Kids aren’t Flesh-bodied AIs
Children should be the measure of education
American Pragmatism vs the Human
Even though most of the world thinks we Americans are dumb (and we do give them a run for their money on that), most of our decisions are driven by a deep philosophical underpinning — Pragmatism.
American Pragmatism holds that if something isn’t “useful,” it’s of no value. And useful is primarily a question of “will this make me money?” Because let’s be honest…
If we can’t use this to make bank, what are we even talking about???
The philosophy is the very air we breathe (we have no clue), but implications flow into every direction—especially into education.
Watch how strange a question like this sounds to our ears: What if the primary purpose of education wasn’t meant just to help us get a job…but to make us MORE human?
Just asking the question is foreign. But the contemporary notion, that it’s exclusively to earn a higher income, is both recent and new in human history.
At one point, education was an end in itself, something that was valuable to your formation as a human, for your own good and for the common good.
Yes, a high-school educated person should be able to do the basics in reading, writing, and math; and if they can’t, we can honestly say there’s something wrong with the system.
But in our profit driven culture, we tend to think that anything done without the pursuit of money as the primary driver is absurd.
And when you dig deeper into our history, one finds the public school system was influenced to turn people into good factory workers — not to help people become more human.
The predominant view of education is exclusively money seeking, for financial ends. It’s totally unmoored from its value, for its own sake.
Anything without the aim of money is a waste of time.
K-12 Education is now just expensive daycare in many public schools
Most public schools are unwieldy, short term prisons for children. Education is a side note, not the primary activity.
From the overworked teachers, or the inability of teachers to even truly teach their kids…
It makes sense why so many wealthy parents pour ungodly sums into private schools; but as one education consultant confided to me, the best private schools today are basically what the best public schools were in the 1990s. I’m sure there are exceptions, but the exception proves the rule.
In many places, students access all books and homework through a Chrome Book or an iPad; they no longer even touch books anymore.
And most are already addicted to screens before they set foot in the classroom, so for them to get a hit on an iPad at school is actually a relief. Ooof….I feel for these kids. They show all the symptoms of addicts on withdrawals, as this teacher points out:
Whichever political party can crack the code for K-12 education will become a political powerhouse for decades. It is the modern civil rights issue of our times — the wealthy can help their children, but the poor students in bad schools have no other option.
We’re not educating these kids. We’re destroying their minds and their attention spans.
Children should be the measure of education
For the past few decades, STEM was all the rage. And now that AI is threatening to dismantle half of all white collar jobs, it begs the question…
If AI could so wipe out so many jobs so easily, was this even an “education?” Did STEM just turn our kids into glorified algorithms?
That may be a bit uncharitable (sorry STEM people…”STEMYS?” STEMERS?”) but it’s not without a point. STEM is not just outdated because of AI; it was suspect from the very beginning.
To treat science and math as the most important is like treating the left hemisphere as the only one that matters for your brain. It’s important, but it’s not the ONLY thing that matters.
But in our black and white world only money-making activities count in terms of value.
The idea of beauty or the sacred is gone. If it doesn’t lead to revenue…what’s the friggin point?
But even our souls know this makes no sense. There is an intrinsic beauty to all of existence.
You will always remember when you got down on one knee and she said yes. You cannot buy what makes this life worth living.
But we reduce life to only what is measurable, quantifiable, and therefore (according to the reasoning) justifiable.
Life is more. Our education should be more too.
Towards a new definition of education
Our metrics aren’t just measuring the wrong things. Our system is aiming for the wrong ends.
The whole human should be the measure.
Education should be oriented around who humans are and how they best learn. And…WHAT is valuable for them to even know.
Of course, they need to know the foundational concepts (reading, writing, math, etc). But to reduce them to only this or only STEM is to shortchange their humanity, and our future.
A child should learn Shakespeare for no other reason than it is the most beautiful thing in the English language. They should learn Dante because few other works will tower over them and humble them with it’s beauty.
We need to re-evaluate our pragmatism — beauty has a place in society. It’s no accident the typical architecture in the American is a rather boring and drab box. This has no personality.
If we shape our buildings, and then they shape us…what would happen if we started to live as if beauty does matter? That the sacred is equally part of the “bottom line.”
I think we’d take a bit more care for every day questions, including our education.
Children aren’t algorithms. They aren’t flesh-bodied AIs. And they should be the standard of success, not how many new coders are pumped into the economy.
Do they serve the economy, or does the economy serve them? C’mon now…
If this education system is molding kids to the needs of an abstract concept, instead of molding the education to the child, we’re gonna have some problems.
And we’re starting to see much of that now.
Don’t let the creeping assumptions of Pragmatism sneak in, like intellectual spiders, into our view of education.