EDUCATION

Hello hope you liked the little the little thing I'm doing here what's up with an anime thing that I can do oh I'll never get my dignity back for that if you're watching this video you're probably online a bit too much and that probably makes you a little bit nervous to some degree after all we're always talking on this channel about how misinformation seems to spread online like wildfire as it turns out misinformation is being spread on Tick Tock can you believe it maybe it's it's we should go back to the times where being physically strong was the most important thing which was never really a thing but either way because a lot of the time when people talk about things like that they're wrong and like this doesn't really check out a lot of tick tocks and a lot of comments are using it the wrong way it's false no way not this time you're on not this time it never happened but it's not just misinformation is it it's the seeming refusal to be media literate at all to read articles before sharing them to figure out whether or not they're clearly fake or not it's the feeling that reading comprehension and overall Common Sense on these websites are piss poor a common reaction to this is to say that it's because the education system is going down the toilet in insert country here for example in my birthplace there are indeed some troubling statistics the U.S experiences a daunting 40 College Dropout rate every year and average scores between 2020 and 2022 in math and reading fell by a level not seen in decades the thing is this topic this opinion that education is going down the drain with those kinds of indicators used to substantiate it is extremely popular as a window for right wing reactionary talking points if you Google search U.S school system failing you're going to be greeted with a lot of interesting op-eds from interesting Publications blaming labor unions and saying that public schools are shifting their focus from excellence in mathematics science reading history and other disciplines toward the implementation of critical race Theory and other neo-marxist philosophies cool of course someone like me who's actually worked in schools will probably tell you that not only are critical race Theory and Marxism barely taught at all save for a couple of college courses but that even if they were students wouldn't give half a [ __ ] anyway the reality has long been that students hate school and don't pay attention Beyond trying to get good grades if even that what this ironically helps reveal is that aside from the fact that anti-vaxx movements and transphobia and other big misinformation movements online are headed by grown ass adults is the fact that education has clearly been bad for a long time young people don't need to be told that they don't know anything and that the school is failing them from people who still think Dr Phil is an actual doctor I'm sorry Dr Phil it's a good program but damn what social media should reveal to us is that the school system has actually never been good enough now for us not for our parents or our grandparents the more we understand about our school system the more we realize how little it actually does to help us learn and how crucial it is that we begin to rethink education as a whole we need to push for upcoming generations to experience education that is self-directed and critically conscious more on this after the break Dr Naomi Fisher's 2021 book changing our minds how children can take control of their own learning puts forth a case for something called self-directed learning Fisher a practicing clinical psychologist analyzes how compulsory education has constructed is insufficient and does little to provide the type of positive educational outcomes it boasts of but continues in great part because we've normalized it and have attached ourselves to it Fisher writes most of us cannot imagine how a child can become educated if they don't go to school this means that when a child is not thriving at school we don't really consider alternatives we try different schools or more supported school we take the child to be assessed for their disorders and pay for therapists all in the hope that we can get the help they need to get them through school leaving the school system altogether is usually portrayed as a disaster it's called dropping out and nothing good comes of that because of this labeling and typecasting that school essentially forces onto children Fisher argues that the school system often hailed as some something that can level the playing field for students of all backgrounds actually furthers inequities schools in fact exacerbate the inequalities which are already present this is because they constantly compare children against each other and the children know this those who do best get access to more interesting opportunities and are given Awards they are told that they are gifted and talented those who don't do so well are doomed to spend their time repeating the material they didn't learn the first time around becoming disengaged and miserable in the process they are told they have learning difficulties or special educational needs these groups are associated with socioeconomic status richer children are more likely to do well while poorer children do less well reading changing our minds is basically like listening to a trained professional tell you that everything you've been feeling since childhood is valid because we all know the pressures and the competitions that we've suffered through in the school system seemingly for No Gain being told they were one of the smart kids or that we're not one of the smart kids and our Ambitions and social habits being dictated to us as a result what a great thing to tell a child from eight years old that they are this type of person and that they'll never be on the other side unless they drastically change who they are and Bingo was his name-o added extra clap not College material and these things influence how we see ourselves for the rest of our lives including our relationship to Authority and our relationship to our own brain brains our own brains yeah a great deal of this is apparent in the realm of standardized testing we've normalized a system where students take tests across the country according to how old they