Tag: school

School?

Posted on by philipdodson

Most education has, and is still, been all about preparing a workforce for the industrialised system, to be compliant and not question the rules, not about bettering society for everyone. The current education system is one of shaming us into the unattainable goal of perfection and actually preparing us for a world that will no longer exists as it is by the time most children have completed school.

What if the school curriculum was centred on respect, kindness, empathy, understand, love, worthiness and compassion? What if we were taught properly how to listen and then communicate with each other?

What if you taught meditation, spiritualism, and learnt about awareness, being in the moment, consciousness and acceptance?

What if we were taught about respecting nature, growing organic food, caring properly for animals and the environment? What if were educated in respecting and honouring our own bodies and looking after them?

What if school was soul, body and mind? Not a glorified memory test to be graded for employment.

I wonder if the world would become more kind, more empathetic, more compassionate, more understanding? Would we be more in the moment and more connected? Could we be more at peace within and to world around?

It’s possible and surely worth a try? After all what we have tried hasn’t gone all that well.

You don’t fatten a pig by keep weighing it

Posted on by philipdodson

I was talking to my friend Tom today and he used this brilliant quote to talk about the constant testing that is used in education. The same as you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it, you don’t educate children by keep on testing them.

Education in the last 100 years or less has all been about the industrialised machine preparing inter-changeable cogs for their ‘machine’. The standardised test in the US invented for that very thing to bring everyone to a satisfactory average level of competency in certain repetitive tasks so that the machine could continue to efficiently function. Take a look at Seth Godin’s ‘what is school for?’. A question that rarely, if ever, gets asked about the purpose of education.

Education across the globe is systematically on auto-pilot, with little thought about the suitability or usefulness of education, preparing people for a world that doesn’t exist.

You don’t fatten a pig by keep weighing it and you do not ever make things better by doing the same things.

Curiousness got the human race to now, our compliance and standardised education will halt any further progress because there will be no more rebels, no more heretics, no more people causing a stir or challenging the status quo.

Just a lot of regularly weighed unintelligent and compliant ‘pigs’.