A Quick Overview of the Need for American Education System Reform
By: Leslie Bicknell
Tags: Education, Politics, American Dream, Reform, Revolution

“School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn’t worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave.” — Einstein

Children are required by law to go to public mandated education programs for 12 years.

I would like to briefly put the U.S. Education system in its rightful context…

Psychologist Today: “Schooling, as it exists today, only makes sense if we view it from a historical perspective…

…With the rise of agriculture, and later industry, children became forced laborers. Play and exploration were suppressed. Willfulness, which had been a virtue, became a vice that had to be beaten out of our children… Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between work and play — essentially, all of life was understood as a play… Children’s lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work that was required to serve the rest of the family…

In the Middle Ages, lords and masters had no qualms about physically beating children into submission… In America, in the mid 17th century, Massachusetts became the first colony to mandate schooling, the clearly stated purpose of which was to turn children into good Puritans…

Employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers. To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work, and a minimal ability to read and write. From their point of view, the duller the subjects taught in school the better…

As nations gelled and became more controlled, national leaders saw schooling as a means of creating good patriots and future soldiers…

School today is a place where all children learn the distinction, which was never known by hunter-gatherers, between work and play. The teacher says, “you must do your work and then you can play.” Clearly, according to this message, work, which encompasses all of school learning, is something that one doesn’t want to do but must; and play, which is everything one wants to do, has relatively little value.

Before the industrial revolution, most people lived in the country and worked on farms.

The quality of life got much worse for most until workers’ rights were gradually won after long, difficult battles.

A man named Horace Mann created the foundation of our modern education system. He wanted every man to be able to compete in the economy: “The fragmented local options weren’t able to keep up with the shift in useful skills… a coordinated effort was required. If nothing happened, the United States would be rocked by social unrest as the classes drifted apart into haves and have-nots.

The majority of our lower and middle class is primarily concerned with pursuing and maintaining financial security. Check out the distribution of wealth, which has become significantly more extreme in the 6 years since:

The dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution:

artificial intelligence

automization

ubiquitous mobile supercomputing

self-driving cars

exponential technologies

Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock (1970) posited that “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

The habits we create in school no longer create economic value. We learn to conform and be predictable.

Not only is this the time of automating work and humanizing jobs, but we have plenty of wealth to invest properly in the American people so they can be fully equipped to build the sustainable life of their dreams. I will show just how much is possible to this end in Chapter 8.

What is evident is that it is time for a revolution of the mandatory education systems.

It is just one of the whole systems changes we need to make to realign ourselves with “reality”.

When children think history exists but on the pages of books, and boring ones at that, how are they supposed to come to perceive various histories as existing now? They are led to think all there is is all that is right in front of them.

Many Americans desire to attend university over community college for the social experience. Imagine, as just an example, how many more opportunities and freedom the youth could have have with regenerative immersive community for college ages, coaches and guides instead of professors, and learning structures helping them to employ the wealth of knowledge on the internet to develop their skills and abilities in the direction of their greatest excitement. This is not a solution for everyone, but we are in the business of illumination. We want to ensure all answers and solutions are freely available, made accessible, and our people get to feel less like slaves, not only to our systems but to our society.

#illumination #paradesea