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What is the perversion of the educational system?

School buys the effort of learning with the promise of a higher future social status.It does not teach how to deal with problems.School thus instills the idea of social castes.

The two dimensions of education

A complete education must teach how to:

School deals almost exclusively with the first point, while children learn to manage groups in families and during breaks at school, college, and high school, on their own.In other words, school classes almost exclusively aim to produce a 'well-filled head' in the sense of Montaigne. More precisely, schools tend to have a diminished view of what a 'well-made head' is, which is reduced to the ability to produce pseudo-reasoning (e.g., a thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure) rather than just reproducing knowledge, and this excludes the ability to work efficiently in groups (i.e., problem-solving).

Republican school and the social elevator

Republican school claimed its caste system became more just, since 'everyone has the same chances'. This involves two major biases:

The teacher's lament

'Today's students are bad and uninterested.'That is normal, they are consistent.By default, a normal child seeks social status.Achieving a good social status does not require solid knowledge, just possibly good grades to access prestigious schools. The child may be interested in the grade, not the knowledge. Once convinced that a good grade is out of reach, the child loses all interest.To give a child the desire to learn (beyond the natural motivation in young children that we will discuss further in the context of alternative pedagogies) requires the following preparatory journey:1. Convince that social peace (living surrounded by people with whom one feels good) is better than social ambition and the inevitable violence it generates.2. Convince that social peace is achieved through the practice of problem-solving and the consideration of facts.3. Be aware that the analysis part of problem-solving requires solid knowledge.

Alternative pedagogies

Freinet and Montessori schools aim to develop a part of our cognitive-affective system, namely the instinct for spontaneous experimentation. Freinet also emphasizes cooperation. However, this is only a rudimentary version of what we recommend in the question 'What is a successful education?'. Indeed, group work is still tied to a idealized view of human beings that does not take into account social ambition and cognitive dissonance; therefore, it functions well only with small children.

A satisfactory educational system

... should ensure that every baccalaureate student:

1) masters the four steps of the problem-solving method, and is sufficiently trained in its practice to do it informally with a partner,

2) understands and respects the difference between a scientifically established fact and a mere belief.

We must note that today, the majority of people who have completed a full course (called BAC+5) do not master these two points correctly.

Point 1 means that the individual has become skilled at working in a group.

Point 2 means that the individual can distinguish between knowledge and charlatanry, and can therefore acquire solid additional knowledge on their own when needed.This point 2 also means that the individual will have a greater respect for facts, and in this sense will be a better citizen.However, this point 2 tends to be replaced by the idea that to practice a certain profession, one must have a certain diploma, which more or less guarantees that the individual has the desired knowledge without necessarily being able to assess its solidity. This way, the problem is bypassed, which has the dangerous effect, especially in a democracy, that citizens remain individuals easily manipulated by opinion media and social networks.

Methodology

Many people have deeply reflected on the purposes of school and educational methods. However, it seems to us that the particularity of the school question is that as soon as one approaches it directly, one lacks support to respond to it in a non-ideological way. At this site's level, it was only after answering all the other questions that a satisfactory educational system became evident to us.

Go deeper

Refer to the question 'What is a successful education?' which addresses the broader topic of education, of which the school system is only one modality. Everything said regarding the question of education applies to the school system. Simply, in addressing the specific question of the school system, we chose to focus on highlighting its fundamental contradictions in terms of motivations and values.Also refer to the question 'What are the conditions to produce a serious reasoning? Problem-solving.' for a more precise presentation of what problem-solving is, and the question 'What is modern scientific method?'' to fully understand the difference between science and belief.

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