Yup. Schools are really designed to crank out people from the factory worker template. Obey, don't question, meet your targets, and then disconnect. It's in ev

Yup. Schools are really designed to crank out people from the factory worker template. Obey, don't question, meet your targets, and then disconnect. It's in every part of the design: - The focus on getting things "right" rather than exploring why things are wrong. - The grading the discourages exploration and challenging oneself. - The endless back and forth about how children fail assignments. Other than in very special circumstances, the teacher is the one having failed if the children on aggregate are not performing as well as they should. - The way "learning" is defined as "remembering what the teacher wants to hear". I could go on. It's crazy. When the children of today become adults, they won't, generally, need to become obedient factory workers. They will need to be creative free thinkers in knowledge jobs. School robs them of opportunities to learn that. Montessori is a small win, but my years in Montessori was also plagued by some of the above. In particular, even though teachers were not allowed to set formal grades on assignments, they came up with their own pretty transparent improvised grading systems. (For example, it was clear that "Excellent" > "Outstanding" > "Great" > "Very good" > "OK". I still have a deeply rooted sense of this hierarchy and feelings connected to it, some 25 years later.)