Here is an a snippet of 16-year-old Paul Hillsdon on the purpose of education: “Schools need to be facilitating the full development of young children to a young adult; raising people who are vocal enough to question the unquestionable, creative enough to imagine the unimaginable, resourceful enough to answer their own questions, and radical enough to believe they can change the world for the better.”
It’s no secret when we look at the [[http://changelearning.ca/get-informed/whats-problem/how-we-got-here|history of Western education]] that part of the purpose of secondary school was to make sure that adolescents learned the skills needed for the factory floor and the office desk – things like respecting authority, staying on task and an ability to follow instructions. Schools and learning activities were structured accordingly.
Thirty years of award-winning teaching in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders as cogs in the industrial machine.
Our public schools are in danger of collapse, and if they do, we will all pay the price.
Healthy public schools are essential for a healthy economy and creating informed citizens. But we are neglecting our schools in a perversely malicious way: making impossible demands on them, strangling them financially, creating trivial changes for the sake of ideology, avoiding necessary changes, and just plain ignoring them.
John Abbott and Heather MacTaggart discuss the need for people to take the time to examine the current research about learning in order to envision and create the best possible system of education.
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