.

Can we go further and take advantage of the interest in interpretation to introduce the student to the author's biography and, by extension, to the historical context in which it takes place? By this I mean that a literature class is never just about literature but also about history, thought, geography... We divide the knowledge that children should learn for the sake of convenience but not really because that knowledge is divided.

The problem is that, for example, the mathematics teacher is not taught to arouse the student's curiosity about the history of mathematics, among other things, because such a teacher is a specialist in his or her field and understands that he or she should not be one in others. The same is true of the rest of the teachers who, due to professional deformation and mismanagement of human resources, are often accustomed to walking beaten paths and becoming involved in the safety of their "speciality". This specialization is the one that encourages the child not to ask about colors in language class or about poetry in physical education. With Paulovian mermaids we divide the time of the minor and make his curiosity into inflexible schedules. It is this same system that is killing the creativity of our students by channeling it because in square subjects where standing outside is seen as an offense to the teacher or even a reason for expulsion.

Leaving aside the curricular question, this desire to adopt is manifested in many other areas of our current institutional educational system. For example, groups of students are made with the age of the students as a rigid criterion. An attempt is made to homogenize pupils of the same age as if this chronological accident were determining the real interests or knowledge of the child.

This organisational structure prevents older learners from supporting or acting as role models for other younger learners. If we accustom students to living with other boys and girls older and younger than themselves, they will soon find it natural to help those who, because of their age, lack their experience or to be helped by others with more knowledge or age than themselves. The division into "fifths" is, together with the compartmentalised subjects, a clear example of the lack of attention paid to diversity and civic education in our education system. The only "leader", the only one who is different in age and experience is the teacher, and this encourages in the student's mind a one-way concept of authority, among other things equally harmful to his or her moral development, is it a consequence that education systems are set up in this way? To obey in a unidirectional way the authority that is presented to us as a state? I don't think so.

In order to reform the distribution of knowledge and spaces in a school, it is essential to transform teacher training and society's vision of them. The teacher must be a researcher and a pedagogical innovator; he or she must be able to anticipate the interests of the students and not remain in the narrow confines of his or her discipline. Getting used to telling our students "I don't know about this, but I will look for information and we will discuss it tomorrow" also means that teachers will get used to being humble and to feeding their curiosity in order to feed our students' curiosity.

On the contrary, the teacher-official tends to be conservative in his or her own system structure and to repeat false and superfluous textbooks like a mantra. However, we must bear in mind that in the current material situation of many European educational systems, with classrooms with more than thirty or forty students and hardly any resources such as computer labs, etc. It is almost impossible for the teacher to make real innovation. Those who do so are at the expense of their leisure or family life and are often forced to admit that their efforts can do nothing against a system that seems to be built intentionally to encourage stupidity and hatred of knowledge.

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_{Posted from my blog with SteemPress : Here}

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