Educated to Death

0064: #Teaching, #Doublethink, and the Learning Wasteland

#Foucault #standardization

There is a required cognitive dissonance that must accompany the teaching profession. Conscious teachers are forced to hold two contrasting thoughts at once often having brutal and erratic side effects. On the one hand, teachers must hold true to the belief that they are helping, that they are somehow bettering society by teaching a group to be better thinkers, maybe even enabling them to be more free. On the other hand, there is the constant nagging, perhaps of the conscience, that what I am doing is, in fact, of no use other than to provide a place for students to occupy their time with boredom and repetitive tasks that are harmful. Buried within the intention of public education is not to create a free human being, but the goal to create a compliant citizen who will never cause too much trouble because the will to do so will have been educated out of him or her.

So, what is the truth? Where is the mean of these two ideas? Are they each correct, simultaneously? I tend to think that the latter idea is more true even though it is enshrouded in the first, more hopeful idea. We are better able to swallow the two if we hold fast to the better ideal. We do good overtly, we provide hope and a “future”, while providing little more than rhetoric and training.

What can be done? Am I missing something? Please correct me where I falter. I have somehow misunderstood, surely?