are and then rank them based on how well they do which subsequently apparently determines how well they'll do for the rest of their lives in school and in work it's no wonder we grow up to have such unhealthy relationships with competition and with learning things with any process of learning that we undergo being shadowed with thoughts that we should be doing better because this person is doing better or why are we doing good when we're not trying and this in turn creates an anxious and counter-intuitive School experience for children one thing is certain test results are used to limit children's opportunities because they are inherently competitive the whole point of a test is to compare and contrast if everyone does well in a test then it's not a useful test someone has to be the loser sounds a lot like the real world to be fair but it's not just the inhumane way that we make kids compete to determine the rest of their lives through testing that inherently problematic standardized testing is also just not good at determining how good a student is in the first place geyser and Atkinson write in the book s.a.t Wars that irrespective of the quality or type of school attended high school GPA proved the best predictor not only of freshman grades in college as many students have shown but also of long-term College outcomes such as cumulative grade point average and four-year graduation in this way standardized testing is more of an indicator of inequality than it is any type of predictor of people's futures and careers and this shouldn't be shocking considered that it was pioneered in the United States by a eugenicist as John Rosales and Tim Walker report for the National Education Association and his 1923 book a study of American intelligence psychologist and eugenicist Carl Brigham wrote that African Americans were on the low end of the racial ethnic and or cultural Spectrum testing he believed showed the superiority of the Nordic race Group whatever that is and warned of the promiscuous intermingling of new immigrants in the American gene pool furthermore the education system he argued was in Decline and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes even more and more extensive of course this couldn't at all have any impact today I mean it's not like people are saying that the education system is declining because they're teaching children about critical race Theory meanwhile most of us say that we don't actually learn anything in school and those observations are founded not only is our curricula generally not focused at all on the information that we find important as adults the competitive conformist nature of school makes it so that kids are more oriented towards following Authority and following mandates than they are for pursuing and accruing knowledge now it's worth noting that Dr Fisher's from the UK I'm from the U.S and so that's the perspective that I'm speaking from but no matter where you are in the world dear viewer there's a likelihood that you relate to at least some of what I'm talking about because this standardized testing and conformist school system is pretty much popular everywhere now at one point Fisher notes in the vaunted Singaporean school system that children take an exam at the end of primary school age 12 which determines their entire life opportunities I talked to a friend about what kind of pressures they experienced as a student in Singapore to say the least it [ __ ] sucked ass school has genuinely made me more mentally ill because it was very much just like hey if you fail this one thing this one time your entire life is screwed the wildest thing about this is that I've had a grown woman who was my psychiatrist who is my psychiatrist look me in the eye and say that JC was the most stressful time of her life she is a PhD psychiatrist working in an understaffed hospital and she said that that was less stressful than going to JC I feel like every week I would see somebody in public having a mental breakdown yeah no you are absolutely correct that would happen there have been several times where like people have just like broken down crying I had panic attacks during class in literature class the teacher had handled it really well and another time in like chemistry class the girl was kind of just left crying as the teacher kept going like and I remember EX implicitly bringing up to the teacher like can I take it to the med Bay or something and she was like no like she's calming down and as long as she's in class at least she's still like you know learning and absorbing and I'm like is that really important so do you think like a lot of the pressure came from school or did like a home have a lot of influence in it because I feel it comes from everyone I think yeah especially coming from like a sap school from like those like fancy upper middle class Catholic schools I remember in primary school after midterms hearing stories of oh yeah this kid came back to school with cane marks on this or which is all up and down his arms for every point he didn't get from Full mocks they would gain him once and that was just like a story people told each other not like a thing to bring up to the authorities or like no I think I lucked out in my secondary school where a lot of my teachers were really good and like really kind and supportive you know like when I was in primary school and I think even up to secondary school public paintings were still a thing I never saw one but I know it was a thing that happened they would basically during morning assembly in front of the entire School bring the kid up onto stage and came them it doesn't happen anymore right like it's down like it's it's definitely gone now right having mental illness is especially difficult in JC I don't know if there's any accommodations but I went to see the school counselor for two years and she didn't say anything about potentially oh there were there's like a official Avenue you can go through to potentially make your time a little easier it was no you have to learn how to deal with this yourself I have memory issues because I have had depression my entire life this was my H3 history teacher I did like an example essay for him to look at and he read the essay looked at me and was like I can see and know that you are