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What is the perversion of the school system?

Schools purchase the effort of learning through the promise of a higher future social status.
It does not teach how to deal with problems.
Schools therefore inculcate the notion of social castes.

The two dimensions of education

A complete education requires learning:

•	to do things by oneself,

•	to do things in a group.

Schools address almost exclusively the first point, and it is within families, as well as in the schoolyards of elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools, that children learn, by their own means, to manage groups.
In other words, school lessons aim almost exclusively at producing 'a head well-filled' in Montaigne's sense. More precisely, schools tend to have a stunted view of what 'a well-made head' is, reducing it to the ability to produce pseudo-reasoning (for example, a thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure) instead of simply reproducing knowledge, and thereby excluding the dimension of being capable of working effectively in a group (that is, practicing problem-solving).

The Republican School and Social Mobility

The Republican School has claimed that its system of castes has become fairer since 'everyone has equal chances'. This involves two major biases:

•

In what way is having intellectual aptitudes a less unjust method of selecting the privileged than simple birthright under the Old Regime?
In this sense, receiving poor grades can be seen as an oppressive conditioning system designed to lead individuals to accept their future disadvantaged social status.

•	It is very largely the family social network that determines an individual's success. The American model of the 'self-made man' is the exception highlighted to hide the statistically significant reality.

The Teacher's Complaint

'Today's students are useless and uninterested.'
It's normal; they are being consistent.
By default, a normal child seeks social status.
Obtaining a good social status does not require solid knowledge, only possibly good grades to access prestigious schools. The child is thus occasionally interested in the grade, not in the knowledge itself. Once they are convinced that the good grade is inaccessible to them, they become completely uninterested.
Stirring a child's desire to learn (beyond the natural motivation in young children, which we will discuss later in the context of alternative pedagogies) requires following the long preparatory path outlined below:
1. Convincing them that social peace (living surrounded by people with whom one feels good) is better than social ambition and the social violence it inevitably generates.
2. Convincing them that social peace is achieved through the practice of problem-solving and the consideration of facts.
3. Realizing that the analysis part of problem-solving requires solid knowledge.

Alternative Pedagogies

Frenet and Montessori schools aim to develop one aspect of our cognitive-affective system, namely the instinct for spontaneous experimentation. Freinet additionally emphasizes cooperation. However, this is only an embryo of what we advocate in the question ''What is a successful education?'. Indeed, group work remains tied to an idealized vision of humanity that does not take into account social ambition and cognitive dissonance, and therefore functions correctly only with young children.

A Satisfactory Educational System

... should ensure that every high school graduate:

1) masters the four stages of the problem-solving method, and is sufficiently trained in its practice to be able to do it informally in pairs,

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

It is undeniable that today the majority of people who have completed a full curriculum (so-called BAC+5) do not correctly master these two points.

Point 1 means that the individual has become competent at working in groups.

Point 2 means that the individual knows how to distinguish between knowledge and charlatanism, and thus can acquire additional solid knowledge by their own means if needed.
This second point also means that the individual will have a greater respect for facts, and in this sense will be a better citizen.
However, at this second point, there is a tendency to substitute that to practice certain professions, one needs specific diplomas, which guarantee more or less that the individual possesses the desired knowledge, without necessarily being able to evaluate the solidity of that knowledge. This thus circumvents the problem, with the dangerous effect, particularly in a democracy, that citizens remain individuals easily manipulated by opinion media and social networks.

Methodology

Many people have thought deeply about the purposes of school, as well as educational methods. However, it seems to us that the particularity of the question of education is that as soon as it is approached directly, we lack support to answer it in a non-ideological manner. At the level of this site, it is only after answering all the other questions that the satisfactory educational system has become obvious to us.