FROM THE EDITOR:
DEAR READERS: In the course of a research I found this excellent article that deals with a hidden truth behind the current educational system. Written in 2004, the content of this piece may enlighten many who still believe our current schools curriculum is far away from what, we as people, need to learn and acquire knowledge, and to make us independent and develop our highest potential to make a better world. You be the judge. This is PART 3 OF A SERIES
by Montalk.net
from Montalk Website
The system itself
Teachers are not to blame either. They are like soldiers in the trenches fighting a war to educate the public, taking orders from their superiors who have no idea what the current conditions are on the front lines.
Teachers are overstressed, underpaid, and restricted in their ability to respond to what they perceive in the classroom. Due to political correctness, threat of legal action by parents, and contrite school boards scared of disapproval by a vocal minority with big political clout, teachers are confined to a tight curriculum they are forced to follow.
They are forced to teach some things, and not allowed to teach others, such guidelines set by a panel of nodding puppets with no clue as to what the truth is, let alone initiative to spread it should they know the truth. These puppets are those who design the school curriculum, who despite once being teachers themselves, are for the majority removed from the classroom feedback mechanism.
It’s the little things that contribute to an oppressive atmosphere in schools. Not withstanding the social atmosphere, teachers on a strained school budget worry about saving paper, staples, or tape. When my high school received thousands of dollars of funding from the community, it used that money to expand its inventory of computers that weren’t even needed just to keep up with the politically correct trend for schools to be technologically current. That money should have been used for the little things, such as office supplies.
Disruptive students are put in the same class with well behaving ones, creating academic socialism whereby equality is maintained by dragging up the idiots at the expense of the smart ones. Separating students on the wrong criteria leads to incongruities and a breakdown of the system and its components. Putting them into grades by age, when they should be instead separated by level of knowledge and skill, results in academic entropy whereby the smart become dumb and the dumb learn how to waste other’s time.
Teachers spend more of this time teaching children how to shut up and sit still than to pay attention and think. Because they are very limited in their methods of discipline, teachers and students suffer as the idiotic and delinquent minority ruins it all for the rest.
Friction within the system from misplacement of resources induces hatred among its components, as each is suffering and blaming one another instead of blaming the system itself. In fact, the system is set up such that the components feed off one another in a long term downward spiral.
Teachers have contempt for the students, and often make an effort to take out aggression upon them, seeing them as the enemy and cause of their own stress. Students see authority as something to be defied, unless they are already broken by it. Teachers make up illogical rules to test how well students obey, such as making them walk a certain way through the library, or not enter or leave certain exits at certain times, and other minor things which irritate students and allow faculty to feel good when they exert their powers. This tension between student and teacher shatters trust between them, and any teaching and learning between them enters the domain of negative reinforcement. Instead of them loving and respecting one another, they hate each other but do what they are supposed to, to avoid consequences if they do otherwise.
When you see a student, what you’re really seeing is someone low on ambition and initiative, but starving for recognition and self-esteem. This is a symptom of a system that is anti-life, anti-individualism, and anti-spirit. Compressing a wonderful human into a precise block to fit perfectly into cubicle induces the survival mode of life. Knowledge, having been made into the source of his distress, is put at the bottom of his list of priorities, as he has to do whatever is possible to regain his self esteem, recognition, and peace of mind. However, he must do so within the confines of the system.
Dysfunction results. Instead of individualism meaning thinking for oneself and seeking one’s own truth and sense of morality, individualism becomes wearing freaky clothing, having funny hair, and garnering attention via infantile vulgarity no matter if it is for fame or infamy. These superficial methods are all that are still legal within the system. The true human spirit, however, is suppressed.
Those who are broken follow the teacher’s illogical rules and learn to trust authority over their own potentials. In this, they become a cog in the wheel. Breaking orders is taboo to them, something they get very nervous about when it happens, and they certainly don’t do it willingly. They become neurotics and unstable perfectionists who stand high on shaky foundations.
Once their individuality is broken, they become robots very good at their tasks. Many go on to college, absorb what’s fed to them well, and become academicians with a groovy little niche and nice income in their fields of research. But however wonderful that sounds, they are robots and nothing more. Or to make another analogy, they are cows.
They don’t know that being the best cow still doesn’t make you a cowboy.