learning in class and you know all of the historical arguments that I'm teaching you but I cannot give you any marks because you cannot remember any of the dates this kind of thing is systemic it is not about how much you learn and how much you understand about the subject it is how well you are able to be neurotypical in a way that is good for exams you ought to be a good worker you are at hard to stress yourself out and make a schedule based on the demands of the people who you work under I know exactly what foreign perception of the education system is like but it's like highly ranked education system you turn out some real smart people it correct in so far has the metrics that we have collectively set up to determine these things have shown that singaporeans are very good at taking tests and at what cost and I don't think they're good at being people I want to elaborate on that point singaporeans aren't good at being people we are very bad at any other skill that we would actually need to live even after all of this it is still true that people with good grades at JC get a better chance at Living a decent life in Singapore I was so burned out from a levels that by the time I had moved to a different country by the end of the year after the exams were over it's like I didn't even like care about my results anymore it stopped being this big proof of what I should be doing with my future and it became like this traumatic event that I needed to forget immediately I'm living a completely different life now I'm living as if I never went to school at all and I'm doing perfectly fine and I feel like I was lied to like why were all the kids my age getting gray hairs and why are we staying in the library till 9 pm at night the snacks were fun orientation was fun but like what was all of that for Fisher's answer to this apparently inept system is to propose self-directed learning as an alternative and they are self-directed schools all over the world from Mexico to Syria and the list is likely to grow over time self-directed learning environments allow students the resources and social dynamics to explore what they want to learn on their own with their own motivations on their own time she advocates for this through her own knowledge of psychology writing that we can see from young children that it is not necessary to force children to learn humans are born curious and with a desire to learn from their environment we can see from experiments and observational studies that children are motivated to learn complex skills without instruction like think about how complicated and difficult it is to get really good at your favorite video game and think about all the hours that you may have put into doing just that without having to be pushed to do it you do it on your own because you don't feel pressure and because because you have a genuine curiosity and excitement to do it that is unless your favorite game is the Sims in which case you're lazy now the first problem with this will be making these kinds of schools accessible to all schools like New York City's agile Learning Center in Harlem do a good job of recommending tuition for various income levels but this simply is not going to be the case around the world there's finance that goes into this and additionally there are many many places in the world that need many many schools to be built and ultimately it's really hard to get a parent to push back against the pressure from other people and push back against what they know and the feeling that they might be failing their child in a risky situation in order to do this but there's risks for keeping kids in normal school too and they're not just light ones they can be pretty severe unless you think Society is just perfectly good right now in which case forget why are you watching this video what are you doing here until we get rid of this system of standardized testing and Scholastic Conformity we should never be surprised or blameful of students and their anxieties their difficulties and their animosities and the things that they don't learn now self-directed learning schools aren't going to be enough to fix that let's talk about some of the social and economic implications of this after another break thanks for watching the breaks it helps me a lot with the channel so self-directed learning is never going to be the end-all be-all especially with the way things are currently constructed and it's not just enough to say school sucks just take the kids out have them learn on their own in the forest because ultimately we don't truly do anything let alone learn on our own our learning and our socialization are very heavily influenced by the situations we grew up in including the social and economic conditions of Our Lives now the modern day origins of compulsory education date back to 16th century Prussia in 1524 Martin Luther wrote a big thing recommending it and it wasn't until two centuries later where a modern standardized compulsory education system was passed in Prussia this called for children to be educated from ages 5 to 13 or 14 with the primary purpose of having them learn Christianity and basic literacy because there's two important things in the world it's Jesus in the Bible but it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century when Prussia was really able to spread that system throughout the state after the end of child labor and a gradual rise in attendance and other such things in general the late 1800s and early 1900s is the time period wherein all the sort of developed States across the world began to build their compulsory education systems and really fund them that includes France Russia and the US I wonder what the context was economically that influenced States into making these big changes look I get flagged a lot for talking about capitalism and blaming all bad things from from economic problems to farts on capitalism and without doing the important work of digging into the histories of things before and during capitalism but when it comes to the school system the connection with capitalism is pretty clear labor laws and including especially child labor laws were very contentious subjects within the Western World and this modern school system provided an effect active means for keeping kids