Education Theater

This article was featured in our weekly newsletter, the Liberator Online. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. I think education is a natural system that can’t be centrally planned. And yet, that’s exactly what we try to do with curriculum-and-textbook-based learning. Scope, sequence, grading children by age, all of that is done not for the sake of the child but for the sake of efficiently delivering lessons aimed at imparting skills and knowledge. We have the best intentions, but what is it getting us? What we’re finding is that we can throw skills and knowledge at them but unless it’s on the child’s timeline, when they’re interested, when it matters to them, it doesn’t stick. We’re wasting all kinds of time, effort, and patience re-teaching things that we taught when children weren’t interested or ready. We’re frustrating children and what we’re really teaching them is that education is an absurd, arbitrary exercise in memorizing what someone else deems worthy and promptly forgetting it once the test is over. This is a false efficiency. This is education theater. Worse yet, perhaps, we ignore the individual’s strengths, genius, needs, desires, capacities, and dreams when we attempt to be efficient and to impose ‘education’ on them. What they’re really doing is creating themselves and I think in the best of all worlds the people who love them the most should be resources or facilitators or mentors in that process. Sometimes it seems to me that education is like a bad present. We’re shoved into the dreaded Christmas cardigan from Aunty Hortence and told to go thank her when what we really wanted, what we really needed, was the bike.