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You can find previous Brain Dumps here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21. Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29, Part 30, Part 31, Part 32, Part 34, Part 35.

I really haven't been keeping up to date with my Master of Teaching course... like I had mentioned in my last post about it, I have completely lost motivation. The "idea" and "concept" of teaching is still really quite interesting and worthwhile to me... but the actual practice in schools seems like it is a complete nightmare and a recipe for draining the soul. Interference from everyone else in the system that "know better" is a guaranteed way to have a million managers and overseers screw things up in a right royal way.

So, I have dropped really way back to a single topic per trimester of study... which in theory should mean that I have heaps of time to do it and keep up to date with the study. Except that I'm finding everything else that I'm doing to be more interesting... from the performance, to teaching at university, to playing with my kids, and gardening in the yard... Really, seriously everything else is more fun than studying for a degree that I'm really not that interested in, that is a requirement for a job that I'm not going to be doing! Hmmm... that sounds like the entire education as a vocational training problem in a nutshell! Learning should just be about learning and exploration... and not as a route to a job. Where did we all go soooooo wrong...

Anyway, in just over a week, I'm supposed to hand in my second assignment essay... I had just produced what I thought was meaningless crap and drivel for the first one... but it scored really well. Sigh...

... for this second one, I have to write about one aspect of the Australian education system from post World War 2 that I find important to write about. Well, at the moment, given my state of mind about education in general... well, I think that this assignment is just going to turn into a barely disguised rant about how crap the system is... despite the best efforts of teachers.

Where to start, the idea that education is for "getting a job" instead of learning to learn, that the system is overwhelmed by metrics and testing in order for other people to poke their noses in and give their worthless two cents worth, the idea that education and schooling has been turned into a stupid commodity with students and families being "customers" and teachers and schools being "providers", the import of so many ideas from the United States despite the obvious state of schooling over there... yes yes, all of this are symptoms of the hyper-commercialisation of everything... where the running everything like a "business" has infected every aspect of modern life. Well... let's get this out of the way... "business" and capitalism is about winning and not about building, and oddly enough... things like education, infrastructure provision, and healthcare, fundamental research and all of these things that are essential to a decent level of human experience in a modern world... well, there is no "win" condition. So, it is blindingly obvious that running these things like businesses with business ideals is just stupidly short sighted... that is without the very clear purpose of pure "business", which is wealth extraction for minimal effort and responsibility.

Anyway... I think it will be quite clear that my essay will be a rant on the infection of the modern education system by non-educational ideals. Of course, I don't for a moment suggest that things were always better in the past systems either... that have been many versions of crap in the past as well... but these days, we should know better... but for some reason, we still treat the classroom as a factory floor production line for manufacturing "productive citizenry". This is short-sighted, and only trains the vast population for a life of mundane existence and control. We can definitely do better in the modern age...

I can also be found cross-posting at:
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Publish0x

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