If we are to believe the data of UNESCO, about 250 million children between the ages of 8 and 16 do not have access to primary and secondary education, and of those who will begin their school adventures, a good part sees absolutely no sense in the education they will have, whether they like it or not. , devote a good part of energy and life. The statistics are imprecise, it's true, but they still provide some guidance: a study by the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale University once showed that about 3/4 of the high school students surveyed had completely negative feelings towards school. They are anxious, tired, under stress, and school generates a complex of negative negative emotions. Research by the Stem4 Foundation shows that school accidents and incidents cause excessive stress to young Britons, and then, logically, they avoid school altogether. While children from developed countries struggle with emotions, hypersensitivity and resistance to real life, their peers from the underdeveloped world do not have that luxury: child labor and systematic exploitation are rampant in many countries, especially in Africa and Central Asia, and according to the World Organization labor, the number of 160 million children, whose lives from an innocent age are only part of the chain of exploitative economic production.
It seems that every view of education almost automatically reminds us of the inequalities in which our world is immersed. While in underdeveloped countries they are raw, brutal and completely inhumane - poor access to education and juvenile labor - the educational systems of the developed world are also faced with problems that seem, in certain aspects, unsolvable. One in four primary school children in England and Wales is not able to use the toilet independently - the English term for this phenomenon toilet-trained is hilarious - 46% of children are not able to sit still, and 28% of them, immersed in scrolling since childhood, are not able to properly to turn the pages of the book, according to research by the Kindred Foundation, which blames the failure of primary education on modern parental profiles that have failed in basic matters.
Primary education is one of the first stages of socialization or introduction into social life, and at the beginning of the 20th century it became mandatory in many countries around the world. Although the desire to make education compulsory appears as far back as the philosopher Plato, then the reformer Luther, the enlightener Rousseau, it took quite a long time for the mentioned idea to take root. And when education became mandatory and massive, educational paradigms were guided by two fundamental principles, economic and cultural. Sir Ken Robinson, a relatively unknown but unusually talented author, writing about it, pointed out that the mass expansion of education was driven by economic needs - to prepare someone for the labor market through future occupations, and cultural ones, which are of a slightly less precise order, but are essentially related to the development of cultural and national identity. Thus, from the start, children are immersed in the dynamics of economic and cultural production, indoctrinated with this or that content. Already in the middle of the last century, the shortcomings of this educational paradigm began to be noticed: Theodor Adorno wrote that such educational mechanisms have created generations and generations of semi-educated people, who, without question, possess a considerable amount of knowledge about anything and everything, but lack the possibility of critical thinking and synthesis . His predictions have come true: science, which has always been one of the main drivers of development and society, has been replaced by countless subjective opinions. Thus, all vaccination practices, the basic ingredient of all public health, are today under the attack of subjective fears and conspiracy theories, and many have stopped believing that the Earth is spherical in shape. Not to mention political pathologies.
The culture of reading classical works has probably always been a bit boring for many, but the consequences of not reading the long Dostoyevsky, the complex Tolstoy, the incomprehensible Kafka or the mildly depressed Hemingway have led to the fact that the average young person after a long education operates with only a few hundred words. We know that the modern ear is not too inclined to classical music, whose predefined form in Mozart, Bach and Liszt is often irritating, but our musical tastes have also become quite narrow today. The only thing about education that still attracts some attention, both among young people and among social engineers, is the possibility of monetizing their own knowledge. This capitalist paradigm, which appears in various irritating forms that are discussed by almost all social actors, is understandable: productivity, measurement, process optimization, development of competences and dual education, are the terms to which the entire contemporary educational paradigm has been reduced. Many things that are vital and most important, such as critical and inclusive thinking, mastery of the sphere of emotions, development of empathy and solidarity, appreciation of diversity and respect for it, are topics that are purposefully excluded from contemporary educational models or exist only as marginal, in traces. But, as always, we are not interested in the causes, and the consequences scandalize us. When the bald-oiled-rapper Desingerica, while singing his hit "Rendallica", explains how at night he is "drugged and drunk, baulja and charlija", making a pie and grating cheese on the heads of his young audience, or hitting them with sneakers on the frontal lobe, spitting at the same time that young delirious audience, only then do we become aware that something has gone deeply wrong somewhere in the educational chain. Maybe schoolchildren really should have read more Dostoyevsky and Kafka, calculated more without the help of digitron and mastered themselves and their emotions along the way.
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