Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Education

Good grief Education, as someone who seems to have struggled with it most of my life im not sure im qualified to provide any real insight into it, but whatever.
Theres a school of thought that suggests modern teaching methods and the whole education system in general is crushing any creativity out of children from day one and moulding them to follow the 3 constants of maths, science and history, not sure about history in that one but you get the gist of it.

This stems back to Britains modern industrial roots where having an adept knowledge of maths or science provided a quick 'grab bag' of skills to surive in this exciting new world of cotton mills and pig iron fast foward to today where most of the UK's skill base is primarly service based and it still more or less applies today. But there is certainly a feeling of rank and prestige applied to certain subjects whereupon others are looked down upon as useless or even uneccesary for an education.

I'l' be honest and say that EVERY subject i took throughout primary school all the way up to Sixth form has done diddly squat in helping me with the course, all the skills and knowledge i apply on a day-to-day basis getting whatever relevant work done was learnt at home on my own not at school which im realsing more and more was a complete waste of time.

Even subjects I would have thought useful even neccesary such as art where rendered useless by the muted style in which they were taught 'Just express yourself children' a phrase i heard all to often is great for someone who just wants to play around with paint but not someone who wants to learn the fundemental basics of art this of course wasn't helped by a frankly shit teacher just counting the days to her retirement .

This concept terrfies me, if something you spend nearly decades of your life attending to apparently 'prepare you for the real world' dosen't even apply to your particular life, just some gormless business student, then whats the point?

2 comments:

Badger Blogger said...

Interesting point of view, I might adopt it as my own.

Michael Powell said...

You say education has been a waster of time, but think about how actually learning to learn is serving you well - the problem lies with forcing ppl into subjects too early, rather than focussing on the brain stretching stuff... you can only learn at home because you have a) the motivation and b) sufficient skills and knowledge to manage the learning process.

that's what education, however imperfect, has done for you.