somewhere if it's not the workplace and having them train in an efficient and streamlined and conformist way so that they could be effective once they graduated at the ages of 14 or 16 or whatever the the idea of adolescence has changed a lot because it turns out that capitalists really liked making kids work because they couldn't really do much and they usually did what they were told so that had to change a lot over time and the school system sort of comes in to fill the gaps these systems were constructed with economic and social goals with State development goals so schools were never going to teach students the information that made them Rebel that made them question the state that they lived in and tried to do something about it whether that made kids smarter or not a really big problem that I've seen now when it comes to the conversation of critiques of education is that they're dominated by reactionary politics in a contradictory desire to avoid being controlled and being made a part of the social order while also wishing to go back to the old good social order in order to create a more homogeneous and controllable Workforce because that's what it did you know and you reconcile this contradiction by manipulating class struggle and manipulating miseducation a person can valorize the standardized test scores a country receives and the school system that it enforces while simultaneously being non-conformist and being against the way that school teaches even hating the school system because both can be neatly blamed on the elites and the elites's desire to make kids learn about racism the ideology like any ideology that's very popular doesn't have to be consistent it doesn't have to be super coherent it just has to be emotionally riveting it has to be empowered by fear and distrust one of the first books that I saw recommended when I started researching on this topic of education and critiques of education and Conformity was a book called dumbing us down by John Taylor gato who was a former school teacher and then became sort of an activist figure talking about how bad schools are I saw this thing recommended in the critical theory subreddit I was expecting some at least kind of Lefty critical Consciousness conversations about school so I was taken aback when I saw that audiobooks were made available for this book on YouTube but only from channels like these which also post videos about the gay agenda look I'm not watching a little Boosie video in 2023 unless it's like wipe me down I don't understand how his interviews are still a thing but anyway even the introduction of the audiobook boasts about its Origins from a library for truth Seekers and Free Speech Advocates these correlations are not a coincidence even though godo in this book has many useful and poignantly written examples of how schools are bad and his experiences as a school teacher and the negative discriminatory effects of schools on children It ultimately seems to be written to empower A Narrative of a conspiracy of Elites to control good Christian people the book laments how now good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do egats and there's a bit more game given up when Garo further laments that Society has come increasingly under central control since just before the Civil War whoa what horrible thing happened during the Civil War that allowed the state to have more control over us what precedent was set and what was it in the name of of how dare those powerful people bring forth a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution by bringing to life the ancient pharonic dream of Egypt compulsory subordination for all hey hey who put that whistle in that dog's mouth who did it now what's compelling about godo's book is that it's not just some hard right wild Christian book fundamentalistly arguing that schools are bad it's actually pretty complex and at points very empathetic it talks about how the poor and how people of color are marginalized by the school system but it's also deeply reactionary it's no wonder that one of godo's last media appearances came in a documentary called indoctrination public schools and the decline of Christianity in America and that years after his passing Republican Senators like Ron DeSantis are getting their Fame off of passing bills like the stop woke act and promise that our school system is for educating in kids not indoctrinating them the truth is that the modern day right wing similar to other communities in the world is comprised of a lot of people who were terrorized by this school system and they've been told that their class antagonisms their valid resistance of authority and conformity in schools their distrust of the system are to be blamed on and to be engaged in with violent oftentimes fights against the very people who are criticizing that system and who are rebelling against it this is why someone like Paolo friari in his book pedagogy of the oppressed hold such an important place in this conversation rather than believe in an order of superiority or inherent qualities among humans friari told us that the oppressed must not in seeking to regain their Humanity which is a way to create it become in turn oppressors of the oppressors but rather restorers of the humanity of both in this way education has to to reveal itself to us as not only a channel for competition not only a method of indoctrination but as a tool for Collective Liberation learning is a natural human thing and we hate learning because we've been dehumanized and if this system that names itself after this human tendency that claims to give us this beautiful thing of learning is actually this tool that makes us resistant towards education in the first place to the point we'd rather accept and spread misinformation and fight over it rather than learn enjoyably and peacefully in communities then it's probably not doing a very good job of the thing it's supposed to do and maybe that's the point thanks for watching I'm Elliot hit the like button comment send a Kofi if you want to support the project it helps a lot and tell us what your experiences with education are in your part of the world whether that's the us or any other country and tell us what your experiences of Education are from where you're from okay whoo