4 ms·
Individualism, as a behaviour and a way to relate with peers, is learned in elementary and high school. Passivity and the wilfullness to perform task for a rewa
by 131012 10y ago
Individualism, as a behaviour and a way to relate with peers, is learned in elementary and high school. Passivity and the wilfullness to perform task for a reward are learned in elementary school. Relations with peers mostly develop in teenage years.
It is very unlikely that this decade of taming has no impact whatsoever on future working behaviours, and not explaining (at least partly) the american individualism you speak of. Competing for grades through individual work, the traditional school model imported from Western Europe, might indeed breed individualism and competition. As could a ruthless school environment of punishing and policing could steer a children toward antisocial behaviours.
Mainstream educational theories suggest project-based education as a way to teach teamwork, but critiques suggest it can be distressing and yield lesser results with students already struggling with learning school knowledge.
TL;DR: The studies cited does do not prove the point: it is very unlikely that schooling has no impact on working behaviours.
- fpoling 10y agoThe point is not that schooling has no impact on future life. Rather that what is taught in school has no impact. Children learns from behaviour of teachers and each other. This knowledge stays. Particular topics that school system thinks it teaches does not stay. Witness widespread functional illeteracy despite apparent ability to read in school.
- 131012 10y agoChildren learn from everything, but what will have the most important impact is hard to assess. Most variables that can explain educational achievements and results are highly multicolinear, so saying this has an impact and this has none is really, really hard, maybe impossible. To make an arithmetic metaphor (yes, some school knowledge stick ;) ), I prefer < and > to = and != for social sciences assertions. Even if we like discrete categories because it is makes bold and satisfying statements, using them is always a reduction in precision. Just like in math I guess. To tackle the question of widespread functional illiteracy, it is necessary to open the Pandora Box of social inequality, as it is generally accepted that the most important variable to predict school performance is the parent's (mother's) level of education.