Educated to Death

0101: #Education Should Build Democratic Participants Not Helpless Serfs

#community #revolution #occupy

Maybe education would be better if it was designed to enable people to to learn how to participate in an open society. People would have to be stakeholders in their education, not just passive recipients, if this were true. Schools would not just be a building in a community; rather, it would be a part of the community. The school would work to empower community members aka students of any age to work for the betterment of their own community. The democratic experience gained there would better enable the citizenry to participate in larger democratic institutions like a democratic national government. In such a system the school wouldn’t be the shame of the community, but the center of the community. There would be no way to separate the school from the community because they would be one in the same, each working to embrace and improve the other. The goal of school here would not be to colonize the mind or the spirit, but to set it free. It would enable thinkers and innovators and creators and so forth. Freire said that it becomes more difficult to keep a group of people ignorant as they become more active in democracies. If we had a democracy people would be active. They would have to be. Further, they would want to be because they would see that their participation mattered. Apathy is a result of powerlessness, real or perceived. Schools breed powerlessness in students, teachers, administrators, and so forth. Bureaucracies harbor the power elite. They are distant demigods to the people. They are untouchable. An existential god is not a god for mankind, but for some other lot that we will never know. Power belongs in the hands of the people. The governed should be the government. Schools should teach for democracy; rather, they are oppressive arms of the power elite. Teachers, teach for democracy. Students demand it. Communities take back the schools. This is our world. Our future. Our lives.