The trouble is, of course, the planet won't survive if the developing world ends up replicating North America's levels of consumption. In fact, learning does not need manipulation by others. Even though most of what we learn is not the result of teaching, school's lesson is that instruction produces learning. So schools produce the demand for more schooling. Maybe that's why so few of us challenge the premises of nursing homes, television, day-care centres, schools and the global economy.
School measures a student's mastery of a prefabricated curriculum on a standardized scale.
When we submit to others' standards to measure our own growth, we put ourselves and others into assigned slots. When everything fits so nicely together, there's no need to look for an underlying agenda. Ineffective Training Aside from these covert agendas, schools don't accomplish their stated goals very well. Experiments conducted 30 years ago in Puerto Rico showed that students were more effective at introducing their peers to the world of science than their teachers. Yet after having received 12,000 hours or more of teaching, many Canadians can't read well enough to function in their daily lives.