Comment by lo_zamoyski

Education today is broken in general.

Few people have a clue about what education is actually for. How can you possibly educate students well if you don't know the destination? And how can you know the destination if you don't know what it means to be human? To be human entails a destination that is definitive for the species.

Overwhelmingly, education today is a shaped by the logic of consumerism. Consumerism begins with a false anthropology, that of the hedonistic homo economicus.

1. Schools send a strong message, whether explicitly or implicitly, that education is about "getting a job". It's about being able to secure a career. At the very least, it is sold primarily as a ticket out of poverty and a means of moving up the social ladder. In a competitive, hyperindividualistic, and consumerist society, status is measured by consumption, so education is a means to increase your power to consume.

2. How many times have we heard teachers say "knowledge is power"? That's a Baconian turn of phrase that represents a turn in scientific history where understanding and knowledge are subordinated to technical power and control. Understanding nature is here dethroned to make way for dominating nature. "Know-how" for us is more important that knowing the "what" and the "why".

3. The coverage of topics and how they're addressed is often jumbled and incoherent. There is some ordering, sure, but it is usually superficial and sloppy. Its practice is like that of some mysterious and obsolete ritual. Many pedagogues are simply bad.

4. Understanding is not rewarded as much as producing supposedly measurable results. In schools, the ultimate result is the grade. The grading system is inherently competitive and designed to rank people first and foremost in a technocratic fashion under the pretense of objectivity. This has "management science" written all over it.

5. Education fads and attempts to artificially infuse technology into education is motivated by profit and abetted by ignorance. Indeed, education in general is big business. Forget tablets and computers. It suffices to note the rapacious practices of the textbook industry, made worse by the fact that these textbooks are almost invariably terrible from a pedagogical standpoint.

Given the soullessness and mechanical nature of modern education, why should we be surprised by what we observe? (I'm not proposing some kind of squishy curriculum. Much of the "reform" of the last few decades that has received just derision is just as misguided, or even worse.) Just as we can talk about factory farming, we may talk about factory education. Students are numbers. But education occurs through relationships. This must begin with parents, but parents are too busy making ends meet or chasing the next promotion. When families were large, older siblings would pick up the slack.

The primary purpose of education is intellectual and moral freedom. Not hyperindividualist freedom, which is about the satisfaction of appetite and the ability to do whatever you happen to feel like doing. The classical view of freedom, which is the ability to do what is objectively good and the ability to be more fully human. Since human beings are essentially intellectual beings and moral beings, it follows that our greatest and most essential expression of freedom is found in the intellectual and the moral.