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I'll bite. The Western paradigm of education has nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with Industrialization. Education is an industrial process tha

I'll bite. The Western paradigm of education has nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with Industrialization. Education is an industrial process that mass produces a literate workforce. In the US, our Industrial Education takes raw materials (uneducated kids), refines them on an assembly line (K-12) by a workforce (teachers), bound to various Quality Assurance processes (SATs, ACTs, etc) that affect their pay, supervised by a central management bureaucracy (the school board) that results in a yearly harvest (Graduation) of brand new workers. This supply of undifferentiated but educated laborers met the demands of manufacturing. inb4 Education is failing blah, blah, blah... Previously the large amount of manufacturing demanded a large homogenized manual workforce. As manufacturing moved elsewhere, the market demand for this labor diminished. Like any other large corporation, Industrialized Education is going through a slow decline as demand continues to drop off for it's primary product. As this general market declines, the market for specialized and refined labor increased. Higher Education is the industrialized refinement for specialization. The end result is a specialized worker commodity. The Industrialization metaphor is even stronger as many of these universities are actual corporations competing to deliver a product for their markets. > I was programming at 8 but apparently to be "well rounded" I had to do all this other stuff that non-coders deemed important. That's because you were a raw commodity being transformed into a finished product. You don't ask a car whether it wants to be red. Management didn't ask if you wanted to be well-rounded. To put it more generally, this is the experience of a sapient being in the process of commodification. > Forcing all the kids into assembly lines and scalping their autonomy is breaking people. It's taking away their ability to think. That's the whole point. It's refining a raw product into a finished good.

fsloth 9y ago
That's one cynical tour de force of western education in nutshell. Well done sir. Perhaps - the whole truth is a bit more nuanced? Could it be, that the tenents of professional management have seeped through society because people believe they must know what they are doing since they are professionals. Leading to overgrowth of industrial processes. Thus it is not the intent of the system design but merely the end result of looking it through the industrialists cold calculating lense (i.e. professional management) and using their toolkit? If all you have is a hammer -, etc.
- JamesLeonis 9y ago
  > Perhaps - the whole truth is a bit more nuanced? 100% Truth be told, Education is at once a deeply Enlightenment established good, a nationalistic and civic program, a method of reducing child labor, enculturation, an international competition (both pride and output), a pragmatic way of getting ahead for most of the population, as well as a medium of training a future workforce. As such any program would be at the mercy of the prevailing cultural and political zeitgeist. My critique comes from the more recent move of aggressive privatization of education (for-profit colleges, charter schools), combined with increases in standardization (No Child Left Behind, ACTs, and tying teacher pay to those outcomes) which both are relatively new phenomenon. I have a ~glorified opinion~ (hypothesis) that business leaders and politicians made sensible policy decisions based on observed improved output in businesses and factories, such that they both resemble each other after many reforms. Additionally, we often hear about schools failing to educate kids. But this recent study brings together and asks; How many are performing above their grade? They drew this conclusion[1]: > Currently, the evidence suggests that between 15% and 45% of students enter the late-elementary classroom each fall already performing at least one year ahead of expectations. Our initial question – How many students are learning above grade level? – needs to be extended. The more important questions may be: > 1. How should we reorganize our schools, now that we know that large numbers of these students exist? > 2. How can we best meet these students’ learning needs, if they already have mastered much of the year’s content before the year has even started? And lastly, > 3. How can schools balance the potential for excellence against the need to achieve basic proficiency, when the variation in student achievement within classrooms and schools is so vast? Lastly, I must admit I wrote that as a counter-polemic of OP's original post. [1]: http://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/how-can-so-many-students-be-invisible-large-percentages-of-american-students-perform-above-grade-level/ http://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/how-can-so-many-students-b...

fsloth 9y ago

That's one cynical tour de force of western education in nutshell. Well done sir. Perhaps - the whole truth is a bit more nuanced? Could it be, that the tenents of professional management have seeped through society because people believe they must know what they are doing since they are professionals. Leading to overgrowth of industrial processes. Thus it is not the intent of the system design but merely the end result of looking it through the industrialists cold calculating lense (i.e. professional management) and using their toolkit? If all you have is a hammer -, etc.

JamesLeonis 9y ago
> Perhaps - the whole truth is a bit more nuanced? 100% Truth be told, Education is at once a deeply Enlightenment established good, a nationalistic and civic program, a method of reducing child labor, enculturation, an international competition (both pride and output), a pragmatic way of getting ahead for most of the population, as well as a medium of training a future workforce. As such any program would be at the mercy of the prevailing cultural and political zeitgeist. My critique comes from the more recent move of aggressive privatization of education (for-profit colleges, charter schools), combined with increases in standardization (No Child Left Behind, ACTs, and tying teacher pay to those outcomes) which both are relatively new phenomenon. I have a ~glorified opinion~ (hypothesis) that business leaders and politicians made sensible policy decisions based on observed improved output in businesses and factories, such that they both resemble each other after many reforms. Additionally, we often hear about schools failing to educate kids. But this recent study brings together and asks; How many are performing above their grade? They drew this conclusion[1]: > Currently, the evidence suggests that between 15% and 45% of students enter the late-elementary classroom each fall already performing at least one year ahead of expectations. Our initial question – How many students are learning above grade level? – needs to be extended. The more important questions may be: > 1. How should we reorganize our schools, now that we know that large numbers of these students exist? > 2. How can we best meet these students’ learning needs, if they already have mastered much of the year’s content before the year has even started? And lastly, > 3. How can schools balance the potential for excellence against the need to achieve basic proficiency, when the variation in student achievement within classrooms and schools is so vast? Lastly, I must admit I wrote that as a counter-polemic of OP's original post. [1]: http://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/how-can-so-many-students-be-invisible-large-percentages-of-american-students-perform-above-grade-level/ http://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/how-can-so-many-students-b...